From Inner Voice to Inner Peace: The Power of Psychological Distance in Emotional Regulation

From Inner Voice to Inner Peace: The Power of Psychological Distance in Emotional Regulation

Jeffrey Besecker: This is The Light Inside. I'm Jeffrey Besecker. Disconnection. During times of our most challenging emotional interactions, we often feel that need to put a healthy distance between what ails us and what allows us to be more fully grown and developed as a human being. Although we can all benefit and gain from the inner strength of knowing our core values and what serves our highest sense of being, there are times when we feel uncertain about who and what we truly are. And that not-so-quiet inner voice it begins to lead us into the land of logical fallacies and misguided perceptions. The realities we create are significantly influenced by a wide variety of factors, both internal and external. And sometimes, as a form of healthy psychological distance, we need just a little bit of space to find that light that ignites the inner sparkle inside. Who and what we are is largely a constructed set of beliefs, concepts, and ideologies. Frameworks that are ever-malleable and consistently on the move. Ever-changing, sometimes for better and for worse. In more recent episodes, we've engaged in-depth discussions about the concepts of ego and the role these perceptions hold in shaping healthy goals and self-perception. Exploring the idea of healthy neuroticism and the formation of filters or parts that influence our personalities. We've also talked about listening to that voice inside while emphasizing the need for a stable self-construct before embracing the concept of no-self. And now the time has come to empower you to divorce that inner voice, to challenge self-concepts and find common ground, with the aim of unraveling subconscious influences and bringing a quiet mindfulness to the forefront. Welcome to 2024, a new year and new opportunities to begin transcending everything we once believed to be true about our constructed selves. Today we talk about how emotional uncoupling and healthy psychological distance allow us to see what we believe about ourselves in a new light. Tune in to find out more when we return to The Light Inside. Our emotions can be a complex web of somatic interactions. As we wrestle with the past, forecast the future, and project our combined assumptions on the outcomes we believe to exist, enter emotional coupling, a process that involves disentangling from these strong emotional responses or attachments. This process allows us to create a healthier space where we can more fully assess and process the complete depth of our emotional response. Establishing psychological distance helps us to detach emotionally, reducing the intensity of feelings associated with a particular situation. This separation enables a more rational and less emotionally charged response. In these instances, psychological distance serves as a cognitive and emotional tool that facilitates a shift in both body chemistry and the brain regions responsible for forming our perspective, allowing us to gain clarity, disrupt automatic patterns, and modulate our emotional responses more effectively. Emotional Regulation is our ability to manage emotional experiences in a way that enables adaptive engagement in daily life within our environment. It allows us to see and recognize the familiar patterns within our human experiences. In order for the nervous system to undertake the task of pattern matching, assessment and recording new experiences requires a consistent level of ventral vagal access, and what we term as social engagement. A state of regulation is required to assess new experiences with any kind of accuracy and neutrality. When survival psychology or hyperarousal is at play, the inherent experience of psychological danger or threat causes the nervous system to bypass the more complex assessment processes of the prefrontal cortex and simply match current experience to past stimulus contained in our implicit memory imprints. When this happens, we're unable to process new information that is accurate or untainted by previous states of survival or threat. And in this way, we find ourselves perpetually living in perceptions of the past, tended by danger with no escape. Veronica Rotman is the founder of Waking Womb, a somatic-based healing and transformation practice that has facilitated trauma renegotiation and life-changing experiences globally. Through her work in somatics, with a background in yoga, breathwork, Reiki, holistic pelvic care, somatic experiencing, and somatic attachment therapy, Veronica's practice is centered around the body, specifically the nervous system, and its inherent capacity for healing and balancing itself. We talk with Veronica today about how healthy psychological distance, although closely related with avoidant coping mechanisms like dissociation, can be an empowering force bringing us back into touch with the somatic responses of emotional modulation. Veronica, I'm excited to talk with you today about learning to divorce from our inner voice and the influence of dissociation as we scapegoat or blame our emotions. Let's start today by looking at how we define dissociation and the role it plays in emotional regulation or modulation. That's another little ripple we like to look at there. Sometimes that act of regulation takes on its own nuance where we potentially engage that need to control as the means of regulation rather than interacting. Modulation brings us back in line with that idea of flow and exchange. Where are we kind of moving along with the emotion? With that in mind, let's dive into that textbook definition of dissociation from your perspective.
Veronica Rottman: Yeah. Well, in the textbook definition, culturally we're more oriented to dissociation being a mental process. where through various mental processes, we are splitting off from conscious awareness in relationship to particular experiences, emotions, sensations, especially. However, we now know, and I see this every day, that actually that's only the tip of the iceberg, the mental result of a body-driven process. And I was so excited to hear the episode on neuroception that you did, because our body, right, is constantly neurocepting. Every six milliseconds, taking in information, both internally and externally in our environment about whether we are safe or whether we are not safe. And when it perceives a threat, when it perceives that feeling would be too much for us to feel, it will actually cut off feeling. It will almost like an immunity response, turn off our capacity to be in our bodies, where we actually feel things. A lot of us believe that if we think about how we feel, then we felt it. When actually there's no processing of emotion without feeling it in the body. So dissociation, especially when we look at it from like a polyvagal lens, you know, you can dissociate in any state. I can be in a ventral state and dissociate in healthy ways. Like when I'm walking down the hallway of my house, I'm not necessarily aware of every step. and everything I see, right? And that is considered a healthy level of dissociation. When there is this more of a freeze state or shutdown where life feels unreal, our body doesn't feel like it's ours, that would be considered dissociation as a trauma response.

Jeffrey Besecker: That's a great way to unravel that. I'm totally thrilled we started off on that note today. Just looking at dissociation, sometimes that in and of itself, looking at that word can become overwhelming to us. You know, we hear and relate to association all the time. How are we associating with things? How are we relating? That's familiar and it's comfortable. in most ways. It's psychologically comforting because we have that connection with association. But here comes this new word, dissociation, which is just simply the opposite of relating. Now we're trying to sever or divorce again that relationship. We're trying to move away.

Veronica Rottman: Yeah, and we're much more in relationship as a society to consciousness. We love swimming in the material world in what we perceive to be real and identifiable. But when we look at dissociation, we're really kind of going to the bottom of the iceberg versus the tip. Like we're going pretty deep into the subconscious waters that we're really not adept to swim in, most of us, I should say. And the somatic work really gives us the capacity to submerge ourselves into those depths and have the resources to do it, right? And one thing I always like to say is this severing, as you describe it, of association. It serves a really important function. It has really high survival value. So yes, I agree. A lot of people will judge themselves and others. when dissociation happens. And dissociation is inherently designed to keep us from knowing that we're dissociating. So we can be in a state of freeze or collapse. We can be dissociating from reality from our own body and not even know it. And it can even feel good. It has that analgesic effect on us. It can feel relaxing because we don't have to deal with what feels like too much to us. So I think it's really important to have this perspective of how dissociation at one point in time, it really served as a protective mechanism for you during what was too stressful or traumatic. And we want to teach our autonomic nervous system that we no longer need to disconnect from our experience and our feelings and from other people. Right. But it starts with having compassion. And I really felt so much compassion open up with my dissociation. And it helps my clients a lot to know that, okay, wow, this is actually a sign that my nervous system is doing its job. Like it's actually a sign that my body is responding exactly as it should to stress and trauma. There's nothing broken within me. Right.

Jeffrey Besecker: There are those times where we do lean into that unhealthy dissociation that does perpetuate some of those less beneficial and more unhealthy results. You know, when we're venturing down that trail of stress and anxiety and we start to get toward that spectrum of hypertension, hyper stress, when we're moving into, what's the word I'm looking for here? I'm even dissociating from the word now. Anyhow, I'm going to let that stand.

Veronica Rottman: What you're speaking to really makes me think of how dissociation can feel for many people, which is that you feel like you're always feeling like there's this sense of, I'm always stressed. I'm always anxious. I'm always reactive. But actually there's a thick layer of numbness blocking you from being able to know what those feelings are and to experience them. So there might be hypersensitivity. There might be a sense of. Why do I always feel like something is wrong, but not really being able to pinpoint it. It can also feel like I don't feel anything at times. There's just like a flat lining. Right. But that again is serving as this really protective mechanism because our body is perceiving that whatever we have to feel would be too much. and too fast, too soon, which is the imprint of trauma. So I really appreciate you pointing that out, that like, as we're dissociating, there's actually a lot going on. So feeling nothing isn't nothing, actually. Numbness is actually a sign that under the numbness, there's so much to feel.

Jeffrey Besecker: We mentioned that role of neuroception in that process. Ultimately, the goal of neuroception being that protective or survival mechanism, that survival energy. We'll get to that a little bit here as we start to unravel this. Give us a little overview of neuroception and the role that plays in our emotional regulation and modulation.

Veronica Rottman: Yeah. So neuroception coined by Dr. Steven Porges is our autonomic nervous systems perception of whether we're safe or not. And I like to use the word perception and highlight and underline it because we have, again, this really in our conscious mind sense of safety being an absence of actual threat in the material world. Like we think, well, there's no bear chasing me, so I must be safe. When in reality, we can perceive threat even in the absence of it. Meaning if I had an experience in my life or experiences that were stressful or traumatic, let's say for example, if I had a caregiver who didn't know how to attune and match my emotions, and I felt my nervous system perceived some abandonment with that, In the future, if I experience the sensations or emotions that are related to abandonment that can trigger the perceived threat and cause my nervous system to go into a survival state, even when I'm actually with a person who's wonderful and lovely, It could have been their tone of voice. It could have been their facial expression, but it triggers that over coupling or implicit memory of what happened before. So we have our explicit memory. These are the stories we have all the details on, or we believe we do. And then our implicit memory is our body's memory. We might not have a conscious ability to recall the details, but that implicit memory is always trying to come through in sensations and emotions. And because of that stored implicit memory, we could be out to lunch with friends, but we hear a sound or we feel a sensation that causes our body to go, oh, it's happening again and I'm here to protect you. So let's go into some flight, let's go into some freeze as a way to keep you safe. Your body just wants to keep you safe. And again, I'm gonna reiterate this, It's not a sign that you are broken. It's not a sign that there's something wrong with you. It's simply your autonomic nervous system doing its job really well.

Jeffrey Besecker: It's interesting to look at research that exists on how even smell can trigger that reactivity. We discussed that in an episode a good while back, but looking at that idea of attachment to those experiences, Let's look at that concept of over coupling a little bit. I feel like that's a good point to jump in today because I know we've shared this a lot in our pre talks and it's jumped up a lot in your own content. Let's look at over coupling and how that surfaces and impacts.

Veronica Rottman: Yes, I would love to. So when we again have that experience that's perceived as stressful or traumatic in our past, our body really intelligently and adaptively associates the stimuli of what we experienced with threat. It gets encoded in our nervous system, like stored in like a somatic memory bank of that sound, that smell, that emotion means whatever was happening before is now happening or about to happen. And so what's really curious about this is that there can also be an over coupling with dissociation involved. So we go into the state of being triggered based on our past. Our body is projecting the past onto the present, but we have no conscious awareness that it's that smell. It's the smell of toast, for example, let's say. from our past. Something stressful happened with the toast and we're smelling it again. We're getting triggered and we're like, why? Why am I triggered? And our body creates a literal disconnect from the smell of the toast because it doesn't want us to remember the imprint of that trauma. That would be too much. And it can take some somatic investigation to get curious about our senses. If for example, you have an experience that you have a disproportionate amount of reaction to based on what's actually happening, meaning you're at work. And for some reason, every time you walk past a certain doorway, you get triggered and you're like, what is going on? Getting curious about your senses. What are you looking at? What are you hearing? What are you smelling, touching, right? What emotion are you experiencing? That can help us to draw more awareness on what has become over coupled as well as that dissociative layer of under coupling, meaning it's below our conscious awareness so that we can start to untangle or piece apart those associations of this stimulus equals threat.

Jeffrey Besecker: It's interesting to see that trickle-down effect of how that energy permeates all the way down to our cellular level. We look at cellular memory. We look at things like our neurological memory. We look at neuroplasticity in the brain and how it wires certain neural interactions. We won't dive too far in that today because I think it's something we're planning down the road, even moderating and setting the set point of your heart rate variable. Where is my range of heart rate function? Not very often when we look at those sensory perceptions, do we stop to consider how's my heart beating right now? Sometimes that distraction alone of saying, let me stop a moment and just feel into my heart. Let me just feel. Sometimes we run from that and dissociate from the fact that the heart is racing. Wait, I'm going to ignore this, which further perpetuates that stress.

Veronica Rottman: Yeah, and we all have a different level of access to that interoceptive awareness, but the heartbeat is one of the most powerful ways to grow our interoceptive awareness or awareness of our inner body, inner experience. Even more so than breath. So research shows that, like, and we say this all the time with mindfulness, like, just take a deep breath. And actually that can trigger more anxiety. But the heartbeat through research, we know by drawing awareness to that, that can be a much safer resource for people. than just noticing the breath. And yeah, there's so much that we can do to build that interoceptive awareness, lots of different practices. And I think it's like the pendulum tends to swing in really big extremes. I think the vast majority… We are human after all.

Jeffrey Besecker: We're prone to those swings and variants.

Veronica Rottman: So if we look at most people, there is a tendency to have more relationship with extraoception or awareness of our outer world, our outer experience. There's a table here. I can feel it. This is real. Whereas interoceptive awareness or our inner self is something that hasn't had a lot of value when we're growing up, who was actually asked, where do you feel that in your body? Pretty much no one. I don't know anyone. If you know of someone, please, I would love to interview them. There was this lack of encouragement to connect with our inner experience. And when there is that mismatch or a disconnect from our inner experience, we're much more likely to project or spew whatever is happening inside onto what's happening outside, right? Instead of actually realizing like, oh, this is actually me. And on the other end of that pendulum swing, and this is something I've experienced in somatics and in yoga, especially. We can go too far inward. We can actually create a lack of relationship with the external and the internal can start to feel so safe and so cozy and luxurious that we lose a capacity to be in the world and feel like we can take up space. and feel like we can be in connection with our environment and with other people. So it's like, how do we find that happy medium where I can, in this moment, as I talk to you, you know, feel my torso, feel the sensations in my feet, even as I'm talking. And that takes some thematic multitasking, right? Weaving together of these two experiences so that there's more what we call coherence.

Jeffrey Besecker: Do you feel at times there is that notion where we bypass and dissociate by going so deeply into our embodiment, by focusing on it? Let's unpack that a little bit, if we might. How does that start to occur and what shape or form does that start to surface as?

Veronica Rottman: So let's say we are practicing yoga and we have what's called parasympathetic dominance, which means that our system has the genetic predisposition towards defaulting to a parasympathetic response, which for a lot of people might sound great. It's like parasympathetic is rest and digest. I must be really chill, right? But actually there's a flat lining there where under stress, if we have parasympathetic dominance, we tend to go into that freeze, that immobilization through conservation or shutdown when we're stressed. And then we go into a yoga practice or meditation or mindfulness practice, and we're encouraged to just close our eyes and track what we're feeling inside, dissociate maybe from our thoughts, and just try to find what we're perceiving to be this really enlightening experience of going inward. when guess what that is replicating? It is absolutely replicating the freeze response of sit still, don't move, there's that immobilization, and try to, yeah, move away from your experience, move into the in-between, when really our system, in order to find regulation, needs more of that interaction and safety with the external, it needs more of that healthy sympathetic response in order to have more ventral capacity, have more capacity to be out in the world, take up space, use our voice, set boundaries. Right. And I am not knocking meditation and yoga, it absolutely can be a platform for growth and healing. It's just that at what point do we go okay I have built up this fluency in my inner self. And now I really want to take that and engage with the world more. Like it doesn't end after that five minutes of meditation. Like we need this level of awareness and awareness. I think, you know, we got to work with that one too. Cause it's, it's, I think perceived to be everything.

Jeffrey Besecker: There are times where that concept can become a bit overwhelming as we seek that urge to feel sometimes guilted and shamed. What do I know and what do I not know? What do I understand? What do I not understand? What do I have access to? What do I not? That in and of itself can be kind of that tassel or challenge of ego that sometimes arrives where we feel inferior and insufficient, plain and simple.

Veronica Rottman: And I love that you brought up that there's a lot of shame with awareness because oftentimes I hear people say, well, like I'm so self-aware, I'm so self-aware. I just know every little, I know why I react to my sister that way. I know that when I do this, I have this particular emotional experience. You have awareness, but that's sort of just looking in at the experience versus going into the experience and actually rewiring it. So self-awareness, oftentimes I think it's confused with like self-shaming, right? There's like, oh, I'm aware that I did this wrong. I have this pattern. And then it just stops right there. And it's like, we celebrate self-awareness so much, but it's actually only a step towards the non-conceptual experience of ourselves, of our lived experience.

Jeffrey Besecker: We look at that idea of self from a lot of different perspectives, which can become beneficial or adverse depending on how we load it up. Again, do we overly identify with self or are we just considering the construct of self? Are we filtering that through a perspective that's healthy and beneficial, or do we venture into those kind of adverse, challenging, and sometimes unhealthy models? Being able to switch that lens out in and of itself can be beneficial, can be adverse. How are we looking at it and what do we make of it?

Veronica Rottman: Yeah, and it feels really important to name that and what you said like constructs of who you are are based on your relationship to what people have told you about yourself, how they're perceiving you, which is so physiological and not personal. and not always, you know, congruent with who you are. And then the labels we assign ourselves. And it's kind of like the difference between looking at a room versus being in the room, right? Like, we can look at it, but that's only a surface layer experience when we're actually in the room experiencing the textures and the smells and the, what includes the full arc of our lived experience, then we have more access to, instead of getting stuck in the adverse, which is really common, like we over-identify with our trauma. And there's a reason for that, right? Like we have a negativity bias, especially when we have trauma that serves as like a protective mechanism. But if that is, Causing our sense of self to take shape based on just the trauma and the stress. We're really missing out on the full range of experience that we've had in our life and the ability to let the stories complete themselves in ways that our mind can't conceive.

Jeffrey Besecker: It's interesting looking at that idea of looking at the room and being in the room from a somatic context. Even how our brain, as we're bringing the brain back into the body, sometimes we throw it out there conceptually. How we form meaning and value through cortical columns in the brain, simply a compartment of the brain that's taking snapshots of our experience. We're just forming a picture or a view of things. Are we putting ourselves in the picture? Are we able to back away from the picture and just observe it? Just like going to the museum. It's interesting. My daughter was just at the museum this week and got reprimanded for getting too close to the picture. Sometimes we have to form that healthy space where we back away from the picture and just look at it rather than being in the room with it. There's that balance again, that fine line. Same with our somatic experience. Which snapshot are we presently viewing? Which portion of our somatic interaction are we engaging with?

Veronica Rottman: Yeah. And I think that's where I really see the importance of noticing the part of you that's not experiencing the room actually. So let's say, let's say we have an intrusive thought. We can oftentimes get tangled up in the intrusive thought, believe that it's fact and create all this story that perpetuates that positive feedback loop with negative consequences as Peter Levine says wonderfully. Just like stuck in that cycle we believe the intrusive thought our body has a somatic experience of that story we're telling ourselves it's reacting to this intrusive thought, and then we continue the loop right that feedback loop. When I'm working with clients, we're going, okay, where in your body do you not have a sensation that feels uncomfortable? Where in your body do you potentially feel neutral or even a pleasurable sensation? And that I think is what gives us the capacity to take space from the charge and shows our nervous system that we are safe. We're so used to these like mindset affirmation things. And if our body doesn't believe that we're safe, none of that's going to work. It can't speak verbal language. It needs us to pre-verbally, pre-cognitively show us, show our nervous system that we are safe. And that happens through the felt sense experience of pleasure. and weaving it right throughout our processing, throughout our day, so that we can start to untangle any of those over couplings. And especially when it comes to dissociation, it's like that is the result of our body feeling too much charge and too much activation. So we literally need to show our system that feeling can feel good again. In little bits, feeling can feel good again, right? So just small amounts of digestible felt-sense connections to pleasure, that warmth in your chest, that grounding in your feet, right? Those are your affirmations, your somatic affirmations. And that's really what grows our capacity.

Jeffrey Besecker: Okay. It takes us back to that neutral reset or energetic grounding. And there's a very real grounding energetic effect in that, that I don't know that will impact completely today or dive in, you know, that's for another episode. Looking at how we even relate to the earth's resonance and how that has a centralizing balancing effect with our body. Back to looking at that concept of earthing. Sometimes we mark that down and cognitively discount that or bypass it itself, but there's evidence, quote, quote, to illustrate how we harmonize and resonate energetically with what's known as the Schumann resonance. It's that basic energetic vibration of the universe and the earth that you find that co-regulation point again.

Veronica Rottman: Regulation. Yes, I was just about to say that. And for a lot of us who maybe have attachment trauma, you know, one of my areas of focus is relational developmental trauma, co-regulation with other people might not be available at first. And so nature is one of the best ways to teach your body that being in relationship with something else and someone else eventually, that it is safe and that you can have that ability to find safety with something else. It might be a rock, it might be a tree. at first, but then eventually it ripples out into the resonant field between you and other people. And you can rewire yourself towards having more health and vitality in relationships that way. And I think that, you know, this is kind of a tangent, but like what you said about earthing and how we discount it, I think so many people are like, Oh, that's just woo.

Jeffrey Besecker: That's just, it goes on whether you want to acknowledge it or not. We can run from it, but it's happening probably more than anything else that we do experience from a sensory perspective.

Veronica Rottman: Yeah, absolutely.

Jeffrey Besecker: Subjectively kind of interjecting my assumptions on that.

Veronica Rottman: Yeah. No, I agree. And I think that labeling it as woo or hippie or spiritual, and not that I have any problems with being woo, but it's like a way for people to reject their subconscious experience.

Jeffrey Besecker: Can be. We write that narrative that, well, this is somehow beyond me and somehow I'm rejecting that.

Veronica Rottman: Yeah. Yeah.

Jeffrey Besecker: So looking at that idea of co-regulation, this was kind of stuck in my mind a while back and I want to interject that point. How we're regulating and what portion of that somatic experience is always interesting to me because so often we lump sum that into raising and lowering a certain set point of vibration. I'm either just raising my vibration or lowering that. Yet from my research, my study, my awareness of it, we have so many different energetic vibrational interactions, energetic frequencies and interactions going on throughout every part of our being, every part of our somatic experience. From the power of our words to the resonance of our heart, to the resonance of our thought, to the resonance energy of our parasynthetic neural system, to the resonant energy of our endocrine system. There's all of these. I'm just trying to pinpoint a few, few, few particles of example of that interaction. of how we resonate with it and how we align. From your perspective, where do we interject in that and how do we find that balance and meaning?

Veronica Rottman: Yeah, I'm trying to make sure I understand this question.

Jeffrey Besecker: I have the curse of seeing the 40,000 foot view. I just say curse very loosely. I have a better relationship with it than seeing it as a curse, but ingested in fun, I'm calling it the curse today, but I tend to approach things from that level of understanding. How do we reverse engineer down?

Veronica Rottman: Yeah.

Jeffrey Besecker: There again, I'm interacting from that kind of dissective view of things and saying, well, But the power of your words have an energy, the power of your thoughts have an energy. How do we determine where again, we're focusing? We'll guide that window of tolerance because it's a window of tolerance. It's not a set point.

Veronica Rottman: Yeah.

Jeffrey Besecker: There is a certain amount of set point there again. Yeah. Trying to bring that all back in. And it's something I've wrestled with that. Yes, it all does move in a generalized range, but there's certain areas we can concentrate on.

Veronica Rottman: Yeah. And I love this idea of a wheel for this with you as the, as the center point, the hub of the wheel. And then there's all these other spokes that include your relationship to your thoughts, your relationship to your body, your relationship to your emotions. And in order to keep the wheel turning, right, you stay at your center in connection to your body to yourself. And then you start to just when you're getting curious, build more relationship with the quality of your thoughts, build more relationship with your emotions. And a lot of people reject this idea in somatics that thoughts can be a somatic experience. And here, this circles back to everything we've been saying the whole time. The mind is absolutely your body. They are not split. That is like an old, outdated, colonial invention. So really reprogramming to see that your thoughts are reflecting the state of your body, of your nervous system. And in order to keep the wheel turning, we want to continue to explore these different channels of perception versus just going, this is the one, which I am guilty of.

Jeffrey Besecker: We all, to a certain degree, want, need, and have to operate from a certain level of default mode activation. Those automatic responses that, if we don't make that quick evaluation and decision, might become detrimental.

Veronica Rottman: Yeah. Can you repeat that? Probably not.

Jeffrey Besecker: We all operate from that default mode that is that balance between what is pertinent now, what will be my safety point now, what will basically keep me alive and moving versus where we can slow down and moderate and regulate and make a little more protracted, drawn out assessment of things.

Veronica Rottman: We need both and think of how everything works in cycles. And yet we tend to get stuck on this really linear timeline, a chronological order to our experience, where it's like, sometimes actually you really need to reorient to the cycle to whether you're in that contraction or expansion. I have no idea if this answers your question, by the way.

Jeffrey Besecker: We'll leave that for interpretation and meaning finding. Do we always search for that certainty where we're trying to just reinforce whatever meaning we're instilling on it? Let's move into that mode. Make meaning what you make meaning of. That's what we all sometimes tend to do anyway, is go to those default meetings that are programmed in whatever activation of the brain mode we're in. Sometimes it is that triggered familiarity of the hypothalamus and the hippocampus that drive the sympathetic activation and the parasympathetic activation in tandem. You know, that's a switch off there. Going back to a little bit of the more intellectual approach of it, the knowledge of that, particularly going down to the paraventricular nucleus, which is responsible for shifting all of our stress hormonal responses or activating the ventral response, hormone-driven response, again, of that calm, relaxed activation.

Veronica Rottman: Yeah.

Jeffrey Besecker: I'll throw that out there and let you interact with it.

Veronica Rottman: I love that you're bringing up this connection between the nervous system and hormones because finally Harvard's doing research on how trauma actually is a cause of women's reproductive health issues like infertility, PMDD, endometriosis, the list goes on and on, a lot of this stuff where there has been a gap in our understanding and our approach to it, and now it's like, oh, we're finally researching what a lot of people have known for a while intuitively, right? That when you have those traumatic experiences, of course, It's going to impact your endocrine system. Of course, it's going to throw off the hormones that when we are in a healthy state in more of that ventral state, our body is really smart. It's like great. Then it's probably a good time to have a baby. Right. Whereas if we're in a constant state of stress based on our past and our trauma, of course, the body is going to deprioritize the hormones like progesterone and estrogen to keep our hormones healthy and our fertility going, it's going to deprioritize that because it says, well, this would be like a really horrible time to have a baby. You're not safe, right? You're in a survival state. There could be a threat to your survival. Why would we create another human being during this time? And this showed up for me in a lot of my trauma showed up in my experience of my menstrual cycle. with PMDD, premenstrual dysphoric disorder. And again, it's one of those things where they're like, oh, you're just having a reaction to the progesterone. And for me, it really was resolved once I started working through my trauma somatically. And I see that consistently with clients as well.

Jeffrey Besecker: We don't often stop to consider and create space to become aware of how that creates its own effect on our neural system. I was doing some reading earlier about a number of different effects that surface as basically neural disorder, neural dysregulation as a result of that, that also impact our emotional well-being, our mental processing, has a trickle-down effect on any number of our somatic experiences.

Veronica Rottman: Yeah, definitely. And it's pretty ironic that I also have that relationship with like, wanting all the information can be like a really safe gateway or portal and back into my body. And so we really have to try and balance it out, right? With like, what is our experience of the information that we're taking in versus like, just knowing everything we can possibly know about the nervous system. And that's beautiful and wonderful and I celebrate that. But I think that a lot of people can hide from themselves and their experience there. So I try to in my work really balance out the informational and educational with the experiential because that's really where we integrate the information and it becomes a part of us and we can speak to it from an embodied place of like actually having relationship with it. You know, it's very trendy right now on social media, right, to talk about like somatics and just slap the term nervous system on your work because it somehow relates to the nervous system without actually having done your own somatic without having rewired your own nervous system.

Jeffrey Besecker: We have a tendency as human beings, and we have a tendency, I'll generalize in that mode, to exercise that level of conditioning. There is, again, that balance between beneficial and adverse. Sometimes that conditioning, that generalization is beneficial. Where do we set that in our framework? What do we build upon? What do we sometimes reject and move on from? Reject in a healthy manner or maybe set aside might be a better frame to put that in as we look at frameworks.

Veronica Rottman: Yeah.

Jeffrey Besecker: There again, we go to mindset. Let's want to mind it. I go back to you because it is one of the more contrarily generalized phrases that just pops up with quite a redundancy. What part of the mind, then, is where I always go to? And I think we share this in our family background lineage, our family experience, where we were stimulated, I'll say stimulated in whatever way, to seek that greater knowledge of things, to kind of unpack things, to find that more, I like to call it nuanced. Again, where do we empower it? More nuanced approach.

Veronica Rottman: Yeah, and I think you're right, you do have to kind of reject some of this stuff because we're getting we're getting inundated with like no you do this and then this and then yeah and a lot of my clients come to me with hyper vigilance around. growth and transformation and wanting it to work and happen. And they want a prescription. They want me to tell them, like, take these steps and then it will work when it's so much of it has to do with them being willing to just set aside the hypervigilance and simply, simply experience their body, which, you know, the word simply, like actually the experience of being in your body is very multidimensional.

Jeffrey Besecker: And we can load things any way we want it, you know, and that's ultimately the beauty of it. We can load it any way we want it. Do we wrestle with simplicity or do we just let simplicity work for itself?

Veronica Rottman: Yeah. And I think I hear this all the time. The feedback I get is like, oh, when you told me to put my finger on my hand, I thought, well, okay, what's that going to do? But when we actually feel our hands and our finger coming into relationship, there's so much that happens here. My hand now has more information and awareness of itself because it has come into relationship with my finger. Right. And someone could hear this if you're listening and be like, I don't feel anything. And that's information too. Right. But these really simple practices are filled with really rich somatic felt sense experiences if we're willing to be open to them. And I think that culturally we're so averted to what seems simple on the surface. or even like animalistic, like our bodily impulses, right, they are a result of being animals, being mammals. And we have this perspective, I think, on our primal instincts as them being something to bypass and ignore for the intellectual. And actually, the more we disregard our body's impulses to protect itself, right, or to move towards pleasure or to be still and rest, the more our intellect suffers, the more we lose capacity to rework mind frame, reframe our cognitive being, right? There's so much relationship there. It's like what I always say is when you bypass your body's impulses, you actually become more impulsive Those impulses stay, right? Our impulse to feel anger and express it, like that, if we internalize it, it just stays on repeat in our system. And it comes out in all sorts of weird ways that can be quite toxic for ourselves and others. So really switching this perspective of like the animal body being inferior and that it needs to be controlled and shamed, like that is such a huge source, I think, of our suffering.

Jeffrey Besecker: It's interesting to me, we always kind of dissociate in and of itself with our humanness from other creatures of species, you know, even other people sometimes. It's interesting to watch my dog when we go for walks and say, he really isn't that much different than me. You know, we watch a lot of the things that he does. A lot of things you can compare as we discern, well, I can relate this to the human experience. There again, we already start that process where I can see the similarities and say, yeah, we really a lot of times don't act too different than from that impulse. A lot of times we are just very animalistic in our approach to things and just engaging in that level of impulse, bringing us back to that level of disconnection with self. We don't even recognize and realize our sensations or our sense of even being. Let's unpack that a little bit. How do we reconnect to some things up today with that somatic response to put the logic in the backseat and just re-engage with the core sensation?

Veronica Rottman: Yeah, I really love this question. And there's so many different approaches that I am trained to look at someone and say, okay, this is what's going on for them. And this will be the best pathway. But I think in general, and I see this as a major gap in semantics itself, movement is key. Movement in a sedentary culture where we're always sitting in chairs is such a strong antidote to not being in our bodies. And it doesn't have to be, you know, I think in the workout world, it's like go as hard and as vigorous and as fast as you can. That's not embodiment. Or even like major athletes, right? Like there's actually a level of really intense bypassing and dissociation of our body signals. By movement, I mean what I just talked about, bringing your finger to your hand, noticing your breath. Your breath is a movement, walking. These really simple experiences of our somatic self, we wanna start gently and open up curiously to what we feel inside. And it can start with the more like sensory experience of when I move my hand, I then feel more blood flow, more warmth. Sure, that's a sensation. It's not a spontaneous sensation that comes from the afferent fibers of our nervous system. The more visceral experience of, oh, when I look at that tree, I feel my belly relax. When I listen to that bird, I feel the warmth in my chest expand. Those are the sensations that we want to gain fluency in when it comes to rewiring our autonomic nervous system. But I think things like somatic movement, dance, yoga, I mean, there's so many different practices, right, that can give us more access to sensation. And I want to share this with the caveat that you always want to, especially with dissociation, honor your body's limitations on feeling sensation. If we feel a disconnect to our body, this is our body saying, what there is to feel here is going to be too much too soon and I want to protect you. That is your body doing its job to protect you. And so actually pausing, you know, maybe placing a hand over your heart and just saying, thank you body for protecting me and doing your job versus what I see a lot in people, which is frustration, trying to force pass that limit, And again, I get that. Everyone wants to heal.

Jeffrey Besecker: The opposite extreme of that, you know. Look at that ice bath plunge. Without moving into judgment. Maybe to a degree of judgment. I'll acknowledge that. I have to acknowledge the blind spot there that might surface. Where do you see drawing or connecting that line to what I would perceive being an extreme measure of doing that? Yeah. I understand some of the intrinsic value. I also see that, you know, when just this week we experienced a drastic plunge in our temperatures outside, walking the dog, you do feel that invigoration of innervation. You know, it's innervation is that activation of the nervous system. It's where all that blood flow starts to increase. It's where those energetic particles come alive. I can make that correlation to the ice bath. How do we find that balance with, do I really need to dive into the ice bath? I'm resistant to it. I'm not going to lie. My own personal resistance is I don't feel I need to go to that extreme to feel it. If you find that balance, if you need that drastic of a shock, make it work for you.

Veronica Rottman: get at it.

Jeffrey Besecker: I have a neighbor that loves it. I see him out back all the time and I'm like, you're crazy. I'm bundled up. I'm not getting in the water with you.

Veronica Rottman: No.

Jeffrey Besecker: Yeah, that's judgmental.

Veronica Rottman: And it's you honoring your thought. And so let's pause and just appreciate that. And I think that especially when it's something trendy like the ice baths, or I see it a lot with like ayahuasca, a lot of clients coming to me with a lot of dysregulation after these practices and are actively in recovery from them. I think, again, coming back to like, we really like to let the pendulum swing to extremes, right?

Jeffrey Besecker: Find the tools in your box that work for you. We all have that different vernacular and that different vocabulary.

Veronica Rottman: Yeah, totally. And even like for some people, the experience of a sensation might feel like too much and you get to honor that. It doesn't have to be this really intense practice that causes us to feel overwhelmed. And we always want to honor that. And catharsis has a time and a place. Right. I hear about like rage rooms or LA. Some of my clients have also come back from these rage room experiences with a fried nervous system.

Jeffrey Besecker: Yeah, it's a fine line. It is. Somebody that battled with, you know, say battled loosely, who managed to navigate that relationship with anger, knowing firsthand from, if we mention experiences, how that impacted my nervous system, how that impacted my level of emotional regulation, how that impacted my somatic experience now plays large in how I relate to expressing that anger, finding that balance, finding a healthy interaction with it. And this I feel can be productive, you know, go get it out rather than taking it out on yourself or someone else. Yeah. Is it that bad of a tool?

Veronica Rottman: It's not inherently bad. And we always want to stay curious about what's actually happening before, during, and after. When you feel called to a certain practice, is it you trying to perpetuate or match the energetic imprint of trauma, which is too much, too fast, too soon, or too little, too slow? Lots of definitions, right? Catharsis can be our attempt to go, I want to continue the dysregulation. I want to, because that's what your system is most familiar with is intensity. Like if we grew up in chaos, we might move towards practices, relationships that replicate that intensity because it feels really familiar. So actually the antidote is how do we go slower, more gently or titrated so that our system can realize and not have its wires crossed on what is safe and what is a threat. We want to like help our system to uncross any of that so that what is safe actually feels safe. And what is not safe, let's say, um, someone who treats us poorly. And we want that to signal, you know, a threat actually. And some of us may have had our wires crossed. So I always say like the catharsis porn, if you will, that I see on social media, where it's like a lot of people having these screamy, ragey fests really make people believe like, I'm not healing unless I do that. And I just want to say, actually, if you've already been through intensity and chaos, your healing happens in the gentle.

Jeffrey Besecker: So speaking to that point, relate where is that pendulum of finding the meaning in the underlying cause of that expression and engaging or activating that process of moving through the expression and relation with the emotional stimulus is driving it.

Veronica Rottman: Yeah, I, I really appreciate what you said about relationship, because we can get pretty obsessed with techniques and approaches, and those all have a time and a place, but healing happens in relationship. And so building more capacity to be in relationship with others is really going to give us more information about ourselves. Like I said, my hand has more relationship to itself because my finger is touching it, whereas when it's not touching it, there's a little less of that awareness. And so if we want to get to what's the underlying cause of our own patterns and our own pain, suffering symptoms, whether they're psychoemotional or physical or all of the above, we really want to come into relationship with others so that we can receive more information about ourselves safely. If we're doing it alone, especially, you know, we're in such a hyper-individualistic culture, if we're trying to approach our healing with just techniques, and if I do my voodoo breathing, and if I do my tapping, then I'll be fine, right? We're missing that really key experience of co-regulation, and we're probably gonna be dissociating to some degree from what really needs to be looked at. And when you have someone who knows how to show you what you can't see, Right? Like the little gestures that your face or your body makes when you do certain practices or tell certain stories, like those have so much information and experience for us when we slow down to notice them. It creates more congruency, right? when we have someone that says, I noticed when you tell that story at this part, you speed up or I see your body, your shoulders hunch when you say that word. Those are things that are probably most likely going to be outside of our conscious awareness. So relationship is key.

Jeffrey Besecker: I love that notion there again, as we kind of wrap up here today, relationship is key to healing. Sometimes that relationship just starts with getting in touch. I think that's such a salient, simple yet complex way of looking at starting that process. If you were to leave us with three tips today to wrap things up with getting in touch with just the somatic response, to get back in touch with the somatic response, what would those three tips be?

Veronica Rottman: Hmm. Wow. I would say. There are many channels of perception. We don't have to start with sensation, but we are step-by-step trying to gain fluency in sensation. But you can start right now with actually relating to your thoughts. What are your thoughts? What are the quality of those thoughts? Are they rigid? Are they expansive? Kind of applying a sensation to your thoughts. You can also gain more fluency and sensation by relating to your emotions. So I think, you know, a lot of us have, we really made some progress with being able to name and label emotions, but what we have underneath that, which is driving the emotion is a sensation. So getting curious about, okay, well, right now I'm a little anxious and it's like, well, where in my body do I feel the felt sense experience that's driving that emotion versus just thinking about it? And I guess my third tip would be to explore movement. And again, for some of us, especially if you're in shut down or freeze. Movement can sound horrible. It can sound like, uh, do not want to get off the couch, but just remembering that really gentle movement, your breath, your heartbeat, your fingers, right? Those are actually really great ways to build more capacity in your nervous system versus like going and doing some crazy workout or cathartic experience. That's most likely just going to cause you to crash again. So, yeah, relating to your thoughts, relating to your emotions, using movement as a tool to begin to open up more capacity for being in your body. Those would be my three main suggestions. And of course, there's a million more.

Jeffrey Besecker: I want to thank you for just sharing with us today that idea of getting back in touch with our somatic experience. Namaste, the light in me acknowledges the light in you, Veronica. This truly has been an enlightening conversation that challenges us sometimes to get out of just that mindset, to challenge those ideas that sometimes that mind is necessary. Sometimes that mind is neglected in the fact that it does matter as a part of the rest of that body. So thank you for sharing that with us today.

Veronica Rottman: Thank you so much, Jeffrey. This was so wonderful. Yeah, I had a great time.

Jeffrey Besecker: It truly has been a fun conversation. Thank you for sharing with us today. Let's do it again soon.

Veronica Rottman: I would love to. Thanks so much.