The essential skill in dealing with distress is learning how to make choices around how we can use your nervous system to curate experiences. What the hell does that mean? Let’s begin with the basics of two arms of the autonomic nervous system. We all have a sympathetic arm that enables us to recognize threats and escape from them. When we as a species lived in the wild lands of the African savannah or the boreal forests of the northern climes where we migrated and everywhere in between, we had to recognize predators and other threats to our bodily safety. We then needed to use all of our bodily resources to escape. When we found a peaceful and secure environment, we could then re-engage the parasympathetic arm of our autonomic nervous system. This side of our nervous system allows us to calm our body, digest food, and connect meaningfully with other human beings we trust.
Lots of factors enable us to have greater control over switching between these two arms of our autonomic nervous system. What we eat has a huge influence, as recent research is indicating that probiotics influence the neurotransmitters in our brains that can help us remain calm even in distressing moments. Early trauma history has an impact on our ability to down regulate emotions. The attachment style we have based on how our mothers and fathers raised us has an influence. The practice of mindfulness and other spiritual disciplines can empower us to have greater flexibility in managing stress. A steady marriage and good relationships with our kids can allow us to be more stress resilient. We can selectively change how we relate to ourselves and others by attending to some of the factors I name here.
But to get back to the essential skill, it boils down to this. We can learn how to “pendulate.” We can learn how to have some degree of choice in how we switch between positive and negative emotions and sensations. We can become ever more flexible in moving between distress and calm, choosing where we place our attention as we experience things in our lives. I mention this in relation to dementia care and grief because lots of grief researchers and therapists will mention this in ways that don’t point to the underlying neural mechanism, but I believe that understanding the underlying neural mechanism allows us to apply the practices across all the domains of our lives. If we understand the root causes of how pendulating works, we can more skillfully live in almost every domain of our lives. We will also more skillfully grieve and mourn.
How do we practice with pendulating, when we experience an overwhelming feeling of distress, we allow ourselves 3-5 minutes of its full expression. That may bring us to a place of deep vulnerability and discomfort. We may cry. We may cover our face and hide. We may need to walk or move. We may want to stay in bed and feel. We may need to be alone. We may want to hug others as we ache. So many deep and intense sensations and feelings may arise. If it helps we can actually set a timer for ourselves. Or we may be practicing mindfulness or another discipline and then allow ourselves to befriend these feelings as we sit. Just allow the experience of grief, sorrow, nostalgia, anger, fear or whatever wash over you and name the feelings. You are exposing the sensations and feelings and naming them, recognizing at the same time that they will not last forever.
As you attend to these feelings, you can trust that they will not last forever. If you need to shift to more physical activity, you can. You may want to walk if you were still. You may want to cook or do something to nourish yourself or others. You may even just say to yourself, these feelings are deeply important to me, but they are not essentially who I am. They can pass through me without me identifying with them. You may focus on the sensations of your body at the periphery of your nervous system like in your feet or sitz bones as you sit. You may relax downward and feel the ground beneath your body as we do in Chan Buddhism. Or you may want to talk with or embrace someone you love. Holding the hand of someone you love like your child or partner can be very grounding and restorative.
What you are doing in pendulating is what Alan Wolfelt calls “dosing.” George Bonano talks about the same kind of thing when he mentions integrating joy and sorrow in the Other Side of Sadness. The same basic movement is at the heart of the dual process model. All of these approaches to grief and mourning are based on what Peter Levine and Daniel Siegel and other neurobiologists call “pendulation.” Because our nervous systems are built to respond flexibly to environmental conditions, keeping us safe in times of threat and allowing us to flourish in times of calm, we can learn to more flexibly tolerate distress, moving between these levels of arousal, thereby curating our experience with greater skill.
