Self regulation therapy (SRT) is a mind-body therapy based on over 40 years of research into how stressful life experiences and trauma change the way the brain functions, leading to adverse effects on mental and emotional wellbeing, behavior and physical health.
What is self regulation?
Our nervous systems are designed to shift fluidly between a baseline state of relaxed wellbeing and various states of emotional and physiological arousal (fight, flight and freeze) which allow us to respond to life’s stresses and challenges. Our ability to do this is referred to as self regulation.
This baseline state of relaxed wellbeing is not only enjoyable to experience, it supports bodily processes associated with self healing and optimal functioning. It also shifts our orientation from one of defensiveness to one of availability for connection with others. Fight, flight and freeze on the other hand, are distressing to experience. While they optimize our ability for self protection, they reduce our capacity for healing, disrupt many of the body’s regulatory functions and impair our capacity for connection with others.
In a well regulated nervous system the shift back from arousal to relaxed wellbeing happens easefully and naturally once the threat has passed. We sometimes see healthy self regulation at work in young children who burst into tears or a fit of anger over a conflict with a playmate in one moment only to be happy, relaxed and playing again just a few minutes later. One has the sense that there is no lingering effect from the upset. Indeed, a few moments later it often seems as if a conflict had never occurred at all.
Stress, conflict and experiences of danger are a normal part of life and generally we can handle them without any lasting negative impact. There are times, however, when a stress or threat is so intense, or the circumstances leave us feeling powerless to protect ourselves or meet our needs in the face of what is happening. Experiences such as these can leave an imprint that affects how our nervous system perceives the world and responds to life events moving forward. The accumulation of these types of experiences over time often leads to a loss of resilience and a nervous system that is more and more fixated in states of fight, flight or freeze, which impaires its ability to self regulate.
Here’s an example of how this works:
A man, let’s call him Allan, is walking along the street one day when he is approached by someone in a red plaid shirt who pulls out a gun and demands that he hand over his wallet and valuables. Allan is, of course, filled with fear at the sight of a gun pointing at him and, not seeing any other option, complies with the assailant’s demands. He is unhurt, but is deeply affected by the incident. Six months later Allan is walking down a different street and passes a clothing store that has a mannequin with a red plaid shirt on it in the window. Suddenly Allan begins to feel anxious, his palms start to sweat and he feels compelled to walk faster. He may not even be consciously aware of the red plaid shirt in the window, or of its association with his experience six months earlier. Regardless of this, however, his nervous system has associated red plaid shirts with danger and responds accordingly.
This shift within the brain can obviously occur during life threatening events, such as the example above, but it can also occur due to emotional or symbolic threat or loss, such as betrayal by a trusted friend, the loss of financial security or an emotionally abusive or distant parent. The accumulation of changes to the nervous system brought on by such experiences leads to increasing psycho-emotional and physiological dysregulation. In other words, the nervous system becomes more fixed in survival functioning (fight, flight or freeze) and has an increasingly difficult time returning to a well regulated state and the emotional and physical wellbeing associated with it.
The more we have been impacted by stressful or traumatic events, the more our nervous systems become conditioned to respond according to mostly unconscious directives laid down during those events. When these conditioned responses become activated during future events they are often out of sync with what is actually occurring in the moment. For example, most of us have experienced getting extremely angry at something that in hindsight was really a minor offense. We may have wondered later why we responded so strongly. The answer lies in primitive centers within the brain which are continuously looking for associations between current experiences and past experiences.
The influence of past experience can be powerful. I met a woman once who had a deathly fear of pigeons. She had been this way for as long as she could remember and had no recollection of where this fear came from. She knew intellectually that pigeons couldn’t really hurt her but as hard as she tried she could not go anywhere where pigeons were congregated. If she wanted to go to a particular restaurant and there were pigeons outside on the sidewalk she simply could not make herself approach the restaurant.
The brain’s survival centers are deeply interconnected with other centers within the brain that regulate emotion and physical health. Because of this, dysregulation of survival circuitry has wide-ranging effects on both mental and physical health and wellbeing. Some of these effects include panic attacks, anxiety, depression, obsessive compulsive behavior, bipolar cycling, low self esteem, difficulty with relationships, chronic muscle tension and pain, hormonal and immune imbalances, digestive problems, hypertension, chronic headaches, fatigue and insomnia. Our mental and emotional wellbeing is intimately linked to our physical wellbeing.
How Self Regulation Therapy Works
Dysregulation in the nervous system leads to patterns of muscle tension, hormonal imbalances and disruption to the functioning of organs, such as the heart and digestive system. We experience these imbalances as tension and other forms of discomfort and dis-ease in the body. The more optimal function generated by a well regulated nervous system, on the other hand, results in improved muscle tone and bodily function which we experience as increased comfort and wellbeing in the body. Because of this, feelings and bodily sensations provide an ideal window into identifying and resolving stress and dysregulation within the nervous system.
Dysregulation results from experiences that generate intense feelings and overwhelm that the nervous system is not able to process and integrate. For healing to occur, conditions need to be present that allow the nervous system to process and integrate those experiences, in essence, to become “unstuck”.
SRT accomplishes this by assisting patients in accessing and maintaining a direct, bodily felt sense of safety and wellbeing while processing and integrating stressful experiences in manageable doses, at the patient’s own pace and within their comfort zone. This allows the nervous system to reestablish resilience and a feeling of safety. The process also facilitates the release of chronically held emotional and physiological stress and allows the nervous system and, therefore, the mind and body to function in a more dynamic and optimal way. Ultimately, this process leads to an increased experience of mental, emotional and physical wellbeing and often, an improvement in physical symptoms.
About Dr. Sandro and SRT
SRT was developed by Canadian psychologists Lynn Zettl and Ed Josephs who founded and led the Canadian Foundation For Trauma Research and Eduction in Vancouver and Kelowna, BC. The therapy is an outcome of their years of study and clinical application of a variety of somatically based trauma therapies combined with their desire to ground somatic therapy in the evolving body of scientific research on the neuroanatomy and neurophysiology of the brain. The result is a therapy which closely follows the natural mechanisms of the nervous system in responding to and recovering from stress and trauma.
When I was introduced to SRT in 2007 I had been practicing naturopathic medicine for about 5 years and was increasingly impressed with the degree to which the mind and body are interconnected. I immediately knew that it was something that was going to be very important to my practice. For two years in 2007 and 2008 I regularly travelled to Vancouver to study with Drs. Zettl and Josephs and began applying the therapy with my patients which I continue to do to this day. Since then my appreciation for the importance of the brain in all aspects of health and dis-ease, both emotional and physical, has only grown. I continue to study and deepen my understanding of it both theoretically and therapeutically.