Week in Review 11-4-26
Happy Saturday fellow human,
Spring is springing in the northern hemisphere; it has been lovely to absorb some real vitamin D for the first time in months. I hope you have been able to catch some light in some way, shape, or form where you are in the world :)
A little round-up from the week that was, starting with the three most shared pieces of content, once again all drawn from The Defense Cascade - What if the Body Was trying to Save You? within the Somatic Academy:
The most shared clip regarded findings from flipping the script. Instead of what we usually do, look at children, observe undesirable behaviour, loop it into labels, and then hand out the magic beans, researchers asked: What if we sent parents to therapy instead? After doing so, not only did parent stress scores go down, but there was a 2-for-1 on offer. Every 1% drop in parent stress decreased ADHD symptoms in children by 2%. A reminder, the children didn’t have to do anything. It’s this type of data that, with resilience, should inspire us. We recognise we are intelligently designed to participate in each other’s nervous systems, and children simply arrive as mirrors unto our organisation/disorganisation. If we said: thank you, they could guide us towards our highest expression. If we say: no, thank you, we continue on the merry-go-round of intergenerational trauma.
The second most shared clip was that relating to the unfortunate reality that people suffering from chronic pain conditions, in this case, fibromyalgia, report uncomfortably high levels of parentification in their youth. Incredibly also, the severity of their pain was related to their beliefs around self-silencing. What predicts our levels of self-silencing? The answer to the question: How responsible did you feel for your mother’s/father’s happiness? We remind ourselves that at that moment, we do not export our sovereignty to another person now we are an adult, we don’t look at our partners, our friends, or random strangers and ask them to listen to our grievances. Why? Because authenticity scores are gated by emotional regulation. Which is to say that emotions are a vehicle, not a destination. We commit to re-parenting/adopting ourselves, and the best way to do that, from a data-backed perspective, is to take the body to calm.
The third most shared clip related to inflammation, an area that provides an enormous opportunity for turning down the nozzle of symptom severity of basically any diagnosis we have, but in this case: ADHD, ASD and the sub-category of sensory sensitivity. While it is important to note that specific inflammatory markers related to symptom severity in both ADHD and ASD, one in particular does a lot of heavy lifting: PGE2. This, when released, tends to not only recruit a whole number of other inflammatory players, but jumps around our body priming our sensory neurons and even heads up to the area of the brain responsibile for panic attacks, lowering the threshold for when to pull the lever.
This week’s Monday meditation involved, amongst other things, reflecting on the question: what is executive function dependent on? We enter into disorganised states, we put our hand up for help, we head into the office where the lifeguard of our species sits, and we try to straighten the thought noodles that appear to be causing us distress. However, we do not ask frequently enough: what rationality am I expecting from a body in a state of irrationality?
For example, norepinephrine is heavily related to emotional distancing and the freeze response. If we open the drawers of disempowering outcomes, and that triggers more norepinephrine, we can often leave feeling worse than we came in. Mass market approaches will then slap a label on us such as: Treatment Resistant, and conclude that the only hope is magic beans. Yet, if we accidentally walked into yoga studio nextdoor, carried out some breathwork, emotional suppression and depression scores drop significantly. Why? Because norepinephrine is coupled with respiration. We aren’t treatment resistant; we were using tweezers to change a wheel instead of a wrench. It’s the tool, not the tyre.
Lastly, over to the program, Germany takes pole position two weeks into April, dankeschön.
🥇🇩🇪 🥈🇦🇺🥉 🇺🇸
I’ll leave it there for now.
As always, to your healing 💙,
Jas