The Slow Work of Feeling Suppressed Emotions
The Slow Work of Feeling Suppressed Emotions Working with emotions—especially when they’ve been buried, shut down, or hard to name—reminds me a lot of orthodontics. It’s not fast. It’s not flashy. But it’s real. You can’t force a tooth into place without risking damage. And you can’t force suppressed emotions into awareness without overwhelming the system....Learn More
The Fight Response on the Road AKA Road Rage
Welcome back to our stress responses series; what they are and how they manifest in different contexts. So far, we’ve explored the different stages of the freeze response: Freeze in a survival scenario and Freeze during social threats, and in our last blog, you survived the ultimate cage fight with Michael Myers (you’ll have to go back and read that one if you are wondering how you...Learn More
Fight or Flight? An Exploration of the Fight Response in a Horror Film
Welcome back to this series on the stress responses. Our hope is to untangle the web of confusion that has been spun surrounding these responses, and to demystify this innate human ability that we all possess and experience regularly. Our last two articles explored the freeze response—you learned how to recognize the differing stages of the freeze response in both Big T (catastrophic...Learn More
Understanding the Freeze Response During Social “Threats”
In our last blog, Stress Responses: What Are They, How Do They Work, and Why I am so Confused!?, you survived a vicious bear attack and learned how the parasympathetic nervous system kicks in when other responses fail. We explored different stages of the freeze response, and how to recognize them. You also learned some pretty cool new words, like neuroception and ventral vagal,...Learn More