Commusings: The Power of Co-Regulation by Nicole LePera

Dear Commune Community, 

By the time I was seven, my family had moved 11 times. We lived in some marvelous places including the Lake District of Northern England, Santiago de Compostela, Spain, and all over Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. While exposure to diverse cultures presented a unique opportunity, my peripatetic youth was not without challenges. Every six months, I enrolled in a new school in a new language.

My absorbent brain sponged up the various dialects like Bounty. The transition from Galician Spanish to Portuguese was simpler for the non-conceptual child brain. I was trading in sounds, language as music, not as vocabulary lessons. And, of course, I was heaved into fluency by a force greater than anything cognitive: the innate instinct to belong.

Despite my facility with languages, I often found myself excluded from the various playground cliques. Being chubby didn’t help my cause. I was teased and tormented. Still, I’d do the bidding of the schoolyard bullies. As a rule, people – particularly kids – will sacrifice authenticity for belonging.

The trials of my childhood anchored me to a pattern of behavior. I became a people pleaser. And I carried this rucksack into my adulthood. This way of being moors one to a constant state of alertness. Because you’re always worried about what others think of you, you never feel safe and secure. You exist in a chronic state of low-grade “fight or flight” – nervous and anxious with an IV drip of cortisol pulsing through your veins.

In her book, How to Be the Love You Seek, Dr. Nicole LePera provides the following insight, among many. We tend to be aware that our psychological state impacts our physiology. We’re frightened and then our heart rate increases. But, as Nicole points out, the opposite is also true. The tyranny of trauma lingers in our fascia and triggers our mental distress. Our trauma actually changes our thoughts. And our thoughts change our behavior.

Fortunately, Nicole provides us with a map of the labyrinth. In her book, she enumerates the protocols that produce safety and security, which are the pre-requisites for healthy relationships. We are lucky to feature a selection from her new book in today’s newsletter.

Listen to my fascinating podcast interview with Dr. Nicole LePera and watch snippets of our chat on IG @jeffkrasno.

In love, include me,
Jeff

• • •

The Power of Co-Regulation by Nicole LePera

Excerpted from How to Be the Love You Seek
 

Humans are relational beings. It’s part of our evolutionary nature to relate to and connect with other people. We’re part of a complex, communal ecosystem in which we’re physically, emotionally, and neurobiologically reliant on one another. Our social brain is both dependent on and wired by other people in more ways than most of us realize. 

While social interactions include “seen” signals, like words, facial expressions, and sounds, the majority of the way we communicate with one another is through unseen signals that are electrical, biochemical, hormonal, energetic, and emotional in nature, all occurring outside our conscious awareness. Even if we’re not talking, looking, or directly interacting with someone else, our bodies constantly emit hormones, pheromones, electromagnetic energy, and neural impulses that impact each individual’s state of nervous system regulation.

If our nervous system is stuck in a stress response and our heart is emitting stressful or incoherent energy, our body will communicate stress, tension, and danger to those around us, even if the only threat is our stressed body. Whatever the cause, those around us will receive and absorb our stress signals, causing them to feel physically unsafe and possibly activating their own stress response. Then, as in a game of table tennis, we’ll keep lobbing danger signals back and forth, ratcheting up the collective stress level.

Here’s the thing: love has to feel safe in order for us to be open to receiving it. But the reality for many of us is that the only version of “love” we experienced as children did not consistently feel safe. Because trauma bonds are neurobiologically conditioned and familiar, we continue to seek safety in habitual patterns, regardless of how unsafe they continue to make us and those around us feel. With few of us ever feeling peaceful and at ease, we stay stuck in cycles of stress reactivity, often acting like cornered animals with each other, creating or escalating conflict rather than joining together in truly loving and collaborative relationships.

Co-Regulation Begins in Childhood

As infants and young children, we experienced soothing co-regulation if our parent-figures regularly smiled, gave us loving looks, used calming voices, hugged or cuddled us, and were consistently in a parasympathetic state when they interacted with us. When we became stressed or distressed and our nervous system was activated into fight, flight, or freeze or shutdown mode, our parent-figures (often unknowingly) used the safety of their own nervous system to bring ours back to a calmer, more receptive state.

Even the most well-meaning parent-figures who desperately wanted to help us weren’t able to actually soothe us unless their bodies first felt safe to them. When I was young, my mom was rarely able to soothe me because she never felt safe in her pain-ridden body. Instead, I absorbed her dysregulation and cycled through my own nervous system stress responses. Any slight discomfort would immediately throw me into fight-or-flight mode. 

Without the emotional resilience or tools to cope with this constant physical agitation, I grew up running around the house and “bouncing off the walls,” as my mom described it, trying to discharge my overwhelming energetic discomfort. Looking back, I think that my agitated energy, coupled with the lack of healthy coping tools in my family, was a big reason why I was funneled into countless after-school programs and activities, which were a socially approved, even celebrated outlet for my pent-up energy.

Embodying Compassion

Just because we didn’t experience consistently soothing co-regulation as children doesn’t mean we can’t learn to practice it as adults. To start, it’s helpful to know when our nervous system is dysregulated. If we don’t feel safe, we won’t be able to help anyone else feel safe, no matter what we do. Instead, we’ll have the opposite effect, sending them messages of stress and danger, whether through unseen signals or seen ones, like angry looks or passive-aggressive comments.

When we recognize that our nervous system is activated, we can help our loved ones feel safe by removing ourselves from their presence. If we have to or want to be around them, we can make a conscious effort to bring our nervous system back to safety by practicing self-soothing techniques: intentional breathing, grounding, and reminding ourselves that their behavior may be based in their past trauma, not present reality. 

Soothing ourselves, or finding our way back to safety, whether alone or by co-regulating with another person, is foundational to the embodiment of true compassion. Whenever we feel unsafe or threatened, we become hyper-focused on ourselves, seeing experiences only from our own perspective and as they relate to our immediate survival. As a result, we can end up acting in ways that hurt those around us. The same is true of those we love, and if we can learn to have grace and compassion for ourselves, we can extend it even to those that have hurt us. The harmful things they reactively do when they feel scared, stressed, overwhelmed, or angry don’t reflect who they truly are, either.

Compassion is an embodied response that’s dependent on nervous system regulation and safety. To feel true compassion for others and to want to support them in their suffering, we must first be able to feel or attune to their suffering. To emotionally attune to others, we have to be able to climb out of our own body’s survival state so that we can see the experience from their perspective.

Embodying safety and compassion is particularly helpful in moments of active stress or conflict. If we can stay calm and grounded within our body, we’re better able to depersonalize another’s stress reaction, understanding it as the threat-based adaptation it is. As a result, we’re less likely to scream back, force them to connect, or shake them out of it, knowing that these types of behaviors will likely only escalate their internal stress level.

Actively Co-Regulating with Others

Our ability to co-regulate with others on an ongoing basis is the foundation of emotional safety and security within our relationships. If we were modeled emotional reactivity or disconnection in childhood, we may find it difficult to remain connected to others during times of disagreement or perceived conflict. But we can develop this “felt” emotional trust over time by consistently repairing or returning to emotional safety and connection after conflict occurs. This return to a safe and secure connection is foundationally important, especially for children, who are often left confused, alone, and overwhelmed by reactive or explosive emotions, like being yelled at or given the silent treatment when a parent is upset.

While much of co-regulation happens largely through our body’s unseen signals and our own nervous system safety, we can begin to intentionally choose to actively co-regulate with others by hugging, holding hands, exchanging loving looks, or sitting close-by in shared silence. 

If you choose to co-regulate with another person, it’s important to anticipate some possible resistance, especially if they’re unfamiliar with the concept. To introduce the practice, it’s helpful to have a conversation with your loved one when they’re not actively upset, asking if they’d be willing to practice during future times of conflict or stress. 

Co-Regulation Menu

The following is a list of some more things you can do to co-regulate with a loved one during times of stress or conflict.

• Smile or send calming glances to each other
• Practice breathing slowly and deeply in sync with each other while sitting facing each other or with your backs together
• Lovingly touch or cuddle with each other
• Look or comfortably gaze into each other’s eyes
• Ask a loved one to play with your hair or calmly stroke their hair
• Hug or kiss each other while relaxing any tension in your muscles
• Go for a walk with each other, focusing on syncing your pace and movement rather than on having an active conversation

If you are alone or unable to co-regulate with another person, you can imagine a moment of connection with them, which will also increase oxytocin and feelings of safety. You can even connect with an animal’s regulated nervous system to help you find safety in your own body. Petting, brushing, or even lying next to a relaxed pet can help you achieve the same calming effects.

It is only when we understand the influence our nervous system has on those around us that we can take steps to create true safety and security within our relationships. Embodying a sense of safety enables us to better navigate conflict with others, often without saying a word, and can help us become more collaborative partners. As we reconnect with the compassion that lives in our heart, we empower ourselves to begin to break dysfunctional patterns in any of our relationships.

Dr. Nicole LePera is the author of How to Do the Work and How to Meet Your Self and is the creator of the #SelfHealers movement, a community of people joining together to take healing into their own hands. Dr. Nicole was trained in clinical psychology at Cornell University and The New School for Social Research and also studied at the Philadelphia School of Psychoanalysis. Her teachings empower the individual to break free from inherited beliefs and uncover their authentic Selves.

From the book How to Be the Love You Seek by Dr. Nicole LePera. Copyright © 2023 by Dr. Nicole LePera. Published by Harper Wave, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers. Reprinted by permission.