For many clients, stress can feel like a natural byproduct of having a family, holding down a job, pursuing an advanced degree, or keeping up with the hectic pace of life in general.
The problem is, when stress becomes chronic it can impact their brain, body, and virtually every aspect of their life.
So how do we help clients stay strong and centered in the face of adversity – especially when they start to feel like they’re staring down new demands or challenges every day?
In the video below, Stephen Porges, PhD shares two ways we can resource clients to better cope with distress.
Take a look.
Click here for full transcript
The first I’ve really talked about neural exercises, and how they then can help individuals provide more activity or more resource. So we go through neural exercise and we’ve talked to a lot. We’ll talk about co-regulation and connectedness, and how interacting with people or even playing team sports builds reciprocity in which our physiology is not really self regulated, it’s co-regulate with another.
The other one is self resources. And I start to think more about this in terms of how one would develop treatment models for trauma, for addiction and others. Because most of the disorders that people suffer are really disorders of state regulation. We can translate that and say they’re disorders of stress regulation or emotional regulation. It’s all the same underlying mechanisms. So I would say that there are certain resources we give people, and that was so we can give them lessons on how to breathe. Because breathing is a powerful portal to regulate physiological state, and to downregulate sympathetic mobilization strategies, calm us down.
We can also use mental images. So with breathing it’s bottom up and top down working together. But with mental images, we start thinking about the positive moments of our lives. And when we start taking those visual images into our mind’s memory, they have a physiological correlate. They start shifting our physiological state, and they downregulate our defenses.
So there are these two pathways. One is we get our nervous system working through exercises of interacting with others. And then we also make sure that individuals realize that under very, very bad situations or challenging, I shouldn’t even use the word bad, but challenging situations. They have a resource they can go to. They can go to their memories, they can go to their breath. But they can really use their knowledge and say that when I’m really challenged, maybe I need to move my body into a environment that is less sensory, so that it can now regulate, even though we’re not talking about co-regulation.
So in behavior modification, they used to talk about time out rooms, but what those time out rooms were cues of isolation. And isolation is one of the worst triggers, most profound and potent triggers to a mammal.
Isolation, whether it’s a metaphor or physically done is really powerful in terms of disrupting who we are, because we’ve taken away the capacity and the opportunity to co-regulate.
But if we’re self-regulating, there are times where we don’t want to be around people too much for us. We don’t want to be around noise too much for us. So we don’t want even activity going on. So we need quiet places and personal spaces. So we have these two pathways. One is we develop a more resilient nervous system. We develop an awareness of that nervous system. And when we develop an awareness of what’s going on in our body, we develop a strategy to be aware when we’re hitting our limits.
For more expert strategies from Stephen Porges, PhD – as well as insights on polyvagal theory – check out this training.
Now, I’d like to hear from you. What strategies have you used to help your clients develop greater resiliency? Leave a comment below.
I wonder if visualization can help. Because most of the time it is not possible to change location to a less sensory stimulating place. Can we focus on imagining a triggering emotional situation, where our nervous system goes into overdrive, disregulation, but we recognize the sensations and we visualize calming ourselves using breathing and our thoughts. If we can visualize getting through a situation like that, calmly, in control of our emotions, and do that visualization over and over again, perhaps we can learn to do it in real life. Has this been method been researched?
This was great!
Thank you for sharing this. I have used breathing and being aware of the kind/quality of breathing as most counselors probably do, but I may have been using something similar to your idea of “favorite things” as I often ask clients to think of one good thing, or three good things – that happened to them recently, OR that they helped happen to someone else. I encourage them to make this a habit, an everyday practice.
Some of the strategies as a mental health nurse have been to learn technique breathing such as hand on belly and chest to self regulate rate and depth of breathing.
Also to self soothe with naming favourite songs movies or favourite place
Very helpful reminder. 🙏 I use this with the children at my school.
Thank you, I especially appreciate the mention of team sports as co-regulating! Very useful.
I was a psychological intern during the Vietnam war, and it was at that time and place I began to experience high levels of arousal just to stay alert because there was life and death danger almost every day. After I returned home my issues were more about anger management, especially toward authority figures in power.
Since I was my own therapist then (the field knew very little about PTSD treatment at that time) I took advantage of developing my new passion of helping others recover from trauma. Vietnam was also the place I fell in love with clinical psychology and this new passion began during the war and has developed for the last almost 60-years
My point is, having a life purpose can not only create a different narrative about what happened a long time ago, it also forges a dream that becomes more powerful than the toxic memories that are still there, but only in the background. Thanks, Dr. Todd.
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