This is the month the kids head back to school. The weather outside is cooler and the days are shorter. And some of us get Seasonal Affective Disorder or SAD. It is also National Suicide Prevention Month. Dr. Nicole Ferguson joined us with some great soothing advice.
Dr. Nicole says, “I tell people depression is not who you are, it is what you are dealing with, and you are stronger than what you are dealing with. So, whenever we can acknowledge something, we can tackle it and so that has always been my motto.”
How do we tackle when we acknowledge it? Dr. Nicole shares that art of it is sematic experiencing and that’s a type of therapy that uses our natural physiological responses to tackle stress, trauma, grief. It was designed by Dr. Peter Levine, a renowned psychologist and he discovered that creatures of nature do not have traumatic experiences the same way that humans do. Dr. Nicole says, “They basically discover they are in a dangerous situation. They assess their environment to see if it is dangerous. If it is dangerous then they will respond accordingly, and if not, they will brush it off and move on with their life.”
Dr. Nicole says we as humans have the ability to analyze and evaluate the traumatic situation and we end up halting our body’s natural response. We tend to think of the would of, could of, should of’s, we think, did I handle this traumatic situation properly and we go back and replay that trauma and our body doesn’t know if it that trauma is real or imagined. For example, Dr. Nicole says, “If you are in a nightmare and you feel yourself falling, you’re really not there physically but your mind thinks your are and your body responds accordingly. So, the same things happen with trauma. We replay it in our minds as memories and our body triggers our response, our natural stress response to handle “that trauma” but it is actually the trauma we are replaying as a scenario. So basically, what we should do is see that as a natural process to the healing journey and try and do techniques that are self-soothing to the nervous system to let our brain know that we are indeed safe, and we can proceed such as animals in the wild do.”
One of the techniques you can do is the 5-4-3-2-1 method so you are looking for five things you can see, four things that you can feel, three things can hear, two things that you can smell and one thing you can remember tasting and that is a distracting way to calm your body down, you are engaging your senses and just telling your brain that your body is safe. Dr. Nicoles says she also works with children and one of the things she tells them is to become more aware of your body’s natural responses to whatever emotion you are feeling and that way you are able to tackle it. For example, she says don’t say you are sad, try to describe the sadness, what is going on in your body, is your chest tightening, does your body feel heavy, that way when they incorporate these techniques we can feel that physiological change and once we feel the physiological change we use these techniques to sooth our nervous system. Dr. Nicole says, “What most people don’t realize is that our body registers emotion before our brain does, so our body goes through this physiological change and then it tells our brain the word we put in the English language to describe that sensation.”
Dr. Nicole Ferguson is the author of Unstoppable Joy.
For more information visit unstoppablejoybook.com
