Post-Revelation Letdown: Why nothing changes after a deep-dive process

Have you ever noticed how expanded and open you feel after a retreat or a HUGE session, but a few days (or maybe a couple of hours) later, you experience a comedown?

You can call it 'post-retreat blues', or a 'vulnerability hangover', but it's actually the result of your nervous system tapping into past trauma because it expanded too much and too quickly.

It might seem a strange thing to say, but most nervous systems don’t experience expansion as SAFE.  

What Expands must Contract

Your nervous system is in a constant state of expansion and contraction. When activated or under stress, your nervous system responds in a range of ways. Think of your nervous system as a gauge that reports what is going on in your body. The pattern of expansion and contraction is a mode of regulation the nervous system provides. No matter how small or how spacious the opening and closing is, the same pattern – expand, contract, expand – continues. It is when the mind gets over-involved that we can experience interruptions in the design of the system and the natural movement pattern of expand, contract, expand (repeat) gets stuck.

You’ve probably been taught in mindset or manifesting work, that the void caused by contraction needs to be filled. We are taught to judge contraction is a bad thing which must be remedied. The thing is, your nervous system is creating space during the contraction in preparation for the next expansion. It is doing what it’s supposed to do! And you went and put on a bandaid where it wasn’t needed because your mind was trying to protect you from the contraction.

It’s a fairly common assumption that trauma should be defined by what happened to you. A more holistic – and body-oriented – definition is that any event that was too much or too fast for your nervous system to handle causes trauma. 

Using that definition of trauma, you can probably understand that expansion needs to happen in a trauma-informed way too. Firstly, so that you don’t overwhelm your nervous system; but most importantly, so that you don’t condition our nervous system to go into overwhelm every single time you expand.

To protect your nervous system from trauma, what we have to remember is that the bigger the expansion, the bigger (and potentially more shocking) the contraction. It’s the fast, sudden contraction that reinforces your nervous system’s past experience that expansion feels unsafe.

So, if expansion is your goal – and if you want to grow your business you must expand – you need to understand that, to control the speed of your contraction in a way that feels sustainable for your nervous system, you must focus on managing your expansion.

It’s much too late to have any helpful influence over your contraction when you’re on the downward slope of the curve (see illustration below) if the contraction is happening at breakneck speed – which is something that can happen very quickly if you make contact with trauma during the expansion–contraction cycle.

Why would we want to control the speed of the expansion–contraction process? Well, the expansion-contraction process is a mirror image of the traumatic activation-deactivation cycle (see diagram).

If we do not teach our bodies to slow down the expansion/traumatic activation (rather than skipping over it), we won’t be present when the contraction/deactivation happens. And if we are not present during the contraction/deactivation, the nervous system isn’t aware that it found safety and completed the cycle, so it will keep looping (and re-enacting the trauma).

Do I Have to Sit with What Feels Uncomfortable?

There’s a popular idea perpetuated by spiritual teachers and the personal growth movement: that you must sit in the uncomfortable to transform your trauma. The short answer is yes. But to make any healing work ‘stick’, it needs to happen through your body and your nervous system. If you are not embodied (present to your body’s experience), then the transformation will not last. Embodiment training can help in this regard.

When you are present to the sensations in your body, you are also monitoring your nervous system and can avoid a rapid expansion–contraction cycle that can open the flood gates to more than your nervous system was prepared for, including past traumas. You can do this safely by ensuring you have support from a trauma-informed therapist and nervous system specialist (like me!).

Coming back to sitting with the uncomfortable, I want to point out that our nervous system also responds negatively to pleasant experiences. Sadly, many of us were conditioned to be wary of bliss and pleasure. You don’t need to shut down your impulse to open into those states (as long as you’re not bypassing something else you would benefit from exploring), but the expansion will ‘stick’ in your body if you slowly move into the expansion in a way that is safe enough to allow your nervous system to expand instead of reactively shutting down.

I recall attending a Vipassana retreat many years ago. The premise of Vipassana meditation is to be able to scan your body and be present with whatever arises. You’re not supposed to feel bliss (and indeed, most people find that what arises is pain). I arrived to the meditation hall late one morning, so I sat down at the back of the room. I soon found my energy perceiving the increased vibration in the room, but instead of joining with the others, my energy used the collective energy as a foothold to climb even higher.

I began to vibrate blissfully, but after a short while, my mind interrupted my experience and told me I wasn’t supposed to be feeling pleasure during this practice. The instant I became aware of my mind-chatter, my nervous system was already in its conditioning, shutting down my expansion and shaming my ‘good girl’ into compliance. Shame brought me back down with a thud. Not only did I feel the hot humiliation of that, I realised my energy body was several metres behind my physical body!

It took over a day for my nervous system to recover so that my energy could fully integrate back into my body. It was a very unpleasant experience, which I suppose is ironic, considering the point of Vipassana is to feel pain (if it’s there) without reacting to it. However, it was a very useful lesson, as it taught me that the nervous system needs time and presence to re-regulate and integrate the experience. I used this learning years later in Egypt, helping fellow meditators get back into their bodies after passing through ancient gateways.

Creating a space for safe expansion

Now that you know what causes your nervous system to become dysregulated, you can focus on small, almost imperceptible expansions over an extended period to get lasting results to figure out how to heal a dysregulated nervous system. One reliable way to introduce safety is to limit the amount of time you spend in an expanded state. I know this sounds counterintuitive, but the feeling you get through being expanded for too long reminds your body of other times you have been overwhelmed. Because your nervous system doesn’t want to feel overwhelmed again, it does what it can to protect you by shutting itself down as quickly as it can.

But here’s the kicker: Because your nervous system thinks that succeeding in protecting you from feeling overwhelmed this time will magically heal all the other times in your past that you were overwhelmed, it is more likely to contract harder and faster than it has previously.

This is how we inadvertently reduce our capacity and end up in nervous system lockdown. Our body is always trying to get us to remember that we know how to get to safety, but it doesn’t remember how to do that if we are unable to stay present. That is why safe, trauma-informed practice is vital to effective nervous system regulation.

Read more about the nervous system here.

Conclusion

While it may sound odd to come back into your comfort zone to expand, from your nervous system's point of view, trying to expand when it’s already stretched beyond capacity triggers survival responses.

Instead of white-knuckling your expansion process, try coming inside your comfort zone and helping your nervous system get really familiar with the juicy joys of sitting in sublime comfort and ease by doing something that already comes naturally to you. Do this, and your nervous system will let you know when it's ready to expand, because you have taught it what it feels like to be in flow.

As an added bonus, you won't have to deal with any more blocks to your 'uplevelling'. That’s because obstacles to uplevelling are your nervous system’s response to not having enough capacity – basically, it’s been taught to stay ‘small’!

In my trauma-informed video courses for healers, helpers, coaches and carers, I teach methods to eliminate overwhelm and rewire patterns of protection, banish procrastination and self-sabotage and metabolize trauma that's holding back practitioners from thriving. If you're curious how nervous system work and Polyvagal principles can expand your impact as a coach or practitioner, my Nervous System Essentials 3-part video course provides foundational education about the nervous system and teaches you how to apply your knowledge to work with different nervous system presentations (Flight, Fight, Freeze, Appease, Fawn and Fold).

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