Trying for co-regulation and finding love

Touchwork integrates and completes memories stored in the body

The mind and body are designed to function in an integrated way, but if we try to comprehend a bodily experience using the mind, it’s like pushing a square peg into a round hole. We can’t easily describe a feeling in our body. We try, because we don’t have anything other than language to describe experience, but our mind and body communicate in completely different ways. You could say they speak different languages.  

It’s actually more correct to think of the mind as speaking a foreign language (one you don’t understand), and the body as communicating through the language of music.  

Most people assume we are able to understand the language of the mind because we use words when we think about things. But the language used by the mind to ‘think’ about things is different to the language used to store information about ‘what happened’.  

When we have an embodied experience, it is beyond reach of the mind, therefore it’s difficult to use language to describe it. The mind’s description of 'experience' doesn’t line up with the body’s experience.  

I could feel my nervous system ‘trying’ to make something happen

In a recent touchwork session where I was the ‘client’, I observed my nervous system 'trying' to make something happen. I wasn’t absolutely sure it was ‘trying’, but I could sense there was some kind of ‘efforting’ happening in my body, and ‘trying’ was the most appropriate word to describe what I was feeling.

In hindsight, I now realise that my system was ‘trying’ for co-regulation.

I stayed curious to my experience of ‘trying’, and I paid attention to my sense of there being a movement pattern inside my body that was playing over and over again. It didn’t feel stuck, because there was movement, but as I stayed longer with that movement pattern, it felt like it was set on repeat. I had a visual impression of a miniature wave machine. I saw the image of a wave breaking against a wall of glass, and its momentum carrying the wave back where it broke against another glass wall directly opposite. There seemed no-where for the water to go. It didn’t seem likely to stop, and I wasn’t sure what would happen if it kept going.

Paying attention to somatic movement patterns

In Somatic Experiencing, sometimes we watch patterns for a while. Sometimes patterns find a new pathway and they change. Change is particularly interesting to us Somatic Experiencing Practitioners. However, this was the second similar movement pattern (the feeling of ‘trying’ to make something happen, not the wave itself), and I decided to mention it to my practitioner.

I said I couldn’t be sure, but I was aware of a feeling of ‘trying’, and also sensing a continuous movement pattern. By the end of the session, it came to my mind to describe that continuous pattern as a “broken record”, but at the time, the image I saw in my mind was of a wave breaking against a glass wall, going back and forth, back and forth. ‘Water’ can often be associated with the fluids in our body, though I wasn’t consciously thinking about that at the time. I was focused on ‘experiencing’, not ‘thinking’.

A Somatic Experiencing Practitioner is trained to look for opportunities to facilitate ‘completion’. My practitioner would have ‘picked up’– either unconsciously, by tuning into the resonance in her own body, or consciously, by paying attention to my language at a symbolic level – that the pattern I was experiencing had the flavour of ‘being unable to complete’.

I asked my practitioner if we could experiment with reducing the pressure of her touch. When a client asks for less pressure or intensity, often it is a reliable indicator to the practitioner to remove their hand completely, which mine did.

When I moved stuff out of the way, my system did it all by itself!

When my practitioner took her hand away from my belly, that was enough for my nervous system to find its way to co-regulation.

Noticing that my system was able to find co-regulation on its own felt amazing!

Even though it happened in the final ten minutes of the session, those few minutes of co-regulation helped my body connect to my deep need for restorative sleep. I had been having difficulty with my sleep routine, particularly with waking during the night and with sleeping through until morning. But that night, I slept soundly. 

How did I know I had experienced co-regulation?

Was a decent night’s sleep my only clue? Did I experience other benefits?

I was certain I had experienced co-regulation because on my way home from my session, I could sense a palpable feeling of ‘fullness’ in my body that felt like ‘love’. It was entirely different to loving another person or feeling loved by them though. It felt like I was fully immersed in the warm waters of love, cocooned in safety.

That experience of co-regulation was not my first, but our bodies are designed to have multiple experiences of co-regulation. If we did not have many experiences of co-regulation during our early, formative development, we need to create a somatic map for our body to find its way there. After that map is drawn, and the body has regular experiences of co-regulation, the body knows on a deep, visceral level that co-regulation is the healthiest (most nurturing, nourishing, and replenishing) it is possible to experience. 

Now I have a visceral knowing (you might even call it, ‘experiential wisdom’) that co-regulating with another human being is the same feeling in my body as bathing in love.

In my trauma-informed group program for healers and neuro-sensitives, I teach methods to eliminate overwhelm and rewire patterns of protection, banish procrastination and self-sabotage and metabolize trauma that's holding back neurodivergent practitioners from thriving. All set within a safe container of shamanic wisdom practices.

Expansion Training for Healers is a 10-week group program for just 12 healers and neuro-sensitives - with plenty of individual support.

Doors are now open for the next round of Expansion Training for Healers, starting Tuesday 9th May, 2023.

If you're curious how healing, expanding and training the nervous system can help you, book a co-regulation call to explore whether this trauma-informed training is for you.