Relationships, Your Neurosystem and Mindfulness

I’ve always said relationships are your greatest vehicle for personal growth and development. 

They will challenge you, excite you, and sadden you. They can make you feel high and free or stuck and afraid. They can trigger your old wounds or remind you of how deeply you feel loved or that you belong.

The complexity of your relationship experience extends beyond the person before you. It involves your own history, family of origin, past romances, traumas, and losses. It also includes any hopes, dreams, fantasies, and desires that you have created in your mind’s eye. 

It’s no wonder that as we navigate our relationships, we struggle to stay present to our current experiences. Our past is often triggered, or we get stuck on how we thought things ought to be, those dreams and fantasies we hold in our minds.

Our past influences our current experiences.

So much of our past influences our current experience. And we also get attached to ideas about the future without any room for psychological flexibility. Yet, it is only in the present that we have any influence on our experience at all. 

Of course, this doesn’t just apply to relationships. In our more difficult life experiences, we are masters of avoidance, distraction, defensiveness and attachment. Then we may wonder why our lives or relationships feel less than satisfying, stressful, empty, and overall less fulfilling than we’d hoped for. 

To live fully, you must make room for all of your relational experiences. In this month’s article, I’m going to share some neurosystemic research that can help you understand your experiences better, plus give you tools to feel your feelings and your life more fully without staying stuck in the hard stuff. 

Why Does Our Brain Do This?

Polyvagal Theory (PVT) is a modality that helps us understand the ways we move between mobilization, disconnection and engagement. It helps us see how we spend a lot of time in protection energy versus connection energy, in relationships and in life. 

Developed by Stephen Porges, PVT teaches us how to better understand our autonomic nervous system and its response patterns. PVT can help you know your internal reactions and states better so that you can learn how to respond instead of react to various life circumstances, particularly those that feel like they threaten your sense of safety and connection. 

Since you are neurologically wired to find connection and a sense of belonging, relationships present the greatest threat to your sense of safety. 

It can simply take a tone, a look, a body gesture or a snarky comment from someone else to trigger your neurosystem into protective mode. Your protective states will either mobilize you into a fight or flight response or simply shut you down altogether in what’s known as a freeze state.

While relationships present the greatest threat to safety and connection, they also provide the most powerful vehicle to bring you toward a sense of belonging and feeling loved. 

So, how do you navigate both sides of this experience, in relationships and in life? 

Start By Strengthening Your Mindfulness Skills

As a species, we need our neurosystemic responses to help us survive. Stephen Porges helps us understand that our bodies experience something called neuroception, a surveillance system, if you will, that constantly scans the environment for threats. 

Neuroception is cued by the environment and activates your body’s somatic responses. It sends those sensations send signals to your brain. The brain then tries to interpret those signals through perception and creates stories based on this information. This, in turn, influences how you behave or what you decide at a given moment. All of this can happen within nanoseconds, often unconsciously, outside of your awareness. 

So, while it’s necessary to have neuroception, your brain may create at times stories that do not accurately represent the current moment. This can create a disservice to your relationships or your life, particularly when past experiences become triggered. 

Mindfulness gives you tools to use to help you increase awareness of your internal states so that you can become more conscious of what you feel, how you feel it, and what your brain does with that information. With that awareness, you can decide how to live and respond from a conscious, intentional state of being. 

4 Steps to Bring Mindfulness to Neuroception 

Deb Dana, Ph.D., PVT practitioner and author of The Polyvagal Theory in Therapy, wrote about the “A, B, C and Ds of Neuroception”, which align well with mindfulness practices. I’ve broken down each component below:

A – Recognize that your autonomic response is constant; it’s always happening. It’s designed to help you assess threats and danger in order to survive. It also assesses safety and connection and exists as the undercurrent to all of your life experiences.

B –  Learn to bring awareness to your autonomic responses so that you can influence your own perception of your experiences. Learn how to “be with” rather than “be in” the experience from an observer stance. This helps interrupt the pattern of living on autopilot, often driven by old patterns of being.  

C – Learn to connect to yourself first with a compassionate stance. A key component to mindfulness and polyvagal theory is practicing an inner dialogue of kindness and care. You can learn how to bring safety and connection to yourself from within. 

D –  By interrupting the automatic, knee-jerk responses that you may have, you make room for developing and deepening curiosity about your patterns, reactions and beliefs. From a more regulated state, you can reconnect with yourself and others, make healthy changes and create a new story. 

Coming Home

Vulnerability sits at the core of intimate relationships; therefore, it makes sense that relationships can often trigger our sense of safety and connection. Our autonomic nervous system constantly scans faces, bodies, tones, gestures, and more for danger, as well as for belonging. 

However, if we cannot understand or regulate what’s ultimately happening within our own bodies and minds, it’s difficult to then regulate what happens in the space between ourselves and others.

Mindfulness offers us the tools to know how to come home to ourselves first, in our own bodies. It helps us strengthen attention and awareness internally and externally so that we can be with our experiences and not over-identify with any of them, good or bad. 

Learning how to live in our own bodies and minds first helps us bring higher levels of consciousness to our lives and relationships.

Ultimately, it helps us disrupt patterns of automatic responses. We then establish a positive relationship with ourselves by achieving connection and safety from within. It is only then that we can make choices and behave in ways that truly support what we actually want – safety, connection, belonging, and ultimately, love.