I was lost in November and December. I felt stuck. That familiar feeling of apathy was slowly returning, and I kept trying to logically understand why. I could not make sense of how a person can go from so balanced and content to so depressed and low in such a short period of time. I needed a logical explanation for the drop in my mood and it took me 2 months to find one. My nervous system was dysregulated and in a dorsal vagal shutdown state.
In early September, shortly after returning from Bali, I was feeling so empowered, balanced. Free. Content. Joyful. An abundance of positive emotions. Shortly after my return from 2 soulful weeks in Indonesia; I returned to a university campus as a student for the first time in almost 2 decades.
The nerve-wracking commute amongst terrible drivers, would bring me to my new campus in Hyde Park at the University of Chicago. The start of a new chapter as a graduate student, embarking on a 2-year graduate program to get my Master of Social Work.
My body slowly began feeling dysregulated during the week of orientation, before class even began. As the weeks moved on; I stopped sleeping through the night. I only had issues with sleep when I first moved back to Chicago from Taos 2 years ago. My stomach was in knots and in one of my classes, my voice shook when I spoke. The fear of being in the presence of this professor started kicking in when I was doing my weekly writings the weekend before our Monday class. I would be dysregulated during class Monday, and it would typically take me 24 hours post class to recalibrate. I was not alone in having a physical response to this professor.
Administrative disorganization was rampant, the curriculum was underwhelming, field placements were a joke and non-existent for most students the 1 month I was in school. Though there is an expected number of hours required in field to become licensed as a social worker.
I was one of the few that did have a placement, at a state hospital in Chicago on one of their psychiatric wards. I attended 2 days of that field placement before I became one of the few students to have an exception made and have my field placement modified quickly to a new placement. I knew I would not only not learn in the hospital environment I was originally assigned to, and that my supervisor would dim my light however he could, but that I would instead have to be witness to and act in ways that felt unethical and immoral.
I could feel my eyes become hollow, lifeless, lightless, when I rode the hospital elevator up to report to my supervisor. I was witnessing myself dissociate. Having a boss with a superiority complex who was mistreating patients and treated me in a demeaning manner is not something I tolerate.
The price tag for university admission was exorbitant and I quickly saw there would be no return on investment just to have letters behind my name. It would come at the cost of my well-being and health. Maintaining my health has become my number 1 priority this last decade.
I listened to my bodily sensations building over the weeks. In my near decade of doing healing work, it is only more recently I have really leaned into understanding the impact our nervous system, our bodies, have in communicating when something is not aligned.
After reviewing financial policies, I realized it was time to withdraw from school to receive a prorated refund on my first quarter of tuition. It was one of the wisest decisions I ever made, and I am so proud of listening to my intuition and what my body was telling me.
I attended the one elective class I thoroughly enjoyed, the day after I withdrew from the program. I wanted to share my decision to withdraw with those students and that professor. The only course that was an elective and mine to chose. A course on self-awareness that had an inspirational, interactive approach to teaching and learning.
At the end of my final class a month in as a graduate student, there was a bald eagle in the tree outside of our classroom. Several of us admired the bald eagle and this beautiful interplay it had with a squirrel in the tree, for several minutes.
Bald eagles are a sign of vision, power and freedom. They represent a strong spiritual sense and connection to the divine. That was a beautiful way to end my stint at graduate school.
The following week after my withdrawal was not easy. I felt a mixture of negative emotions; feelings of discomfort, self-doubt, ambiguity. I wondered if my inability to commit to and see things through reflected my lack of worth. I had anger that even universities operate like well-oiled corporations. There was fear of what to do next with my life, now that my plan for the next 2 years was no more.
After a week, I recalibrated and felt ready to move forward.
And then US election day came along. The new fear of America’s future reality was visceral. The world felt unsafe. Divisive. Angry.
I realized later, that as I would leash Piper up for a walk that first week after the election, I would literally tell her, “the world is not safe right now, we have to go on a quick walk”. People did not make eye contact with one another that first week in my neighborhood. It was like everyone existed in their own silo as a form of self-protection.
As the weeks moved forward, my mood tanked. I isolated more than I typically do. I felt like I moved, thought, and talked slower. I lost curiosity and interest in things. I could not cultivate joy no matter how hard I tried.
I was cognitively trying to make sense of this spiraling space I was in. As someone who has a very robust toolbox, I could not understand how I could possibly be falling into what would be considered my 3rd depressive episode. There was no clear trigger that I could make sense of, like there had been the 2 times previous.
How I could go from this beautifully empowered, uplifted, radiant space to total despair in just a few months time?
And now I know how.
Nervous system regulation and understanding is vital in understanding how to heal mental and physical symptoms and ailments. Our nervous system is millions of years old and is pre-verbal. It does not respond to cognitive or verbal interpretations of our situation. It responds to internal, physical, stress states that our body is experiencing.
The only intention for our nervous system, is our safe survival.
Which if you think about it, is beautiful. That said, it is working off a historical database of every single event we have ever experienced. These experiences are stored in our fascia and our muscles and are automatically referenced to assess the impact of maintaining our safety, or survival.
Every millisecond, our nervous system is scanning for danger, assessing risk factors, and responding as it deems appropriate, to keep us alive!
We all have varying windows of tolerance within our nervous system. We have the capacity to expand this window of tolerance through intentional somatic practices and having more repeated exposure to fluctuating through our different nervous system states and returning to a balanced, ventral state. The more we live in a ventral state; the more safety is integrated into our nervous system as our baseline.
My nervous system had fallen into a state of dorsal vagal shutdown in early November. I had primarily embodied a ventral space for a long stretch; balanced, content, joyful. When school began in September, I began to move into a parasympathetic mode. I was more activated, more on guard, more anxious, muscles were tight and restricted, and my back pain returned. My mood was fluctuating and unbalanced.
I began to recalibrate and move out of a parasympathetic mode after an intentional week of slowing down and processing, but then the election happened. This reactivated my body when it was scanning for safety and was already weekend after 5 weeks of dysregulation. The visceral fear and concerns of societal safety reinforced my nervous systems historical data base and activated survival fear in my body. This knocked me straight into a dorsal vagal shutdown. During shutdown, many symptoms mimic depression. Apathy. Hopelessness. Immobility. My nervous system was in dorsal shutdown to keep me safe; it was not that I was becoming depressed.
My societal fear is not gone, but I have learned new tools that have opened my eyes to how much we must learn about healing. How healing modalities are free and accessible to everyone, if people had the education and awareness to understand. My robust healing toolbox keeps expanding as I keep trying to understand the interconnection of mind, body and spirit in terms of health and wellness.
