The Dependency of My Okay-ness

adventures in shifting where my I okay-ness comes from

Photo by Lynn Kintziger on Unsplash

Hopefully it's clear enough at this point that the most fundamental reason for nervous system retraining, while this feels like an oversimplification, is to restore the deepest sense of okay-ness with myself no matter what. I know, I’ve put it quite scientifically :)

No matter what is happening in me, no matter what is happening around me, and no matter what is happening through me. Tall order.

And hopefully you know me well enough by now to know that there's a lot of nuance to making such a concrete statement, so I'll try to flesh this out a bit more.

To begin, I'll illustrate with a recent example from my life. My husband, who is usually cool as cucumber, was clearly ‘off’ one morning in his emotional state. It was on a morning that I was getting ready for work, so I was more focused on what needed to happen for me before I left the house. But, when my oh-so-infinitely-sensitive internal sensors started to catch my attention regarding his mood, I immediately went into the mode I know so well, of trying to make him feel better. I pursued asking him what was wrong.

Up to this point in my life, it has been a common reflex for me to immediately pursue such a line of behavior. However, in that particular moment when I asked him this time, I simultaneously realized that as much as I wanted to offer the possibility that I cared about how he felt, probably the more truthful reality was that I needed him to be okay before I left the house so that I could be okay with the rest of my day.

I further realized in that moment that not only was my okay-ness dependent on his okay-ness but the okay-ness of my entire day was somehow dependent on his momentary okay-ness before I left the house as well.

How the heck did I get here?

I didn't receive this strong of realizations all at once; it took some percolation throughout the day to recognize what the true motives were here, and then to circle back with him to name this in the evening. As our friend Brene Brown cheers with us, naming shame diminishes its power over us. So I named to him.

And of course my initial response to my naming was one that included this shame energy as I recognized that I had made my own safety and happiness contingent upon everything else and everyone else that's going on around me.

I also recognized that it doesn't just happen with my husband but with many others who I am close to, and even those to whom I am not-so-close. I'm currently unpacking with my own somatic coach how this dynamic has shown up more often than not in the past even as a practitioner, which was causing nervous system dysregulation in me and probably contributing to burnout in different seasons of my professional career.

The true reality is that when we are born, our own need for nervous system regulation as infants is completely dependent on our caregivers. The initial wiring of our ventral vagal nervous system, that polyvagal state of social engagement, connectedness, and compassion for self and others is completely dependent on the connection with our caregivers when we're born and through the first few years of life.

Before you get that sinking feeling as you consider your own childhood and the potentially ‘not-good enough-ness’ of your caregivers, my point and sharing this is that there's a time and a place for understanding that it's certainly normal at some point in our development to require others to help us find regulation in our nervous system. It's developmentally appropriate.

Where it gets tricky is when we've experienced misattunements with our caregivers when we're young that don't also involve supportive repair experiences. Add to that any potential types of experiences that keep our stress responses looping, ie. trauma, challenges can be created within for developing one’s intrinsic sense of safety or okay-ness within ourselves as we become adults.

I know it seems like quite a dilemma. And it is, until it isn't. What I'm about to offer is not an overnight solution by any stretch of the imagination, but from a somatic perspective with time and consistency, it’s one of the practices that can help.

If you have found yourself like me as someone who has inadvertently created a world in which being okay requires everyone and everything around you to be okay, then feel free to read on with me.

First, know that this is not a character flaw or weakness and it’s not your fault. Your very intelligent nervous system, which is primarily serving the purpose of your survival did what it had to do so that you could be alive here, right now, reading this. Let that sink in.

The process of finding my okay-ness has been the work of my life in a very primary way for the past year-plus.  It has begun with actually recognizing that I have a body, aka, that I'm not just a brain living life ‘above the neck,’ and understanding how this body is actually serving me instead of fighting against me. That in itself is a journey and a different post yet to be written, by the way.

A practice that I learned from my training in Somatic Experiencing is called “orienting.” Orienting is finding oneself in the ‘here and now,’ inside the body and inside one’s surroundings. There are two main types of orienting: defensive and exploratory. Generally speaking, as has been true in my case, some of us end up with a nervous system that's more attuned to defensive orienting when there are many unresolved stress loops that keep running in our system. This type of orienting is always looking for threats within the body and the environment in order to attempt mitigating potentially adverse experiences to the organism. While this type of orienting is definitely helpful in a truly threatening moment, to live one's life in a position of defensive orienting which we might also call hypervigilance, is exhausting. I can tell you this from experience, and you know it too if you’re tracking with me. It's running one's nervous system in-the-daily on survival energy. We weren't created for this in the long term. And running on survival energy for too long depletes the system, which can contribute to our experiences of mental unwellness, physical illness, and even spiritual disconnection.

Incorporating the practice of exploratory orienting has been an adventure for me. Essentially with this kind of orienting, there is a sort of inner neutrality and even a sense of curiosity within, as one identifies their environment and their body.

I might notice how pleasurable it feels in my right shoulder when I provide a gentle stretch over my head. I might smell a lovely essential oil that I just purchased and identify the sweet-smelling clove within the mixture. I might notice the photo on my desk of my husband and myself on a past trip to Ireland following our bliss through grassy fields filled with sheep. I might look at the lamp in the corner of the room and really pay attention to noticing the detail in the lampshade in a way that I've never seen before, only to discover an intricate pattern of spirals. Can you sense the difference here with me?

Intentionally shifting into a daily practice of exploratory orienting can teach our nervous system to downshift out of survival mode and into a thriving mode of being. It takes quite a lot of practice, at least in my experience, and I'm still really at the very beginning stages of this. But when one replaces defensiveness and hypervigilance with curiosity and connection, over time the nervous system learns that it doesn't always have to be on high-alert for danger.

And in the bigger picture, as we zoom back out from describing this practice, it also teaches my nervous system to depend on itself. Meaning, that there's a certain level of trust developing below the conscious surface in this orienting experience between my brain, my body, and my relationships with the things and people around me. I become more centered in myself and trusting of myself as I identify what is happening in and around me with my interoceptive or “somatic mindful” capabilities.

This practice then can have a big hand in restoring a proper connection with one's intuition, or ‘ways of knowing that are outside of typical cognitive left brain learning.’ Often intuition is something adversely affected by perpetually looping stress responses.

It is only by recentering in ourselves, ‘re-membering’ our body to our brain, and re-discovering our own being and our world from this posture of exploration and curiosity, bit by bit, that restores our sense of our true core self.

Of course many other things go into this lovely stew, but as I continue to contemplate what has unfolded for me over the last year, this piece has been quite central, and continues to be so as I consider my next personal and professional steps in recovering an even deeper sense of myself than I have ever known before.

I'd love to hear how any of these ideas have landed for you or if you can relate. Feel free to drop me an email or share in the comments below to contribute to the community conversation.

I like to name these things to help others to know that they're not the only one. We tend to find that once we name these things there are many others who feel similarly and there's some sort of healing salve in it all.