Welcome to the latest episode from the Lessons from the Playroom podcast. It’s been a couple episodes since it’s just been myself and you. For those of you that have been listening and following along, I hope you’ve been enjoying the guest speakers as much as I have enjoyed spending time with them and recording with them and listening to their amazing wealth of knowledge.
And today, just you and I are going to have a conversation about calm. This feels like a really important topic for us to come back around to. There is an earlier episode where I do touch in on this a little bit, but it seems to me that these days this idea of being calm and more specifically the idea that children need the adults to be calm when they are having a hard time, I just keep seeing more and more posts about it.
I keep reading more about it and when I do, there’s just this piece in me that says OOH close, but not quite. What I have been hearing over the years and what I’ve been hearing and even experiencing in my own world and with my students and all the parents that I also work with, is how confusing of a message that actually is. This idea that I have to stay calm when a child is starting to get activated.
And the part that’s confusing is that it’s really hard to pull it off. So that might feel really relevant and true for you too. It’s really hard to stay calm when a child in front of us is screaming or throwing a temper tantrum.
It’s hard to stay calm when the child is really shutting down and withdrawing or they’re doing something that feels scary in some way. Calm is a state inside that’s really hard to access. So I want to spend some time in this episode unpacking calm and more specifically unpacking regulation because that’s usually the context in which this conversation shows up in order to regulate, we got to calm down, we got to stay calm.
And again, it’s backfiring a little bit and I’m hearing more and more people begin to get some hints and clues that it’s backfiring. So I want to be a voice out there saying let’s talk about this and let’s get clear on what this actually is. So the first thing we need to do is quickly review what we know about what regulation is and isn’t in the context of our autonomic nervous system.
So let me say this really quickly. There are prior episodes where I go in more depth about the nervous system. You can check those out, specifically the four threats of the brain.
And like I said, I’ve got prior episodes on calm and what regulation is, et cetera, et cetera. But I want to review really quickly just for the context of this. So it’s important for us to understand that when we are born, we automatically know how to get dysregulated.
And what I mean by that is our systems are already knowing what to do when we perceive some kind of a threat or challenge in the environment. We already know how to rev up in a sympathetic response into a fight or flight to be able to take the challenge on. And we also automatically know how to go into a dorsal parasympathetic response where our system starts to shut down and move into withdrawal and immobilization to take the challenge on.
These are brilliant things that our system knows how to do. Nobody had to teach it to us, which is really so extraordinary. I’ll give you some examples here to really drive this home.
When you were born, nobody had to teach you how to cry. Nobody had to teach you how to scream. Nobody had to teach you how to fall asleep when things felt too overwhelming in your environment.
No one had to teach you how to arch your back and try to move away. No one had teach you how to dissociate. These were already ingrained functions that you had within you to be able to take on the perceived challenges and threats in your environment.
What was more challenging, and what is still challenging for all of us is this idea of regulating or this idea of modulating all of that, because our brains are really wired under this notion of guilty until proven innocent. So we will always err on the side of caution. So you might even think of it as we move through the world ready to take something on in case we don’t feel safe.
And something in the sense has to come on and tell us, hey, it’s okay to relax around that. It’s okay to slow down. There really isn’t danger in your environment.
So this response that I’m talking about is the ventral activation in our parasympathetic branch. And this stephen Porges talks about this in polyvagal theory. This is the newest part of the evolution of our autonomic nervous system.
And this is where when we talk about regulation, this is really the part of the nervous system that we’re talking about. How do we access ventral? You might hear people describing it as such. I want to reframe.
However, when we say, I need to access ventral because I’m experiencing dysregulation. What does that really mean? Because it doesn’t actually mean to calm down. What it means is to connect.
So I want to begin to throw this as another option or another way of thinking about calm. It’s not about calming down when we feel dysregulated. It’s about connecting to ourselves when we feel dysregulated, it’s about accessing ventral.
That could be with a breath, that could be with movement, that could be with naming our experience, that could be with asking for help, that could be with getting a glass of water. That could be so many different things, that could be taking a walk, going for a run when we start to feel activated. But this idea of accessing ventral is more about so that I can connect with myself, so that I give myself the possibility of beginning to have some governance over the dysregulation that’s happening.
As I’m saying that, I want you to begin to hear that there is this amazing part of our nervous system that allows us to be regulated and dysregulated at the exact same time it allows us to be connected to ourselves in the midst of activation. The example I just gave around taking a breath. So imagine this.
Imagine that you are having a moment where you’re feeling anxious, and then all of a sudden, you access ventral by taking a deep breath. In that moment of taking a deep breath, you’re still not calm. You’re still anxious, but you’re beginning to connect to yourself.
You’re beginning to access ventral, which is giving you access into higher centers of your brain, which is allowing you to begin to become a little bit more steady in the midst of the anxiety. It’s beginning to allow you to have a little bit more access to being able to think through what’s going on, to be able to feel a little bit more grounded, a little bit more, again, connected to yourself. In synergetic play therapy, we define regulation as a moment of connection to self, a moment of mindful awareness, a moment of secure attachment with ourself.
Now, let me put that in the context of calm, okay? So as I’m saying this again, the goal isn’t to calm down. The goal is to connect. And the reason why that distinction is so key is that we don’t go from high activation to calm.
There is a journey to get from one state to another. And when we start to prioritize calm, I’ve got to calm down. This activation is bad.
I’ve got to calm down. That’s, in a sense, what we start to say, I got to get out of this dysregulation. I got to calm down.
Hoping you can hear this in my language as I’m saying it. What it’s doing is it’s saying that one state of the nervous system is somehow better than other states of the nervous system. And it’s important to recognize that regulation is not better than Dysregulation.
Both are actually necessary. Both are necessary if we are talking about being able to integrate something. So let me add in another little piece here.
So, again, as we move through the world, we are already knowing what to do when we perceive a threat or challenge. We automatically go into a sympathetic response. We automatically go a bit dorsal.
And the thing that the part of our system that is being worked is our ability to connect to ourselves in the midst of that, our ability to begin to have governance over that at some point we may arrive into a state of calm, but not right away. And that’s why this distinction between calm and connect is so key. Because when we prioritize the calm over connect, we set ourselves up for sometimes an unattainable or unrealistic experience in the moment, which then often comes with a lot of shame, which is what I hear from parents and caregivers and what I hear from therapists.
They say things like, I couldn’t stay calm. I tried so hard to stay calm, and I couldn’t do it. The child was picking up the sand in the playroom, and I tried to stay calm, but it was so hard to stay calm.
Or the parent telling me, my kid is standing there screaming at me and I’m trying to stay calm, and I’m so worked up inside and I’m not a good parent, right? I’m not able to do it without realizing that calm was not the point in either of those. The point was connecting to the self. And here’s why.
When a child is Dysregulated, because they’re very much on this learning curve of learning how to access ventral. I mean, we all are, but hopefully as adults, we’re a little bit further ahead in our ability to do so. When the child is really Dysregulated, they have disconnected from themselves.
They’re having a hard time accessing ventral, right? They’re not connected to themselves. In a sense, what they are doing when they are Dysregulated is they are screaming out, can I please borrow someone’s ventral system? Can I please borrow your nervous system? Because when they are able to borrow our ventral state, if you will, right, the part of us that is connected in the midst of the activation, which isn’t necessarily calm, right, it’s just connected. It’s the ability to take a breath while feeling anxious.
It’s the ability to feel our bodies while we’re still feeling mad. It’s the ability to be able to breathe through or to know I need to talk out loud or I need to name an experience while I’m feeling overwhelmed or confused or frustrated that brings a sense of poised or a sense of centeredness. You might even think of it as a sense of there’s something steady happening in the midst of all that activation.
And when the child is Dysregulated, they’re trying to grab hold of that, right? They’re trying to grab hold of the thing that is steady in the midst of all of the activation. Because when they can grab hold of that thing that is steady, then what it does is it allows them to then steady internally, which gives them access into their ventral, which helps them then begin to connect with themselves. So they then begin to have a little bit more governance over the activation that’s happening inside, where maybe at some point they can arrive at calm.
So when we just say, I’ve got to be calm or the child needs a calm adult, it’s actually skipping that whole middle step and it’s expecting the adult in the moment of activation to be able to go from activation to calm, which isn’t quite what the nervous system does. I want to give another example here that I think you might be able to relate to. So I want you to even imagine right now that you are standing in front of a child who is highly dysregulated.
Let’s say that they are let’s just go with anxiety. They’re super, super anxious. Maybe it’s even moving towards high levels of panic.
Maybe they’re starting to get so worked up it almost seems like they’re going to go into a panic attack. I want you to just pause for a second and as you imagine that, I want you to notice what you start to feel in your body. And what I want you to notice is that you actually begin to become activated too.
That you’re actually not calm inside. When you are with this child who is starting to get anxious, or maybe the child who’s escalating into aggression, I want you to just check that out in your body. If you’re honest with yourself, you’ll notice you don’t actually feel calm inside.
You actually feel a bit activated or the child who’s starting to go really shut down, like really, really shut down. Notice there’s some activation that happens inside of you. So because we are human beings and we are designed to attune to each other, we attune to each other’s dysregulated states, which is why it is nearly impossible, I’m going to say that again, it is nearly impossible to be calm inside when someone is dysregulated in front of you because you’re designed to feel their dysregulation.
So what’s often happening is that when we hear these messages that say you need to stay calm again, which is different than connect yourself in the midst of your activation so you don’t lose yourself, what happens is that you see a lot of parents and play therapists who attempt to look calm on the outside, even though inside they’re really, really dysregulated. And in the attempt to look calm on the outside, what it does is it sets up an incongruence for the child because the child is reading the adult’s nonverbal cues. And so now all of a sudden, this adult is pretending or trying to look calm inside.
They don’t feel calm, and the body doesn’t lie. So the body is actually giving cues and clues that actually what’s going on inside is not actually a state of calm. And the child sees the incongruence in the adult, which has the possibility of then landing as another challenge in the child’s brain because the brain is scanning in the environment for incongruence in order to determine whether or not there’s safety in the environment.
So I’ll take a breath. Can you feel the conundrum here? When the emphasis on, oh, my goodness, we need to be calm, or this child needs a calm adult when the child is dysregulated, if we don’t understand what we’re saying or we don’t understand what that really means or what we’re trying to say, really, because it’s not stay calm, it’s stay connected to yourself. We actually can set up incongruence in the environment for the child.
And not only does that potentially land as a challenge for the child, but for the adult now they’re also incongruent because they’re not being honest about what’s actually happening inside. So I wish that we could all take this word calm and just put it in the drawer for a while, not forever, because calm is an important state of the nervous system. It’s just as important as all the other ones, but just for a little while because we’ve become overly attached to the word.
And my invitation is to replace that with the word connect. So rather than when the child is starting to get activated and you start to feel yourself getting worked up, rather than saying, oh, my gosh. Just stay calm, just stay calm, just stay calm.
What would it be like instead if you said, okay, I’m feeling this, I’m feeling activated. I’m feeling starting to get ungrounded. I’m beginning to lose myself.
So what do I need to do to connect with myself in this moment? How do I begin to create something inside of me that’s a little bit more steady? I can still feel angry. I can still feel anxious. I can still feel overwhelmed.
And in fact, it’s important for attunement that we allow ourself still to stay connected to the resonance of what’s going on with the child. But how do I access my ventral in the midst of it so that I don’t emotionally flood, so that I don’t then lose myself? Because when I can find something in me, when I can connect to me with that breath or that movement or whatever it is that I do, then the child then can feel me, feel something in me that’s a little bit more steady, which begins to steady them so they can then access their ventral, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. So what if we replace our own calm down to ourselves with connect to ourselves? And then what if we did the same thing to the children that we work with? When the child in front of us is starting to get activated and dysregulated.
And then we have this impulse to get them to calm down. Because, by the way, the impulse to help a kid calm down has very little to do with the child and everything to do with us. And our inability in the moment to access ventral, we don’t know how to stay connected to ourselves.
And so the brain defaults to a thought that says, oh, my gosh, this feels so uncomfortable inside of myself. So if I can just get the kid to calm down, then I don’t have to feel this activation inside of me. So rather than I need to get this kid to calm down or how do I help calm this kid, what if the new language is how do I help this child connect to themselves? How do I help this child access their ventral in the midst of all that activation, not for the purpose of calming, but for the purpose of them learning that it’s okay to have those different emotional states, learning that it’s okay, that they don’t need to run away from their anxiety.
They don’t need to run away from their sadness. They don’t need to run away from it because none of those states are inherently bad, right? Calm is not better than mad. Calm is not better than anxious.
It’s all information. Each one of the states of activation in our nervous system serves a purpose. It’s information.
I’m going to define emotional intelligence as the ability to connect to yourself in the midst of whatever activation is going on. How do I connect to myself in joy? How do I connect to myself in sorrow? How do I connect to myself in anxiety? How do I connect to myself in confusion and overwhelm and anger? How do I connect to myself? Because when I learn how to connect to myself rather than expecting myself to calm down, which we’ve established already is a pretty hard task, I learn some really key things. I learn, number one, that I’m okay.
In the midst of my experiences, I learned that I don’t have to run away from myself. I learn that even when things feel challenging in my system, I can still move towards that intensity, which allows me to expand my window of tolerance. It actually allows me to engage in life at a deeper level because I get to experience a wider range of the fullness of emotional activity of life, which allows me to feel more alive, more connected with life itself, more connected in my own body and my own being, everyone.
That is what we are up to with kids. It’s not about calming kids. It’s not about calming ourselves.
So the next time you read or you hear something that says a child needs a calm adult when they’re having a hard time or they’re dysregulated, I want you to pause for a second and I want you to understand that what a child really needs is not a calm adult. Needs an adult that is able to connect to ventral, that is able to connect to themselves, that’s able to be honest about their internal experience, not need to run away from it, not need to change it, not need to make it become calm, but knows how to be in it without losing themselves. That’s what a child ultimately needs, not the adult to pretend like they’re calm when inside they’re actually having a really challenging time.
Listeners, I hope that was interesting. I hope that’s got you thinking. Please feel free to email, share comments.
Let me know how this conversation lands for you. If what I just said has caught your attention and you want to know more, this is very much one of the things that I teach and train in synergetic Play Therapy. I invite you to explore Synergetic play therapy.
I invite you to check out our online Intro to Synergetic Play Therapy courses they run three times a year. It’s a great way to begin to understand in more depth what this discussion that I just had looks like from a clinical perspective. So everyone, be yourselves.
Be yourselves. Feel the activation. Connect to yourself in your activation.
Give yourself a moment of secure attachment with yourself as you learn through trial and error, over and over and over again, that there is not a state inside of you that is bad, that is not worthy of love, and that ultimately, that you have to run away from. Be well, listeners. Remember, you are the most important toy in that playroom.
