UNEDITED TRANSCRIPT: The following transcript may contain typographical errors or other mistakes due to inconsistencies in audio quality, background noise, or other factors. We cannot guarantee its precision or completeness. We encourage you to use this as a supplement to your own notes and recollection of the session.
Tami Simon: Hello friends. My name is Tami Simon and I’m the founder of Sounds True. And I want to welcome you to the Sounds True podcast, Insights at the Edge. I also want to take a moment to introduce you to Sounds True’s new membership community and digital platform. It’s called Sounds True One. Sounds True One features original premium transformational docuseries, community events, classes to start your day and relax in the evening, special weekly live shows including a video version of Insights at the Edge with an after-show community question-and-answer session with featured guests. I hope you’ll come join us, explore, come have fun with us and connect with others. You can learn more at join.soundstrue.com.
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In this episode of Insights at the Edge, my guest is Dr. Jeffrey Rutstein. Dr. Jeffrey Rutstein is the lead teacher and host of Sounds True’s nine-month online immersion Healing Trauma Program. He’s a clinical psychologist, an expert in the treatment of trauma. Jeffrey is a certified Hakomi mindfulness-centered somatic psychotherapist. He’s been in practice now for nearly four decades and he specializes in the treatment of healing trauma. Jeffrey’s also been practicing meditation for over 50 years, and he’s poured all of his expertise and his heart and his deep spiritual vision into the creation of the nine-month Healing Trauma Program. We run it once each year; it begins in February. You can learn more at SoundsTrue.com. Jeffrey, welcome.
Jeffrey Rutstein: Hi Tami, it’s great to be here.
TS: I never know should I call you Dr. Rutstein when we’re talking formally in front of other people or Jeffrey, which is the way I always think of you and how I talk to you, but here we go.
JR: Jeffrey’s fine.
TS: In The Healing Trauma Program, you help people learn how to shift their nervous system state to shift out of dysregulated states. And I think it might not be obvious to people the connection between learning that skill, learning how to work with nervous system dysregulation and the healing of trauma. And I thought we’d start there for you to make that connection for people.
JR: I think that’s a great question. There are many different definitions of trauma, but the one that I tend to favor most of these days is I view trauma producing a chronic and long lasting dysregulation in someone’s nervous system. So we all have the ability to go into defensive states, fight or flight, people are familiar with those. We also have the ability to go into a state of called shutdown or collapse. And if we’ve experienced trauma, it stays largely in our nervous system and impacts so many aspects of our life. And the main way that people notice it or experience it is through when their nervous system gets dysregulated, meaning that instead of being balanced, they’re kind of stuck and overactivated in a very defensive state. So being angry, reactive, irritable, being frightened, worried, panicked, or in the shutdown and collapse zone, shame, despair, numbness, dissociation, withdrawal, and all of those are aimed at helping us deal with and protect ourselves from threats.
And so the way that trauma lives in us is by promoting and maintaining this chronic level of living our life mostly through our defensive states. And so what does that look like? That looks like someone who finds themselves anxious most of the time or angry and reactive and irritable most of the time, or bouncing between the two. Or the same with shutdown and collapse. People can be very anxious and worried and then a few moments later or a few hours later find themselves eating to go to bed to be unconscious for a while, to not be able to deal with anybody. We weren’t given any education about how to work with our nervous system. Matter of fact, it works usually out of the level of awareness for most people. And so one way that I had discovered about really helping people heal from trauma is working directly with the nervous system and reducing its tendency to get stuck for prolonged amounts of time in these defensive states, which reduce our capacity to enjoy life, to connect with, to have compassion for ourself and others.
When we’re in a defensive state, our whole nervous system is just trying to get us to the next moment where it might be more safe. And the idea of pleasure, of satisfaction of fulfillment, that’s not of any interest in our defensive states. They only are designed to help us ultimately get our genes to the next generation. That’s just what it’s for. It’s not for anything else than that. Not making you a better worker if I’m more scared or more ashamed about work better. No, it’s about helping you avoid danger and that’s what it’s all about. And that’s one of the marks that really people live with. Even often. After some significant therapy, people will find they still have a massively dysregulated nervous system and then they think that then their life is just learning how to live with that. But we also know that anybody who’s truly interested and is willing to devote the energy and time can learn to shift their nervous system, can learn to work with it in a way where they can return to a level of connection with self and life and others instead of spending time in these unpleasant wound up defensive states.
TS: Lemme ask you a question, Jeffrey. What keeps us stuck in a specific dysregulated state instead of, oh, there was a trauma. This thing happened. My nervous system appropriately responded at the time, and then I went back, I shifted out of that. No. Why do some of us find that we’re stuck? Our nervous system is stuck in what you referred to as chronic dysregulation.
JR: That’s a good question. So a couple of things. So trauma works and impacts us both consciously and unconsciously. And our nervous systems learn very quickly the signs of danger, right? So if you had a father that was an alcoholic and on Friday nights he always came home drunk and was always violent with the family, then you might find that your nervous system reacts automatically to Friday nights. It is perceiving that this is a night when it can be bad for us, and all of a sudden, even if it hasn’t happened for 40 years, their nervous system is jumping into that defensive state. Or you lay eyes on someone who’s drinking or you smell alcohol on someone’s breath. The nervous system is always scanning for safety or danger. And the moment that it detects anything that’s even slightly reminiscent of the context or the setting or the characteristics of a person or situation that was dangerous, it immediately goes into a reaction to minimize danger and try to help you find safety.
So even if I’m aware of my trauma, my nervous system has learned, even if it was a one-time event with trauma about how to scan for any similarities to that horrible event, and then anything that even remotely reminds me of it, I go right back into dysregulation, then it’s compounded by another factor. Our nervous system states are designed to be sticky. That’s the word I use, which means that once you’re in them, you’re supposed to stay in them. I use this example of a flight fear. You’re being chased by a saber tooth tiger, and you need to stay running from that tiger, right? You can’t after two minutes go, oh, look at that pretty rock. Let me just see what that is. I wonder if I could bring it home. And the moment that you’re saying, look at that pretty rock, you’re gone. You’re someone’s lunch.
In other words, states to protect you. You can’t just easily slip out of me. You’re supposed to stay aggravated or angry. The energy of fight or the energy of flight, for example, until you have reached safety. But on our modern society, we’re not really running from saber tooth tigers or having a war with a neighboring tribe and have to be on the watch all the time. The stuff that triggers us are mostly social and environmental stuff, music conversations, deadlines, criticism, arguments. And what happens then is that we’re constantly going into a defensive state because we’re sensing lack of safety, some danger, and then the state itself also keeps us there longer. So ultimately it’s learning how to discern whether I actually need to be afraid. Is this a safe or unsafe situation right now? Because that’s the main thing. You’re not going to be able to unhook if you believe with every fiber in your body that it’s not safe, you’re not going to shift out of a state.
So the process is being able to help people begin to look and discern what’s actually occurring. And as they’re doing that to also begin to shift towards the zone where we’re not as much in a defensive state. This is sometimes called the window of tolerance that Dana refers to it as the ventral vagal response. It’s also called the social engagement zone or the tend and befriend zone. These areas, they’re all the same name for that one sweet spot area is where we can access qualities that let us relate without being panicked about safety, we have the capacity to be present. When I’m in shutdown, I’m absent. I’m really not conscious. And when I’m in fight or flight, I’m actually very concerned with the future. Future holds the safety I have to make it to the future. I can’t be present now. I have to either fight this person to get to the next moment or I have to run away to survive to the next moment.
And those things are what keeps us dysregulated and frequently bouncing between states. Very few people stay in one state all the time. I don’t think anybody does, but people can have their go-to states. There are some people who spend a lot of time anxious. There are some other people who spend a lot of time angry, reactive and irritable. So depending upon our genetics, our experiences growing up, our personality, our nervous system may have a preference for one form or another. Also, for example, if I grew up in a family that was violent, my anger may be forbidden because I could trigger my parents to become violent. So instead I learned that an early age to either be anxious or to shut down. And if I did either of those, I would make them less pissed off so I could be in a defensive state, but it was also a safer defensive state to be in than if I went into anger and actually expressed my anger to them, then I would be risking my safety again. So
TS: One other question about this notion of chronic dysregulation of our nervous system state, because I’ve been hearing this from certain people, I’ve been in conversation with this discovery. Wow. I think for the first time in my life I’m actually becoming aware that I have been baseline dysregulated my entire life. For example, I’ve always been thinking I need to move into the future and do it right and be sort of a perfectionist achiever. And this underlying kind of vigilance in my nervous system always push. It’s always been there. It’s been there my whole life. What would you say to that? It’s not so much like, oh, I comes and goes, but this is an underground driver in my whole life.
JR: That’s not that uncommon. And it is an incredible realization for folks to realize, oh my God, I really haven’t been regulated. So what I would say to that is at an early age you learned that that state was a safe state for you to be in. Now these states don’t give you pleasure. They don’t help you feel good, but they drive you to do the things that will minimize danger. So for example, people who are perfectionists are often trying to please some authority, and there’s a deep seated fear that they are going to be discovered as shame worthy. So as long as I’m a perfectionist, I won’t arouse your suspicions. I won’t cause you to be angry with me or criticize me or shame me. And so I live my life as if everything in the world is going to judge me or attack me for not being enough.
So it can be a little different for each person depending upon what state they’re in. But we do sort of settle into something like that. And most of my life I’ve either dealt with shame or anxiety because in my family, anger wasn’t allowed. So I thought there was something wrong with me for being anxious and feeling ashamed. And then I kind of got it at some level that it’s my nervous system. It’s like I’m angry with and blaming my nervous system. That’s another deep benefit of having a nervous system perspective is that it makes it less personal. From a psychology model, you’re responsible. I’m the same me. If I get angry, it’s my fault, and if I’m sad, it’s my fault. And if I say the wrong thing, it’s my fault. And it’s just not about saying you don’t have any responsibility, but it’s looking at that these are reactions that are occurring without your control. These are occurring on their own unbidden. These are automatic nervous system reactions. You don’t think yourself into getting angry. An anger response occurs the moment the threat is detected, a fear response occurs the moment the threat is detected. So we sort of live into this and accept it more and more as just who I am. I’m an angry person, I’m an anxious person. And it doesn’t dawn on people that maybe you have some trauma in your life that has led your nervous system to need to favor chronically being in defensive states,
TS: You have a teaching in The Healing Trauma Program where you have people reflect on this question, is it me or is it a state? And tell me what the value is of starting to sort out, oh, this isn’t me, is what you’re really pointing to on becoming aware of the nervous system state I’m in and that we have that option in any moment.
JR: Yes, exactly. And that it’s a state versus me. In other words, if I’m angry, I could feel the anger and then immediately I could start reacting with criticism and judgment about my anger blaming me for getting angry. Instead, if I see it as, oh, this is a state, then I would look at it as something must have made me feel unsafe. So I’m moving away from you’re a bad person, you’re an asshole, Jeffrey. I’m moving away from that. And then moving towards, well, what set the alarm bells off in my nervous system. And instead of having to fight myself and increase shame, I’m able to move in a more compassionate and less adversarial way to my state. And that actually is part of what helps shift it. The more I fight my state, the more I get stuck in it.
TS: Alright, let’s talk about how in The Healing Trauma Program you help people, first of all become aware of the state they’re in, and then secondly, what kinds of skills we can learn to shift states when that seems like it would be helpful.
JR: So the first thing we do in the program is we talk about the characteristics of the various states that we can be in. And I talk about three pools of energy that we can source from. And the first pool is the hyper activation. That’s a high energy kind of response from the body. That’s what we think of as fight or flight. Those are high energy, they’re very active. We’re going to fight for our lives or run away at the opposite end of the spectrum, at the hypo arousal or activated level, we have low energy defenses. These are much more passive. The body becomes more thinking, becomes much less quick, much less clear. People can even be without thoughts and without awareness of feeling. There’s a numbness that can come up, a tiredness, a sluggishness, a spaciness. People also get closer to feelings of despair, hopelessness, and ultimately if you go deeper into that state, you can move towards dissociation as well.
And then the final pond we can source some energy from is from this window of tolerance, this space where we’re able to meet things without needing to get defensive without going into a very protective space. Now in the window of tolerance, some of the characteristics are feeling safe, somewhat relaxed, able to engage in conversation, able to care, right? There’s a difference between being in a conversation with someone and feeling totally cut off and not really related and just going through the motions or feeling like you’re kind of leaning in and connecting. That’s only possible if we have some of our nervous system accessing that window of tolerance, that enteral vagal space. Once we do that, we have more capacity. So students in the program learn the characteristics and begin to learn and name what states they frequently visit, where they find themselves in. And then we work on, once you identify the state, there’s many different somatic exercises, mindfulness practices, awareness and attention practices that help shift the state of our nervous system from either a hyper or hypo dysregulation, a defensive state and helping it move towards this much more balanced, present non defensive state.
Now we’re not necessarily in just one state. We can move and we can be in a state and have a characteristic of another state. Like I can be in ventral and I can have some access to fight or flight, and that can serve as long as I’m in ventral as a sense of excitement, eagerness, like I was excited about getting to talk to you tonight. And so that energy comes from a little bit of sympathetic fight or flight. I can feel some of that energy inside, but I’m not in a defensive space. I’m not feeling like I have to fight you or run away from you, but I’m excited. And so no state is bad and everyone’s going to go to all the different areas. They’re going to go through the three pools of energy in a given day, you’re going to move through them.
The idea is beginning to notice when you’re chronically stuck in one versus visiting it for a moment because someone said something and you have a reaction and the reaction lasts a few minutes and you’re fine and you come back down versus someone says something and eight hours later you’re still telling other people about it. You can’t get over it. You’re rehearsing it in your head that’s stuck in that activation and on its own that can keep going until something else changes or forces your state out because people don’t know that they could do something to ship.
TS: Lemme ask you a question. Why do you refer to this as pools of energy that we’re drawing on? Meaning it feels more to me in a way that there’s this wiring, this circuitry and the circuitry is going either fast and eruptive or it’s the circuits are slow and down and lethargic, but why talk about it as three pools of energy,
JR: I guess because of the fluidity of it. Your analogy about wiring is correct. It is a wiring issue, but it’s not just a binary. This wire is on. And so it’s this way. There’s different strengths and intensities in each of these different response patterns. And the idea of a healthy nervous system is a flexible nervous system. It’s able to move in and out of states as needed. So the idea is you don’t try to be ventral all the time, right? That would be really hard for most people, but it would be nice to have more of your life be able to live from ventral instead of it being chronically lived from anger or fear or collapse and shut down.
TS: Okay, I mentioned this word eruption, and I think sometimes in nervous system dysregulation, it can feel like something’s erupted inside of us. And you gave this example, we’re not even aware that it’s Friday night, but Friday night was the night when a parent perhaps in the example you gave, came home drunk. And so some part of us has registered that and then we get triggered When an eruption of dysregulation occurs, is it important from your perspective for us to discover why is this eruption happening or no, just tend to the situation and do the kinds of embodiment practices and breathing practices that you teach in The Healing Trauma Program and shift your state. You don’t need to know why.
JR: I would say it depends on one level. If you know you’re in shame, for example, and you want to shift out of shame, you don’t have to know why you’re in shame to shift. But what I do strongly encourage people to do is once they get more regulated, then you have a better capacity for insight and discernment. When I’m in a state, if I’m angry, I don’t have much capacity for insight or discernment, I’m going to be all skewed towards seeing everything as enemy or adversary or colors of rage. So it is helpful once I get more regulated to look at, well, why did I get triggered by this? And when I’m more regulated, I’ll have a much better chance of actually discerning the true causes or cues or triggers. And it’s not that I can avoid those triggers, but I can begin to understand them in terms of, oh, okay, it’s Friday night, that’s why I’m getting anxious. That’s why I’m getting worked up. Okay, is Friday night dangerous? Well, it was dangerous growing up, but now it’s not. And so I can begin to work from a more regulated place with beginning to soften the trigger and that the next Friday I still may get triggered, but it may have an easier time both noting it, oh, it’s Friday again. And shifting. And then also coming back to the knowledge, the discernment that it’s a projection from the past. It’s not a danger that’s happening in this moment.
There’s a phrase, a term called neuroception, and this phrase is the ability, it refers to our ability to discern the nervous system state around us. So I can determine if you’re dangerous or safe, but we can have two different types of neuroception. We can have matched and mismatched. So matched is when I feel you’re safe. My nervous is miss telling message, but you actually are safe. So that’s matched mismatched. And this can happen for trauma survivors a lot more. It happens for everybody. Trauma survivors even more is that they can perceive something as safe, but it could be dangerous.
And the reverse is even more commonly true. I’ll perceive something as dangerous and it’s not. I’m seeing it as if it is the past and it’s very dangerous. And right now it’s not. So part of what we also need to do is when we’re a little bit more regulated is discern was my neuroception, was my perception of the nervous system threat, accurate or inaccurate in this moment? Was it matched or mismatched with the reality of safety and danger? And that’s how it’s helpful to know how you got there, but you can shift without knowing how you got there. But for increased flexibility over time, it’s helpful to understand the kinds of things that trigger you. So for example, someone I was working with recently gets very reactive whenever they feel disrespected. She won’t share this with people she’s comfortable with, I mean friendly with or attached to, but she can get very reactive to people who aren’t seeming to show respect or recognition of her humanity. She can get very, very angry over that. She’s aware that this is not really about now, but she also is aware that the eruption happens instantly. It’s not a thought someone does something and anger is coming out of her mouth the next second. So this is one way of our nervous system running our life and her working through it is going to be being able to see more and more that she’s seeing disrespect in situations where it’s not occurring. She’s seeing danger or an affront against her when it’s not actually occurring.
But that’s helpful in understanding your nervous system, but if you understand what’s causing the triggering, that’s not enough to help you shift or learn how to respond to it differently. I started out doing insight therapy, only psychoanalysis, psychodynamic psychotherapy. Early forms of trauma therapy were all that. It did a lot to help people have a better understanding of what occurred, but it didn’t really touch the nervous system. People could still have hugely exaggerated startle responses, massive difficulty sleeping, tremendous difficulties being intimate and close with another human being that there would be things that the nervous system would just overpower them with. And I found that working with the nervous system is one way of giving people a direct access to changing that.
TS: Give us an example when you say working directly with the nervous system, the kinds of skills that you help. You mentioned not sleeping well, you’re not sleeping well. Nothing seems to help. Nothing helps. What helps?
JR: If I was working individually with someone, I first might get a little background around how long trouble is with sleeping? Has this been since childhood? Are they aware of any conscious causes for this? Did a parent come into your bedroom? Was there a lot of fighting at night? Was there violence? Was there, what were these things? So I get a little sense of what the nervous system is trying to manage, and then I would start teaching the person how to shift from. So what keeps people awake is being in fight or flight. If you’re in shutdown, it’s actually almost too easy to go to sleep. So people are activated hyperactivation at night. And so there are practices that help them slow down. I mean anything as basic as progressive relaxation, the clenching and releasing of different muscle groups, moving through the body, stretching the jaw, and then closing the jaw tight and then letting it hang loose.
Doing that with the cheeks, with the shoulders up high, letting them drop and letting them go loose body part by body parts you work through systematically and two things will happen. You’ll automatically be helping the person shift towards much more regulation. It’s breaking the absorption of the anxiety state. Now I’m thinking about doing this with my body instead of lying here in the dark and thinking about terrible scary things. And by working with physically directly lowering the arousal level, the activation level, that’s how you’re working directly with the nervous system that moves you closer to sleep.
And there are tons of techniques we teach in the course. Anything from the long outbreath, which is simply allowing your exhalation to be about twice as long as your inhalation. Some people have to work a little bit at that to get comfortable with it. It can feel a little like it’s a strain in the beginning, and it helps to inhale through your nose and exhale through your mouth is if you’re blowing through a really narrow straw. So you can slow that exhale down, but that’s a direct hack into the nervous system. Inhalations raise our heart rate and respirations, exhalations lower them. So by making my exhalation longer than my inhalation, I’m tilting the nervous system towards lowering respiration and heart rate, which lowers activation. So that’s a great one for when you’re in fight or flight. It’s not such a great one if you’re in shutdown because you need more energy to sort of wake you up out of shutdown. But these are very like the one I was just talking about, the out breath is very good for cooling down the fire of anger or fear.
TS: One of the teachings in The Healing Trauma Program that you offer, Jeffrey, is that people are capable of healing. And that sounds well, okay, yeah, it’s The Healing Trauma Program. People are capable of healing. But I think an experience that many people have who have suffered for a long time from some type of chronic dysregulation is, I don’t know, it’s a little better. I have more awareness of trauma triggers. I apologize more quickly after I have outbursts and I get back to some way of being somewhat connected, but really I’m capable of healing. I don’t have that experience yet. It still seems like trauma’s running my nervous system even after I’ve learned some of these skills.
JR: I mean, that’s one of the reasons that the program’s nine months. This is not something you can learn and own in a way in two months or three months. You need a period of practice. You need some time to really work with this language and this way of being in this way of seeing viewing what’s actually occurring inside. Most of the time we just pay attention to what we’re thinking, if at all. But we don’t pay attention to the state of our body and or our nervous system. That’s usually just not even on the radar, the nervous system. So that’s a common complaint of a lot of people in therapy. I’m better sort of, but I’m still struggling with this and that.
What I have been extremely pleased with and very moved by is the depth of transformation that people who engage in our program, The Healing Trauma Program over the nine months, see significant transformation in how they are in their own body, in how long they spend in defensive states or dysregulated, how quickly they can come back to regulation, how much they feel like they are empowered versus just a victim to someone else driving their life, their nervous system or their past driving their life. They feel like they have much more of an ability to be the driver of their own life, to understand what their state is and to help them move towards a state where they’re not continuing to suffer. Because so many of us, even if we understand our trauma, go right back to our habitual modes of worrying all the time ruminating, getting angry at ourself, getting angry at other people. That kind of color is our life. And some of us don’t even see that as a symptom of legacy Trump. They just see it as I’m screwed up or I’m too impatient, or they don’t see it as this is your nervous system. And I love this quote from Deb Dana.
She says, the nervous system does not tell you who you are or what you are. Most of the time. That’s how we take it. By the way. It confirms that we’re bad. The nervous system does not tell you who you are or what you are. It only tells you how you are. And that was liberating for me because an understanding of it’s not about you’re a bad person because you’re angry, that would be who you are. But it tells me my nervous system is letting me know I’m upset, I’m feeling unsafe. And so I can use that information to then work with what’s happening. If I can begin to see that my nervous system reacts whenever it perceives danger, emotional or physical, then it gives me a door into working with what goes on rather than having to blame me or just say, there I go again. Because talk therapy doesn’t really give us a way to change the nervous system. It helps you understand it, but it doesn’t help you work directly with it unless someone’s incorporating a nervous system perspective.
TS: You mentioned earlier, Jeffrey, that when we’re in a more regulated nervous system state, we’re able to connect with each other, we can be present. I’m here and we can care. One of the things that I think is kind of paradoxical, if you will, is that connecting with another person can also help us shift out of dysregulated states. So I wonder if you can talk about that, how we can actually use connection to allow us to be more connected.
JR: Absolutely. So there’s the term self-regulation, which is where I engage in practices to help bring my nervous system back into regulation. And then there’s where we regulate with in relationship to another person, nature, music, animal art, God, there’s different things we can co-regulate with, and we are wired for connection. Remember that sweet spot is also called the social engagement zone. In other words, a primary skill comes out when we’re balanced, which is that we can relate. So if I was upset and I said, Tami, do you have a few minutes? Can we talk? He said, sure. And I start telling you about something that was troubling or going on, and instead of you jumping in and criticizing me and going, well, that was stupid. You shouldn’t be bothered by that. You just kind of said, yeah, that’s really stressful. That must be really hard.
That sense of compassion and kindness and non-judgment actually helps me move more towards that in my own nervous system, because you’re a safe person who’s offering me some care, and I was the one able to ask for it, but I was more dysregulated than you were when I came into the conversation why I wanted to talk to you, I was upset. So a lot of times, talking can help. It doesn’t help if I come in dysregulated and blow you away with it. So if I’m dysregulated and I’m dysregulated because I think I’m angry at you and I come into our conversation blasting you, chances are you’re not going to stay regulated for very long. I’m not going to get any more regulated. I’m probably going to get more dysregulated. We’re going to co dysregulate together. That’s also a thing. So we can regulate with others much better if they’re able to meet us in a place of connection versus judgment.
TS: I was talking to someone who’s taken The Healing Trauma Program, and I was mentioning to this person, I’m going to be interviewing Jeffrey, what did you get out of the program? Summarize it for me. I want to make sure I touch on the main points. And the person said, number one, I can now identify what state am I in? Number two, I have skills to come into a more regulated state. And I was like, okay, good. I get it. That’s the core of this program. But then they said, number three, I’m getting ready to talk to another person. And now I ask myself, what state is this other person in? And I thought, wow, that’s really good. That’s really good. I’m getting ready to connect with why wonder what state they’re in. And then the fourth point that was made, can I handle this other person right now? So I’d love to hear more about I’m getting ready to talk to someone. What state are they in? How might I assess that or sense that?
JR: Well, I think we do it all the time, unconsciously. We just don’t track it and articulate it or narrate it to ourselves. So one of the things that goes along with being more in that sweet spot or in that social engagement zone is that the tone of our voice and the rate of our speech and the softness in our feature or the warm smile that includes the eyes as well as the smile, those are all welcomes. The moment that I see that in someone, they’re someone I could probably talk to, but if someone’s scowling, pacing back and forth, cursing, throwing things around, really absorbed and attached
TS: Clearly, sure, sure. It’s a sign if they’re throwing things around, yes, clearly.
JR: Exactly. So you want to look at to see is this person in a state where they’re regulated enough that they could hear this? Because if they’re not regulated, they’re not really going to have any room for you. And instead of getting soothed or understood, connected, you may get scolded, criticized, judged, you’re making a problem out of nothing. Get out of here. I mean, so it’s a double-edged sword because especially if people have had trauma, they know how co-regulating other people can be. So part of the way of also assessing safety is I want to talk to this person and they’re generally a safe person, but it’s now the right time. Now of course, we can ask them, I’d love to talk to you about something. Is it okay if we talk about this now, are you able to do that? And the hope is that the person will answer honestly.
But whether they answer honestly or not, your nervous system will also be detecting whether their smile, their tone of voice, the rate of their words matches the, yeah, I’m ready. Or if the words are, yeah, I’m ready, come on. But not more than three minutes and be quick. Then they’re already telling you, well, they’re maybe not ready. They want to be ready, but they already got an agenda. They’re giving you this much time. And to me that would say, okay, let’s do this at another time. And the reason for that is if I take something important to somebody and they blow me away for it, or they get really reactive and upset about it, I’m going to feel worse. And I’m also going to feel like my initial need wasn’t even met or seen. Instead now I got another level of hurt or frustration or distance put on me because of this interaction where I was seeking some comfort or understanding or grounding about my original interaction.
TS: And then can I handle this other person right now? And perhaps it’s okay to not choose to interact in that moment, as you were just saying.
JR: Absolutely. Absolutely. And this is a type of wisdom if we want to get our needs met, it’s helpful to know what state I’m in. So there’s four questions that we ask in the training. What state am I in and what do I need to return to ventral? That’s one and two, because any conversation is going to go best if you have at least a foot or some toes in ventral in that window of tolerance. And then the next two questions, the third question is what state is the other person in? Final question is what do they need? Not what do they need to come back into regulation? What do they need? They may need to be left alone. They may need something else. I’m not having an agenda about where I need to get them to. I’m just wondering what do they need right now?
And those help us set up a sense of what may we predict or expect from this interaction. And if I think I do need to talk to someone, but they’re in an irritable mood and it’s late in the day, I’m tired, I’m not going to talk to them today. I don’t want to get upset. My brain’s not going to work at a hundred percent this late in the day, whatever, so I’m going to talk to them when we’re both in a better space. It’s sort of that’s working with your nervous system and working with the other person’s nervous system.
TS: Now, Jeffrey, we talked quite a bit about dysregulation and chronic dysregulation, and you briefly mentioned a healthy nervous system, A regulated nervous system is one that’s flexible. Can you describe that? What does the circuitry and flow of a healthy nervous system that’s regulated, what’s that like?
JR: Well, first of all, in general, it would spend less time in defensive states. It would spend more time having more of its energy being drawn from that window of tolerance, that social engagement zone of energy, where that serves our life. We have access to creativity, humor and action, compassion, the things that most humans seek, and we would get dysregulated. That happens, but we wouldn’t stay dysregulated for inordinate amounts of time depending upon the upset. It could be a few hours or a few days if it’s something huge or longer, like for example, the death of a loved one. But the idea is that versus the picture you painted before of someone who’s just kind of chronically living in a slightly driven or perfectionistic state, person who has a more flexible nervous system wouldn’t be driven so much by what made safety for them in the past.
They would be driven more by what is more in alignment with their heart, what’s more in alignment with their deeper wants and needs with their sense of how they want to contribute or their gifts or love. Our defensive states aren’t really concerned about any of that. They’re only concerned about not being killed, staying safe, not being threatened. So if more of my energy can go towards engaging and living in my life with connection and compassion, and if I do get dysregulated in a healthy nervous system, we’re able to find our way back and we’re able to see what it is. Okay, so I’m not turning into a shit right now because I’m angry, but something threatened me and I am reacting with anger and that’s natural, and I know that I actually have a little bit more room to work with it. I can choose.
I can still have a conversation around anger and I can still have some anger in the conversation, but it’s different than if I’m totally hijacked by the anger, then I’m not really having a conversation. I’m just beating the other person up with my words. So nothing really constructive happens when a person is engaging from a place of rage, especially if it’s towards the other person that’s just going to keep going around and going around and going around until that state loses some of its energy. And there’s been some people I’ve worked with or have known in my life that once they get on a roll and get angry, they could be angry for days, raging for days, and they’re really stuck there. And as much as it’s unpleasant to be around a person who’s raging at you, it’s really horrible experience for the person who’s immersed and hijacked by rage, right?
They’re just full of fire and hatred in that moment. So it’s a healthy nervous system begins to find its way back towards balance, towards home, towards a sense of being more regulated and in touch. Also, when we are, we begin to have a much broader access to light. When I’m in a defensive state, there’s only a little bit of me that’s online and I’m looking for in fight or flight, I’m looking out to these little slits to look for danger and to find my way out. My body may be really active and hot and tense, but I’m not really observing you much except are you coming at me or going away? I’m not really caring about your feelings, I’m caring about safety. So the way that I relate to you and the way that I relate to me is really reduced and narrowed down in any defensive state. So as we become more flexible, more able to spend more time in that balanced window of tolerance zone, we find that there’s a lot more of us we’d like because we’re not in these zones of conflict all the time. And so a healthy nervous system would look more flexible in those ways about not staying stuck, but there’s a qualitative difference of experience in a healthy nervous system. People are not fighting the same battles that they fight constantly. If they’re in chronic dysregulation, how’s that land?
TS: It lands well, and I feel very aspirational around it. In the very beginning when I introduced you, Jeffrey, I said, you’ve been working now for nearly four decades in private practice with people who have suffered trauma in different ways as an expert in the healing of trauma, and I think it’s important to name that you’ve worked with people who have gone through some pretty hellish nightmarish experiences. So as you’re talking here about learning how to shift our nervous system state, you’re speaking about it and it could be applied to people who have even suffered quite severe trauma. Is that true?
JR: Yes, absolutely. Absolutely. That I think that this is a skill actually that should be taught in elementary school. I think everybody should learn about their nervous system and learn the impacts that it has that for example, one interesting thing is that if you’re in a state, the state drives the story. If I’m in anger, the story that I will have is that I’m a victim. Someone’s wrong, an enemy, an adversary, and I’m entitled to do whatever I need to do to hurt them, to protect myself, to push them away. Anyone who’s angry will have some elements of that story. Anyone who’s afraid in fear will also be thinking about some catastrophic event that will happen in the future, whether a minute from now or 10 years from now, I’m going to die. Someone I love is going to die, the world is going to end, whatever it is.
If you’re anxious, you’re thinking about some moment in the future and something really bad happening, then state tribe story. And if you’re living in a story of anger or fear or shame, it’s a really rough place to be. The only time we don’t have stories, so animated is when we’re not totally hijacked into a defensive state. If I have more access to the window of tolerance to that social engagement zone, I may be telling some light stories in the background, but I won’t be immersed in this intense, focused, driven storying about what you did to me and how wrong you are about it. Instead, I’ll be connecting with you as a person or with nature or with some food I’m eating or music I’m listening to, and I’ll be able to relate to the person, to the food, to the music without being ensconced in this background rumbling of my fears or my resentments or my shame.
TS: Alright. One final question here, Jeffrey, and I think this is particularly interesting. I mentioned you’ve been a meditation practitioner now for north of 50 years, which is when you talk about how we’re hijacked by our reactions, whether it’s our fear reactions or our hostility, I think people can really relate to that. And this notion of being hijacked, someone else is driving the car or flying the plane, we aren’t in a healthy nervous system state. How would you describe, you could call it the self or our true self. Who’s the driver? How do you experience that? The driver that’s not hijacked, that’s fluid and flexible.
JR: I think that that takes a little bit of extra work. I think people will glimpse that more and more as they do practices and realize they don’t have to be stuck in a defensive state. But even if we are in the window of tolerance, people still end up compulsively thinking, we just do. And that’s where, by the way, something like meditation also a grounding practice, but meditation allows us to disengage from a compulsive ongoing automatic thinking that occur because as long as we’re still fully identified with thinking we’re more in life, but we’re still a little bit outside of it, and the more that we can rest in our true self, our authentic self, our awareness, the more that we can be with the quality of being versus thinking about becoming, I’ll be better. I’ll do this. I’ll have dinner. I’ll make that to instead just be able to drop into being in this moment. That’s where I think we realize the ultimate freedom and we realized that this is what we’ve been pulled away from most of our life is that our truest self lives below all this noise and below and outside of a lot of these defensive states, it’s still there. It’s always there, but we lose touch with it.
TS: Is it fair to say that that’s the sort of secret aspirational value that’s delivered in The Healing Trauma Program is introducing people to that sense of presence and from that place of presence, being able to shift our nervous system state?
JR: Yes, absolutely. And also for those who are interested in the program, part of our emphasis is also on being able to be of service and offer your healing presence, which means that if I can come into a conversation without an agenda, with being regulated with sensing where you are in your state, being able to relate with a sense of compassion and kindness towards both of us, then I’m going to help you regulate. If you want to regulate just by being there and the way that I interact with you so that there’s a way, instead of us being driven around town by someone else, we get to sort of be in our nervous system. We’re having the owner’s manual now, and we actually can impact others in a positive way, not by trying to make them go somewhere, but by the quality of presence that we bring to them in the relationship itself. Because like you were saying before, it’s relationally. How we can regulate sometimes is that just being with someone else who’s calm and kind and open and warm, because that’s a big piece of this too friendly, warm, welcoming, once nervous system automatically leaves the defensive state.
TS: I’ve been speaking with Dr. Jeffrey Rutstein. He is the lead teacher and host of Sounds True’s nine-month healing trauma immersion program. It’s offered online. We offer it once each year. It begins in February. You can learn more at SoundsTrue.com. There is a group of guest faculty members that join with Dr. Jeffrey Rutstein to lead the program. Jeffrey mentioned Deb Dana. She’s an expert in Polyvagal Theory and she’s part of the core faculty, along with Jeffrey, of The Healing Trauma Program, and they’re joined by Resmaa Menakem, the author of My Grandmother’s Hands; Peter Levine, the developer of Somatic Experiencing; Gabor Maté, who wrote The Myth of Normal and is an expert on addiction and trauma; Thomas Hübl on healing collective trauma; and more. Again, you can learn more at SoundsTrue.com We run the program just once each year, and so I encourage you, if you’re interested, to check it out and come join us. Jeffrey, great to be with you, as always.
JR: Great to be with you too, Tami. I really love our time together.
TS: Thanks for being with us. And if you’d like to watch Insights at the Edge on video and participate in the after-show Q&A session with our guests, come join us on Sounds True One, a new membership community featuring award-winning original shows, live classes, community learning, guided meditations and more with the leading wisdom teachers of our time. Use promo code PODCAST to get your first month free. You can learn more at join.soundtrue.com. Sounds True: waking up the world.
