Do you find it hard to stay regulated?
The room may be too noisy.
Or the lights are too bright. You might notice the fabric of your clothes or a lingering smell.
You may be feeling the afternoon slump or find for whatever reason, you’re more distracted.
Staying regulated in sessions and in life is a real skill.
It takes focused practise and significant self-awareness.
Luckily, we can build this skill.
The best way I have found is to start noticing your body. Both in states of regulation and also dysregulation. After all, if we don’t know how we feel in each state, it’s hard to know what we need to add or take away.
Once you have this awareness, the next step is to start playing by adding or taking away sensations and tools. You’ll find some things work in one environment, time of the day etc but not in others. That’s ok.
Pretty soon, you will have a much better idea of what you need, to stay regulated and importantly, what dysregulates you.
This is the same for when we are working with our kiddos. We aren’t going to get it ‘right’ straight away.
We are going to need to watch them, ask questions and get curious.
& then we are going to have to play with the tools to understand how they respond. For one of my kiddos, to ground them and add more calm to their body, they just need to sit on the floor. For another kiddo though, this results in overstimulation.
We also need to understand that our nervous systems bump up against each other. This happens as soon as you are sharing space with another person either in real life or even across a zoom screen.
That’s why some people leave you feeling calm and others exhausted.
So the final step is to learn how to not only regulate yourself, and how to help others self-regulate but to then protect your regulation. To be unaffected by who you are sharing space with. Again it takes a lot of self-awareness and practise.
But when you can do this, you stop having as many bad days. You stop dreading sharing space with others. You stop worrying about the effect sessions or people are going to have on you.
It’s a super skill.
& one that with practise is well worth learning.
