Deprogramming vs. Regulating Your Nervous System
121. Deprogramming vs. Regulating Your Nervous System
You hear the word regulation/dysregulation of the nervous system a lot, and you’re wondering what it really means.
Or you’re struggling to understand the difference between working on your traumas (my term for it is deprogramming your love patterns) and regulating your nervous system.
This episode will help you understand the difference between the two.
I’ll also explain the psycho-corporeal approaches I’ve been practicing for 8 years in Opening up to love.
What Is a Regulated Nervous System?</
In polyvagal theory, Stephen Porges distinguishes 3 states of the nervous system: the ventral vagal state, the sympathetic state, and the dorsal vagal state. I won’t go into detail here, you can learn more about polyvagal theory in episode 57 on polyvagal theory and about these 3 states in episode 56 do we change through the body or the mind?
A regulated autonomic nervous system easily moves through the 3 states of the nervous system to cope with life’s stresses, then naturally returns to the ventral vagal state (vagal brake). The ventral vagal state isn’t a permanent refuge, the idea is to return to it often enough for the body to regenerate and be able to cope with upcoming stress.
This survival mechanism is useful and healthy when there’s real danger. Who would want to take the time to think about the best way to act if a bear were charging at you?
So having a regulated nervous system doesn’t mean:
- Always being calm
- Never being activated
- Never freezing up
A regulated nervous system lets you:
- Move from one state to another easily
- Return to the state of safety, the ventral state, quickly
- Have a wide enough window of tolerance for what activates you to absorb life’s stresses
What Is a Dysregulated Nervous System?
Your nervous system becomes dysregulated if you’ve lived through past experiences that overwhelmed your nervous system. You may have heard the word trauma — traumas, in the nervous-system sense, are all the experiences that overwhelmed your nervous system because it was too much, too soon, too fast, too intense, and for too long. There are 3 causes that can dysregulate your autonomic nervous system
- Chronic stress (physiological or psychological) lasting more than 6 months
- Traumatic shocks such as death, war, accident, abuse, neglect, birth, PTSD
- Developmental traumas (Complex PTSD) that formed through attachment/your relational experiences. In the training I did on traumatic stress with Bessel Van der Kolk, their definition is as follows: Developmental trauma is exposure to (1) interpersonal experiences that often involve relational harm or betrayal, (2) that are repetitive or prolonged, (3) that involve abuse, neglect, or abandonment by attachment figures, (4) that occur at vulnerable developmental moments in the individual’s life, and (5) that impact and compromise the individual’s physical and psychological development. Having accompanied more than 450 people, I have a more nuanced view because it depends on the child’s perception in relation to their other life experiences, I’d say that on our scale we all have traumas.
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The nervous system can become dysregulated in 3 ways:
- You may have a default state (the vagal reflex) that is a state of insecurity (dorsal vagal or sympathetic). There are often 2 possible causes:
- At birth, a child inherits, through co-regulation, the nervous system state of their attachment figures (parents; this is called the primal wire).
- You may also have experienced traumas significant enough to change your default state: a traumatic birth, traumatic shocks such as exposure to death, war, an accident, abuse, or neglect. As a result, even though the threat is gone, the body still perceives danger and its defenses remain engaged.
- You may feel unsafe more quickly because your past experiences have recorded perceptions in your survival database that put you in a state of insecurity more easily (faster activation of the vagal brake / narrow window of tolerance). If a child experienced a lot of emotional stress in childhood, they may have a smaller window of tolerance and react very quickly to the slightest changes in their environment.
- You may have difficulty returning to a state where you feel safe (lack of vagal tone). If a child experienced a lot of emotional stress and did not receive co-regulation from their parents in response to that stress (a young child is not able to manage this alone), their nervous system may have great difficulty returning to its state of safety.
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Regulating vs. Deprogramming Your Nervous System
I really like the explanation from Irène Lyon, a nervous system expert trained in Somatic Experiencing and the Feldenkrais Method, using a pool filled with balls.
Regulating your nervous system, for her, requires:
- Becoming aware of the balls, of the edge of the pool. Awareness of yourself, your body, your impulses, taking care of your physiology and your environment will naturally help increase your nervous system’s capacity, so it has more room to heal.
- Learning to welcome new balls or balls that get activated. Regulating in real time, practicing regulation techniques first in low- or no-stress situations, then increasing practice at different stress levels, will help increase your nervous system’s capacity/widen your window of tolerance.
- Deprogramming means doing work on your past (removing certain balls from the pool) if you think you have traumas, and consciously replacing them with resources (the new balls in the pool). This last part is done with a therapist, and you work specifically on your traumas. Several methods do this work: EMDR, neurofeedback, Somatic Experiencing, and the psycho-corporeal approach that I practice.
So in summary, regulating is all of that, but deprogramming/doing work on your traumas is something you do while being supported by a therapist.
In other words, you can regulate yourself by feeling the sensations in your body, by orienting yourself while walking around, by doing yoga, by hugging someone, by doing breathwork — that doesn’t mean you’re doing work on your traumas or that you’re deprogramming your love patterns.
I’ll also give you my own way of explaining it, with the emotional bathtub, look at whichever example speaks to you most:
- The faucet of your bathtub is your past experiences that dysregulated your nervous system and that make you feel like you’re repeating certain patterns in your life (mainly in love or relationships). To stop the influence of the past, you need to turn off the running faucet, meaning deprogram the imprint of your past events on your nervous system. That’s what you do in the program Opening up to love during the Day of the Past, because it requires you to take stock of your past and do individual, in-person psycho-corporeal deprogramming sessions. What’s unique for me in the approach I practice is that you specifically deprogram the cause-and-effect, meaning that in such a situation you react in such a way.
- The first time you turn off this bathtub faucet, you still have a certain level of water left in your bathtub, and depending on the accumulation of life experiences that dysregulated your nervous system, your storage can be more or less significant. For this there’s breathwork (I talk about it in episode 21), which lets you empty the remaining storage, and also the emotional release massage that we also do during the Day of the Past in the Opening up to love program.
- You can then manage the water level in your bathtub via the drain of your bathtub. That’s what you learn in the program Je m’aime. There are several ways to do this, I’ll go over them briefly here and detail them further in episode 122 (add the link):
- Spotting what dysregulates you and regulating yourself every time you’re activated to avoid refilling your bathtub. In Je m’aime you really learn this essential foundation and build your own resource kit.
- Gaining capacity to increase your degree of resistance to what dysregulates you by starting to practice when things are calm, then increasing the level of difficulty.
- Reclaiming your power in relation to your environment/in interactions with others. (Acting in alignment, setting your boundaries while still managing to connect with others.) It’s the feeling of powerlessness that often creates trauma.
- Working on your basic physiology is like working on the quality of the bathtub’s enamel.
Can You Heal Your Nervous System? Is It True That Regulating Your Nervous System Takes Time?
If you listen to Stephen Porges, Deb Dana, Peter Levine (Somatic Experiencing), Bessel Van der Kolk, they all agree that regulating your nervous system, doing work on your traumas, takes time, that you have to go slowly so as not to overwhelm your nervous system.
I completely agree with them that learning to know and self-regulate your system takes time, because you have to understand and identify the sensations in your body, test and identify what dysregulates and regulates you, that takes time.
I also agree that learning to reclaim your power (when you’ve had traumas you often feel powerless in the face of them) also takes time.
But it’s also a big contradiction with what I see in my program Opening up to love during the Day of the Past, where I see people change their attitude and transform their lives drastically within a few months after this deprogramming work and putting it into practice. I’ll let you listen to the love story episodes of the podcast to hear how people felt. I’m not saying it works this fast for everyone: it generally takes longer for people who have experienced major traumas such as abuse, or people who have more disconnection or who struggle to take action. I also haven’t worked with people with big-T traumas such as war or PTSD or violence, so that’s also, in my opinion, a different level. And I’m not saying this so that you’ll all come rushing to buy my program.
It’s also a contradiction with my own personal transformation. On the ACE Study scale, which covers adverse childhood experiences, I have a score of 6/10, which is a fairly high score, and for me deprogramming my patterns transformed my life fairly quickly. It took me 4-5 years, because at the time I was learning my methods, I worked on a lot of insignificant patterns, and that’s one of the things I changed when I started my practice as a therapist. Yes, I still have to regulate myself, and when I encounter higher levels of challenge I have to work on my window of tolerance again, but the bulk of the work is behind me.
In the next episode I’ll explain more concretely how to regulate your emotions.
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Going further
And if you’d like to do the work on your love patterns through the body and transform your love life, there’s the program Opening up to love. You can add the Day of the Past option, a day of Somatic Deprogramming: psycho-corporeal work to deprogram nervous system automatisms and reprogram new relational reflexes.
Sandy Kaufmann
is a somatic therapist and coach, based in Switzerland. She is the author of two books published by Éditions Eyrolles and has accompanied more than 600 people. She is the creator of the Somatic Deprogramming method and hosts the podcast “S’ouvrir à l’amour“, ranked in the French top 50 in the relationships category.
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