What Does It Mean To ‘Heal’? {EP 172}

Robyn: Kind of on the flip side, it can also lead us down this idea of working towards critical healing, it can also lead us down a path of, I mean, essentially trying to manipulate someone else. Or like if we feel like healing is some externally defined goal. And that it's this like destination. And this thing we should all be working toward. I mean, in some ways, it's almost inevitable not to start to kind of fall into this path of manipulation, whether that be of ourselves or of other people. So when I use that word, I'm not using it critically. I know so often, we use the word manipulation, and it kind of like ruffles our feathers, nobody wants to think about being manipulated or manipulating someone else. I don't mean it like that. I just mean, like, if that's our goal, we're gonna start to really focus on these, not well-defined, external factors. As opposed to kind of staying focused on what does that even mean? Like, what does healing even mean? And why? Why are we working toward it? So a really fast Google search defines healing as the process of making, or becoming sound, or healthy again, or to make free from injury or disease, heal a wound, to make well again, okay. So generally speaking, when I'm talking to folks and the word healing gets used, what folks are referring to is strengthening that stress response system, widening up that window of tolerance, decreasing traumatic symptoms, and or intense emotion dysregulation that is really negatively impacting someone and/or their relationships.    

Robyn: If we really try to simplify these ideas, when folks say healing, what they often are wanting, again, is to like widen our window of stress tolerance. So that stress- because life is stressful, causes less dysregulation. That we want to widen our window of stress tolerance so that we can experience It's something uncomfortable- stressors, while staying present and mindful. And if you pause and thought about it for just a moment, like, think about the challenges in your own personal life, or if you want to even use the word symptoms, it depends on what you're you're familiar with or comfortable with. And think about that in regards to your kids, or to your partner, or just people you know, right? And if you wanted to think about the word healing, typically, what you're thinking about is how do we just decrease dysregulation? Right? And then typically, what that means is how do we increase our capacity to stay present and mindful while being uncomfortable, right? Like if I think about the last time there was, you know, a situation at my house that would indicate that there are still some steps to take towards quote-unquote, healing, you know, the situation that comes to mind is, yeah, that person needed a wider window of stress tolerance, so that stress can be experienced while causing less dysregulation, right? That we can be stressed- we're not trying to eliminate stress, but that we can be stressed and or uncomfortable, while staying present, and mindful.    

Robyn: So that's one way to look at this idea of, quote-unquote, healing. The other way to look at this idea of healing is to think about the actual mechanism of change that is required to change or shift, how traumatic memories are both stored, and retrieved. Now, I'm not gonna dive very far into that topic. It's dense, it's convoluted, it's more than what we need on this podcast. But the mechanism of change that allows for traumatic memory to be reconsolidated. And that's essentially what we're aiming for- reconsolidate traumatic memory, it's really only possible when an individual's window of stress tolerance is wide enough that the traumatic memory can be, kind of, triggered, or activated, or awakened, or accessed while the individual also stays mindful and present. That doesn't mean calm. That doesn't mean happy. Traumatic memories contain grief, and sadness, and anger, and all sorts of negative emotions- quote-unquote, negative emotions, but there is a space where we can allow those memories to be activated or come alive, and we can do so without being overcome by them. And then, in that moment, the mechanism of change- of how traumatic memories are stored and retrieved, the mechanism of change is possible. Okay. Now, in order for that to happen, we have to have a pretty wide window of tolerance, right? If we want to, like kind of awaken or, you know, look at a traumatic memory or traumatic experience while staying regulated. Right? That means having a relatively wide window of tolerance. So whatever way you look at it, what people mean when they say, quote-unquote, healing is widening the window of stress tolerance, strengthening the stress response system. So the stressor is either able to be regulated through or the nervous system can return from, or shift from regulation to dysregulation back to regulation, with relative ease. Okay?    

Robyn: So that's what people typically mean when they say healing. And hopefully, it's really clear that healing isn't a destination, right? Like, that's a sound cliche, but this is a journey, not a destination, we don't achieve healing. We don't, you know, get to that place and check it off and say, Yay, cool, done with that. Right. widening and strengthening the stress response system is really a, kind of, never-ending journey, and experience and even if we start to talk about like the mechanism of memory reconsolidation, there's some evidence to suggest that as we reach new developmental milestones, which of course our kids are doing regularly, memory is kind of, metaphorically- means something different, right? It shifts and changes as different developmental tasks are achieved. And so there's new opportunity even to, kind of, revisit traumatic memory as new developmental milestones are visited. Now you've seen this, if you've been parenting a child with a history of trauma for any length of time, that what the traumatic memory means to them at age five is different than age eight, and 12 and 16, and 22, and 45, right? Like we all go through developing new relationships with our past experiences. That's completely normal.    

Robyn: Okay, so with all of that in mind, what do we do then? To support healing? Okay, how does healing happen? What we're really asking is, essentially, not exclusively, but essentially we're saying, how do we widen the window of stress tolerance? And if you've read Raising Kids With Big Baffling Behaviors, or you're in the club, you know, that widening the window of tolerance is all about growing the Owl brain, right? So how do we do that? Well, first, we think about growing the Owl brain by offering felt safety, and by offering connection, and by offering co-regulation. Now I know we, kind of, keep always coming back to the same ideas, right? Healing, the window of tolerance, growing the Owl brain, regulation, connection, and felt safety. And the reason that I keep recording all these different episodes in which we look at the same things, but from different angles, is because that's just how, like, that's just how real life works, right? That there's all these ideas and curiosities and situations that arise, and we can look at those and see how do they fit in with the framework that we already have? Okay. So healing mostly means widening the window of tolerance, we widen the window of tolerance by growing the Owl brain. And we grow the Owl brain, by parenting with regulation, connection, and fell safety- or being with others with regulation, connection and felt safety. So when your Watchdog brain or your Possum brain starts to take over, and you start to feel overwhelmed, or helpless, or hopeless, and you don't know what to do to support healing, you can take a breath. And remind yourself that actually, you absolutely do. Because you are now steeped in the ideas of co-regulation and connection and felt safety.    

Robyn: Whether we're talking about parenting, or we're talking about therapy, folks- people, children, adults, humans, can only begin to rely on their capacity for self-regulation, once they've had a really solid foundation of co-regulation. So what does co-regulation mean? What does that look like? Now I do have a podcast all about what co-regulation really looks like. Because co-regulation is something that gets talked about a lot without pausing to really- kind of like the word healing without pausing to really be like, what does that actually mean? And then the concept of co-regulation and regulation, and ultimately self-regulation, that gets a little muddy and murky, because we've lost connection to what that actually really means. Okay, so, co-regulation can absolutely look like this very active experience of soothing somebody who's dysregulated and again, you can head back to the podcast episode I have all about what is co-regulation really look like? It's episode 81. It's also an episode in the Start Here podcast that you can find it robyngobbel.com/starthere. And there's also an infographic that you can go grab and download at robyngobbel.com/coregulationinfographic.    

Robyn: So there's this very like, kind of, active way of offering co-regulation which essentially looks like soothing and then there's these other ways that co-regulation looks, which can look like attunement, which can look like matching the energy but not the dysregulation, which can look like validating our kids or each other, even if what we're validating seems totally irrational, right? Co-regulation can look like scaffolding and helping our kids really thoughtfully and deliberately have what they need to develop a skill, and then kind of slowly and sequentially decreasing the supports that we have in place, decreasing the scaffolding, as they become more and more independent, that's actually a form of co-regulation. A former co-regulation I talk about a lot is the idea of decreasing the distance. Like when I look at a child who's struggling in a situation, the number one thing I think about is where's the closest regulated adult, because not always, but a lot of times kids are struggling in situations where they aren't in close proximity to a regulated adult and or that regulated adult is responsible for a lot of children. So think about like, recess, for example. Or even just being at school, right? Like it's 20 kids and one teacher and maybe an assistant. And so, one way of offering co-regulation is to decrease the distance between the child and the regulated adult. Now I have podcast episodes. I think on all of these things, I definitely have a podcast episode of matching the energy but not the dysregulation. I definitely have a podcast episode on scaffolding, I'll make sure those get put in the shownotes. I talk all about attunement, validating immunity, irrational scaffolding, decreasing the distance, all those kinds of things in Raising Kids With Big Baffling Behaviors.    

Robyn: My point in this moment isn't to like rehash the things that I've dedicated whole episodes to or even whole chapters in my book to my point is to show that these things are all related, that healing, widening the window of tolerance comes from these experiences that you have been introduced to, that you do know about. We're not talking about something new here. Okay, this all starts to kind of come back and come from the same place, which I find very hopeful, that decreases my overwhelm. Because I can get kind of lost in the weeds. I mean, even as a therapist, I can maybe be looking at some treatment planning- when I was a therapist, and I was, you know, thinking about treatment planning or thinking about how to help this specific client, who maybe had some presentation or some symptoms that wasn't typical, or, you know, looks a little different than a lot of my other clients. And that could start to make me go down the Watchdog pathway, I could start to get kind of overwhelmed like, oh my gosh, how do I help this person? I don't have the skills I don't have, I need to go do a new training. Right? That's what therapists always are thinking, oh, I need to go take a new training. And maybe, right? Like maybe we do need to add some tools to our toolbox. Just like parenting, maybe we do need to add some tools to our toolbox. But also maybe what we need to do is calm our own dysregulation, shift back into our Owl brain and realize wait, wait, wait. Healing is about increasing the window of stress tolerance. Healing is about regulation, connection. and felt safety. Oh, I already have a lot of ways I know how to offer co-regulation. I already have a lot of ways to offer felt safety. Like I've done an entire podcast series all about felt safety, it was three full episodes. It's like an hour and a half or more of talking all about felt safety. Because feel safety has these three places that it comes from right? Felt safety comes from an internally from our own inner world. Felt safety comes from the environment, and felt safety comes from our relational experiences. So I have a podcast episode dedicated to each of those. Alright, theres a felt safety series. That starts at episode 161. So it's 161, 162 and 163.    

Robyn: And I actually did just create an infographic for it. I know y'all are loving these, like quick downloadable infographics. I'm honestly not sure if at the time of the airing of this podcast if that infographic is going to be like live and available for download. But if it's not, it will be soon and it's just that robyngobbel.com/feltsafetyinfographic. So again, if it's not there today, it'll be there soon. I'd have to go look at the calendar and I'm just not going to pause to do that right now.    

Robyn: Again, my point is, we start to talk about this nebulous concept of healing. And we started to think, oh, my gosh, I don't know how to do that. Yes, we do. Because we know about parenting with co-regulation and felt safety, and connection. To widen the window of stress tolerance, we were going to create more space between the stressor and the response, we're going to create an experience, hopefully, where we can tolerate more stress, without quote-unquote, freaking out. This does not mean we never get grumpy. This does not mean we never get disappointed. This does not mean our kids are never grumpy, or disappointed or in a bad mood or upset with us. Right? That doesn't mean that at all. This means that slowly over time, the stressor, like, 'I'm sorry, you can't go down the street right now and play with your friends because it's time for bath time' Right? It means that over time, the stressor, being told no, not getting to do what you want to do, which is indeed a stressor, starts to become what we would call it more congruent, it matches the stress response. And so a stress response that matches, 'I can't go down the street and play with my friends because it's time for bath and bedtime' might be some grumbling, might be some complaining, it might even be a little stomping around. Right, an expression of disappointment and frustration, that would be congruent, it's normal to have an expression of unhappiness when we don't get what we want. Right? That's congruent. So that's what we're aiming for. Really widening that window of stress tolerance, so that the stress response system can navigate that stressor and move from regulated to dysregulated to back to regulated, okay.    

Robyn: Okay, now let's look at something a little bit different. Sometimes when the world- I'm sorry, sometimes when the word healing is used, we're referring to the shifting and reorganizing of traumatic memory. Now, I really get that most of you aren't thinking about the shifting and reorganizing of traumatic memory, especially if you're not a trauma therapist. But when we're thinking about the word healing, and what that really means to heal from a traumatic experience, that is what some of us are thinking about, without knowing that that's what we're thinking about, which is to shift to reorganize the traumatic memory. And it's actually really not an oversimplification to say that traumatic symptoms are all related, or at least, almost all, related to traumatic memory- memory, is everything. Now, I'm not going to rehash memory right now, just like I didn't rehash scaffolding, really, or co-regulation or felt safety, because I have resources for memory. In fact, with memory, I have a couple of resources. I have a podcast series about memory, and I have a video. And I have a little ebook all about memory, and traumatic memory, it is possible to shift, and what we would say to reconsolidate traumatic memory networks. That's a thing that can happen. And that is certainly one aspect of healing. But most quote-unquote healing is actually widening the window of tolerance. And widening the window tolerance is actually required for shifting memory networks. So it actually makes perfect sense, to focus mostly on widening that window of tolerance when we're thinking about healing.    

Robyn: Now, healing from traumatic experiences doesn't mean that the memory or the experience no longer has any kind of impact. Having traumatic experiences is going to have an impact. It impacts who we are. And we're going to have an experience when we think about those memories. Right? Healing means that we don't become flooded by that traumatic memory. Healing means that I can have that memory and experience it as having a memory, as opposed to experiencing it as like happening again in the here and now, which is what happens when traumatic memory isn't kind of, let's just say stored correctly. Okay? So healing does not mean that the memory or the experience doesn't have an impact. Underneath all trauma work is grief work, we are going to have grief. Where there is trauma, there is grief and grief work is never over. Okay, grief doesn't go away. Grief doesn't disappear. Grief, eventually becomes this experience that shifts and ebbs and flows. And sometimes it's big. And sometimes it's small. And sometimes it's kind of like taking over everything, and sometimes it's just accompanying us in life. So I don't want to give the impression that healing means there's no impact, or that we could ever be done healing or that healing would mean we no longer have grief about the trauma that was experienced, that's not true at all, we're going to have grief. And like I said earlier, grief gets kind of revisited at different developmental stages. Traumas mean something different at different developmental stages, our kids experiences are always going to impact them.    

Robyn: It doesn't always have to impact traumatic symptoms, it might, I can't be in control of, you know, when and how traumatic memories integrate, and when and how traumatic symptoms decrease. So those might linger for a long time. But even as traumatic symptoms decrease, those traumatic experiences still have impact. We're not aiming for them to not have impact, what we want to think about doing is widening that window of stress tolerance so that we can have a relationship with these memories, without the memory overtaking us, or flooding us, or feeling as though the experience is being re-experienced in the here and now.    

Robyn: Alright, I want to say one last thing, and then we're going to start to work towards wrapping up, y'all I've been really working towards getting my podcasts be a little bit shorter. Have you noticed, not so much guest podcasts or interviews, I don't want to put parameters necessarily in the length of those. But I have been working at getting my individual episodes just a tiny bit shorter for you. So one last thing I want to talk about today, and then we're gonna wrap up healing, quote-unquote healing, or widening our window of stress tolerance, happens at exactly the right pace for that individual. Now, that doesn't mean it happens at exactly the right pace, that the kind of negative impact or the traumatic symptoms alleviate at the pace we want them to. So we can acknowledge that we have our own traumatic symptoms, or our kids have our own traumatic symptoms that we wish would go away faster, right? That we can acknowledge with honesty and authenticity, that those symptoms are having a negative impact. Right? That can be true, and it can also be true that quote-unquote healing, widening our window of stress tolerance, and memory reconsolidation is happening at exactly the right pace for that individual. It's a requirement.    

Robyn: Wait, let me back up and say that a little bit differently. Felt safety is a key piece of widening the window of tolerance, decreasing traumatic symptoms, ultimately having the experience of memory reconsolidation is felt safety. And it is only so safe to be safe, right? That experiencing felt safety means it has to feel safe to be safe. And that is going to happen at a different pace for everyone and at times it's going to feel very frustrating. I know I have been extremely frustrated at the pace in which my own nervous system has shifted and healed very, like mad, angry, shaking my fist at the sky, for the pace at which my nervous system is going. And I've certainly felt frustration at the pace in which, you know, other people my life's nervous system is shifting and healing, including sometimes my own clients, right, like, I just look at these folks who I just adore, adore with my whole heart, and I see the pain that they're in, because of the pace that their nervous system is able to shift and change. And I just wish so much it could shift and change faster. And then I come back to, despite all of the hurt and the pain, I can trust that it's shifting at exactly the right pace for that individual because the nervous system wants to heal. And it will, as soon as there's enough safety available for a shift to be made.    

Robyn: So I kind of look at this episode as almost a bit of a summary episode as a bit of an integration episode. And integration is actually part of healing, and widening the window of tolerance, and key component in interpersonal neurobiology and relational neuroscience. So it's okay to occasionally have these episodes where we're really focused on integration as opposed to like learning new tools or techniques, or even learning something new. But instead of learning something new, or pausing to like, kind of pull it all together. I know I talked about a lot of different episodes in this one episode. And so I'll make sure links to all of those get included in the show notes for you. You can of course, always go to my website, that's robyngobbel.com/podcast. Go there, specifically the podcast page, because there's a search bar on my podcast page, and you can search for all these things. So let's just say you don't catch what episode number felt safety is, right. So you can go to my podcast page, robyngoogle.com/podcasts, on the web, search bar type and felt safety type and co-regulation, you know, type in some of the things we've talked about lying, stealing, manipulation, impulse control, frustration tolerance, all these topics we talked about, you can type them into the search bar, and find the episode. And almost all of my episodes have transcripts, we're still working on a little bit of backlogging. But most of my episodes do have transcripts. So that is a really great resource for you. Of course, I have a free resources page as well. And that's constantly growing.    

Robyn: All of the infographics that I mentioned are over at the Free Resources page. So again, if you can't remember what those are, just go to robyngobbel.com/freeresources and choose what you want to download. And then of course, if you want even more support, you want to be connected to a community of folks, you want to be connected to me, you wanna be able to pick my brain, an option for you could be to come and join us over in The Club. The Club is not always open for new members, it's open periodically for new members. And so you can just go check the web, and see if The Club is open for new members now or not. And if it's not, you can put your name on a waiting list, robyngobbel.com/theclub. If the club isn't open, then what I want you to do is keep coming back to the podcast or maybe grab a copy of Raising Kids With Big Baffling Behaviors. So you can kind of go at your own pace as you explore these concepts. Alright, y'all, as always, so wonderful to be with you. Thank you for continuing to tune in. Thank you for continuing to share this podcast with others. Thank you for continuing to show up in the world in a way where you want to bring safety to yourself, and to others, and to kids and really to the whole wide world. It's important, important, hard work that we're doing. And it's really a super big honor to do it with you. Alright y'all, I will see you back here next week. Bye bye!