Safety?
You may have never actively thought about your nervous system before you come to a counselling appointment, but it is something I like to raise a fair bit in both counselling and coaching. If your body is detecting a threat, and is in an active nervous system threat response, that has a whole host of effects on your body and mind. Autistic and ADHD people tend to have chronically activated nervous systems – we are having to respond to so many things which neurotypical people may not even be aware of: sensory issues such as noises and smells and textures and bright lights; interpreting body language and facial expressions and social cues; arranging our own faces and body language to fit in, processing what is happening and how to respond to it, while trying to work out or remember what it is that we’re actually trying to do ourselves. It’s no real surprise that neurodivergent people tend to have hugely and chronically raised stress levels.
I like to discuss the image of a stress bucket. If your bucket has an inch of stress in the bottom, then you’re going to be OK, you’ll be able to deal with several stressful events. But if your bucket adds another inch of stress because there’s a fluorescent light, another inch because of the car alarm going off, another inch because someone is wearing strong perfume, another inch because you got a work email and you’re not sure if the person writing it was cross with you or not, another inch because you had to make small talk with the person at the check out, then it’s not going to take much extra to cause a meltdown – and the final straw will be something small probably, something that makes you and the people around you question why it bothered you so much. So then you add shame to the whole cycle which adds to your stress from the outset, and the whole merry go round starts again.
Nervous system activation isn’t just fight or flight – there’s freeze, fawn, flop, fit in – and all of them affect our behaviour and capacity hugely. Nervous system activation affects digestion, sleep, ability to learn, short term memory and emotional processing, just to name a few. Without the ability to be able to recognise our own nervous system state, and then work on regulating ourselves, we will find it very hard to make changes in our lives.
So a good opening question is – when and where do feel safety in your life?