Coming Home to the Body: Somatic Safety and the Wisdom of the Nervous System with Jolene Ironside

So we're just going to do a short conversation today, aren't we? And we wanted to explore the idea of the body giving voice.

And we've played with some ideas, haven't we, around this.

And where's a good place to start?

I think we'll start like what I see when clients come to us and usually it's like what we'll hear is about overthinking, anxiety or worry and a kind of story is being told in the room.

um and what we're kind of looking for what I look for when I'm listening to people is also how their body's moving and it's in those micro movements and as I'm doing that I'm gonna be pausing um the person who I'm working with just to check in what's your body doing as it's as it's telling the story and the reason we're doing that is to work out what's underneath the words and to try and help us get back in touch with that internal intuition and what the body's saying so it might be that as somebody's telling a story they're slightly a couple of millimeters moving forward or there's a bit of tension in their shoulders or in their stomach And as we're kind of pausing and checking in, we're trying to find out what is my body telling me about that situation? So tell

me, why is it that people, why do people get to a situation where they need someone to help them read their own body? How do people become so disconnected and and out of tune with the language of what their body has to say

yeah it's a good question and i believe like you know when we come into the world we are experiencing the world through our senses aren't we and then um as neurodivergent individuals we're exposed to so many environments that don't feel safe to us and we get the bodily response but we're told to ignore that actually and um and then throughout those kind of years we stop listening or those feelings can become so big and overwhelming that we disconnect from them and we stop we stop kind of tuning into what is my body telling me in this environment what I don't feel safe I don't feel comfortable here and and from that That's kind of like if we think about a lot of the school experiences that people have, they are told just to get on with things.

And then we start to learn that actually exhaustion is something that you push through.

Loud noises are something that you cope with.

And then you just start to ignore that because you're trying to go at the pace that we're told.

It's so true,

isn't

it? Yeah.

You don't have choice when you're in school, do you, to go to the toilet when you want to, to stand up if you need to stretch? You don't get to make those decisions.

And then when, you know, what could be the consequence of that for a young person when, or, you know... or just the developing human, you aren't allowed to act upon some of the messages that the body is giving you.

So it's not only about being disconnected and not tuning in at perhaps an earlier point in life when you can tune in a bit more.

Yeah.

but you can't respond, what might happen to somebody?

What I see in practices, particularly in girls, is that we then get to the self-harming part of that because we're taught to ignore, ignore, ignore what's happening to us.

So we're trying to find all these ways to cope and we're using all these different tools that we're being told to use and they're not working because we're disconnecting or we're using so many different tools to try and manage in environments that don't suit us.

until the point of why i just can't cope anymore and that might come out then in in self-harm and eating disorders um constant overthinking or just hyper vigilance then because our nervous system's never being able to to relax because we don't feel safe enough to relax

and might that dysregulation that's building up and a young person is not able to respond to it in that moment can that show up say, at home or in a different environment when they leave the school environment? Can it become displaced and sort of show up in a place where you're not expecting it to show up? Yeah,

absolutely.

We see that a lot, don't we? And, you know, the young person has spent all day using all of their energy to trying to stay still or trying you know trying to ignore their body responses and then when they get home you know out comes the the explosions or we get the other just sleeping all the time or they don't want to do the things that they used to enjoy doing because they're all their resources are going into like trying to sit still when their body needs to move um try just trying to cope and then like you say it's displaced elsewhere isn't it and And then that's kind of carried through because the internal voice is, I can't do this and I can't be in here.

And now I'm in therapy and what the therapist is telling me is not working either.