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Show Notes

In this episode, I respond to a thoughtful question that came out of The Art of the Mother Duck workshop Luc and I recently taught on nervous system skills in outdoor recreation and group dynamics.

We explore what happens after a stressful or overwhelming experience outdoors — when the body continues carrying activation, fear, or protective responses long after the moment itself has passed.

I walk through why these responses are normal, how the nervous system learns quickly around threat and survival, and the ways intense experiences can leave behind incomplete survival responses that continue showing up when we return to similar situations.

From there, we explore some practical ways to support the body through this process: orienting to safety cues, resourcing, co-regulation, pendulation, and titrating slowly back into challenge. I also talk about the importance of patience when capacity feels smaller than it used to — and how rebuilding trust with the body often happens through small, successful experiences over time.

This episode is an invitation to approach nervous system healing with more compassion, more slowness, and a deeper understanding of what your body is trying to do for you.

Timestamps
00:00 — Introduction + walking in the woods
01:00 — Reflecting on The Art of the Mother Duck workshop
03:30 — The listener question: what happens after intense experiences?
04:30 — Prevention vs. response in nervous system work
06:00 — It’s normal to be impacted by intense experiences
07:30 — The nervous system as a fast learner around threat
09:00 — Fight, flight, freeze, and the “panic zone”
10:00 — Completing survival responses
12:00 — When experiences land as growth vs. overwhelm
13:00 — Interrupted cycles + incomplete responses
14:30 — Why some activation stays stuck in the body
15:00 — Somatic therapy + completing survival cycles
16:00 — Returning to activities after scary experiences
17:00 — Orienting, resourcing, and co-regulation
19:00 — Pendulation: activation + safety together
21:00 — Lowered capacity after overwhelm
22:30 — Titration + rebuilding trust slowly
23:00 — Whitewater story: feet in the river as the right first step
24:00 — Giving the body small successful experiences
25:00 — Learning safety takes time too
26:00 — Closing reflections

Submit your questions for the Q&A [here]

Photos and links from this episode:
www.mindandmountain.co/podcast

Transcript

Speaker 1 0:14
Hello, co-regulation conversations. Sarah here. Good to be with you. Hi. hope you're well today, whenever you find yourself listening. I'm on a little walk here in the woods in Anchorage. I wonder if you'll hear the breeze or the birds. I'm enjoying listening to the sounds of so much more life around these days, now that it's more solidly at least out of winter, I think we're gonna call it summer quite yet, and today I wanted to spend a little bit of time speaking to a question that came in from the Art of the Mother Duck, a class that Luke and I offered recently about using nervous system skills in outdoor rec experiences, particularly in group experiences, where we might be able to skillfully support each other if we're, if we have the nervous system lens to use, and some of those skills and strategies to employ, and that was a really fun class. I'm like still kind of riding the high from it. It was something that we have been wanting to do for quite a while, and yeah, in some ways it's the results of everything we've been working on interpersonally to navigate each other's nervous systems and the dynamics that we find ourselves in when we're out recreating together and the this work of the somatic experiencing and attachment work, all of this deep dive that I've been doing in the last six or so years now has it's actually maybe more like eight or so years now, anyways, that's really informed a lot of how we are navigating our partnership dynamics outside all the time, but definitely outside, and then Luke's been pulling all that into his outdoor rec, his instruction safety instruction classes too, with some pretty neat results, so yeah, it was really neat. How that class went, and those of you that are there, I hope that we're there, I hope you got some good stuff out of it. And someone after the class was over sent in a question, an anonymous question that I responded to to them directly, but I thought I wanted to bring the question here in a broader way, because I think it's something that many of us would relate to experiencing, and I wanted to have a little bit more space to expand into my thoughts around it, so that's what we're here to do today. So this person was asking about what to do when your nervous system is impacted by something that's happened in an outer rec setting, a lot of that class was about the skills of prevention, like how do we set up our relationships and our containers and our classroom spaces and our group dynamics, so that the nervous system has as much access to safety as possible, and then how do we also then like titrate our way out of our safe comfort zone into experiences that stretch us. A bit, and do that in a way that works with the nervous system too, so glad that we did a lot of prevention work, and then on the second day we talked a lot about response and what to do when things are stressful or activating, and even when they end up in like those higher intensity zones that where the nervous system might be more like panicking, whether that's fight or flight panic with a lot of like energy and mobilization, or if it's a freeze panic where there's more shut down and like lack of energy mobilization, so yeah, all of that is really like great skills to be using for helping things go well more often, and then knowing what to do when things go wrong, and even with all of those skills excellently laid down, things still go wrong, and we still have jarring experiences in our bodies, and you know when we're outside and in the rest of life too, so I don't know that even like any kind of perfect, I don't think there's any way to nail this for one thing and not be impacted by some of the more intense things that happen in our lives, and so that's one thing I want to say, like it's, it's normal, that's that happens, this is our nervous systems adapting to the intense things that we run into in our human lives, and yeah, while we can like talk about prevention and add skills to make that more, more feasible. And I just got passed by somebody, if you heard that on a bike from the guy. And yeah, so even with like things still happen, it's not a problem, so that's one piece of it, and then yeah, it just is really normal to have experiences in your body that stick with you. Our nervous systems learn really quick, that's like one of the things that they do. There's a lot of bikers out tonight, somebody with some biker with some music, maybe you heard, yeah, so you know, if we recognize that our bodies are incredible learners and that they do tend to they're exceptional at learning to respond to stress and sometimes do that very quickly, just because that's that life or death, that life or death question that the body's always asking, am I safe and not, and when it recognizes that there's threat around or any like potential thing that could be a life threat, the response to that is often a pretty strong one, and for good reason, you know, it's like that. That's the nervous system's primary job, is to make sure that we stay alive. So, if there's anything that, like, gets into that zone of this is getting intense or scary or potentially threatening, or they kind of, anything that crosses over that high intensity zone, where in this class we were calling it the panic zone, or you might think of it as fight or flight, or freeze those survival responses. Anytime we kind of touch into that stuff, that's that's an impacting thing for the body, and yeah, it would make sense if there would be some lasting way that the nervous system might be still integrating that experience after the fact, or carrying it for some time after, for many reasons, and you know it's potentially there was well, in so, in the, in the class, and you know, I'll do like a quick little overview here, but we, we talked quite a bit about. Had different ways to help support the body in completing the survival response that it wanted to do in those moments, like the impulse for survival that the body wants to do. Sometimes it gets a chance to be completed, like if we say follow out of our boat, and we have flight response, like I want to get out of here, and then you're successfully able to swim your way out of the rapid and get out of the river, then you did successfully flight yourself away out of the threat. You get to the side of the river, and you might have a sense of accomplishment at the other side of that, especially if you're well supported, well resourced. You need to have some support, like some, you know, you've got some, some people there to help. That's a successful, in one way, we can think of that as like a successful completion of a flight response, and then if we have some nervous system skill set skills in our group too, then maybe we're also after we get to the bank, we're also like coming together and being like, wow, that was a lot, and being validated in the experience we're having in our bodies and some co-regulation to help that energy that just came through, like, move and settle and do what it needs to do, and then also maybe we like are able to sit and have a break and eat some snacks and settle our nervous systems together after the big effort. All of those things might help a big thing move through and complete and settle and land as a success story where you had something wild happen, but you like got through it, and, and survived, and did good, made it, made it like a growth experience with a positive outcome, but you know, many times that's not the way things play out, like maybe it's more things get interrupted, or we're in a rush, and more, we don't know, we don't know these skills until we know them, maybe that you know there's some misattunement along the way, or maybe we feel embarrassed, or you know, like so many things that could come in and interrupt that cycle's completion, and then the other thing that can happen that often is one of the factors of like leaving us with some kind of jarring or some impact in the body would be that the just scroll right

Speaker 2 13:31
here

Speaker 1 13:35
very often the body needs like actually has multiple impulses that it wants to do at the same time so it might want to flee, but it also might want to fight, or it might freeze, but it also wants to fight, but it froze instead, and so there's maybe multiple impulses that come through on a body level, and the actual charge with in the body to enact those responses, but there's just not time, because in real life things happen really fast, and so we often can't complete all of the cycles that the body might have wanted to, so that's another one of the the things that might need to happen is making time to notice what the body still wants to do. What are those energies trying to make happen, and make space to complete the incomplete survival response cycles, so all of that, the incomplete cycles, those are things that I would point people to somatic therapy for. Generally, I don't know. I haven't seen yet a way of thoroughly completely, I don't know, of completing those cycles in like a group format or a self-guided experience. I mean, you're certainly welcome to play around with tuning in to what those responses might be and might need, and maybe you'll find a way to tend to them on your own as you start to come into relationship with them, but in so far, in my experience, that's been most effective inside of a therapy process, so that's one piece of it, the work to try to tend to the energy that's still in there, that shows up when you're back in those situations, be looking for a somatic experiencing therapist to support some of those cycles to move through and complete and then the other piece of this, so like the kind of be trying to approach this from a couple different directions, because the other piece of this is that as you're getting back into those situations yourself, and you start to notice the, the like anxiety coming in, or the fear, or the charge in the body that you're, I think that's what this person was naming, at least, that there was like, when they were getting coming back into some of these situations, their body was responding like with more energy than it needed, or in a way that it didn't used to, and yeah, so the the part you can for sure be doing all the time with that is the work of helping the body remember that it's safe. That's a whole.. we did a whole big section on this in the class, and those of you that weren't in the class, but have been here for this podcast over the time that I've been making these episodes this year, that's what we talk, that we've been talking a lot about, that these, all these different ways of helping the physical body connect with safety cues through the senses, orienting the resourcing coming into relationship with things that are supportive, it's like when, when we notice that the activation showing up in the body, and even before, like even before, if you anticipate that this is, we're like potentially moving into a situation that, where this stuff might come up, the this, yeah, these are all great big opportunities for orienting, for resourcing, and for co-regulating in advance, so you go in with as much of a container and a support system, and as many resources for your animal body as possible, like a cozy layer that feels good on your skin, that you can bring your attention to when the charge starts to build, or yeah, just like whole whole bunch of different tools or resources to pull in, and yeah, so the idea with that would be to, as you're moving back into these situations, to have some other resources on hand that you can help your attention help help notice when the charge is around, and there's some like different ways to play with those dynamics, and this is all different ways of playing with pendulation, but the one of them, I mean, I talked about this in the last episode a little bit, but the potentially the movement of noticing from the the energy that's in the body, the the discomfort or the charge, the activation, so it would be swinging the attention from noticing that to noticing your resource and how that feels and back and forth between the two, that's one way to work with it, and the other would be to. To see about noticing them both together, like you're playing those two notes in harmony at the same time, so either of those, you know, and just play with whichever of those feels easiest, or like it comes most naturally to you, but that would be one of the things I'd be trying to track, is like, can we notice what's happening in the body and notice something else that's a safety cue, basically just kind of helping the body be with the experience it's having and notice that there's some things that are okay, so that's one of the main skills that you let I'd be like trying to keep around whenever you have attention for it, and the other piece would be the I would like to take just take your time getting back to it, you know, like the because our nervous systems learn so fast what not to do, or that like this thing is it bring brought on a lot of intensity last time they the their willingness to go there can shrink down pretty fast, and so you just your threshold of overwhelm, or that threshold between the stretch zone and the panic zone. If you were in the class, you know those terms, but the that threshold has dropped, and in order to help, like, be with that, and maybe help it expand back again, you know, it when our threshold drops, the things that we used to be able to do sometimes land as, like, too much, so that can be hard, I mean, that's that's a tough thing, because it's, yeah, it feels like a backslide, or it feels like we lost ability, and, and I mean, in some ways we did kind of lose capacity, maybe not forever, but having a having a time period with some lower capacity can be kind of tough for people sometimes, so yeah, just naming that, because that's real. Be with the frustration or the disappointment with that, and and then the tending to it part is the patience and trying to do some little by little titrations back into it, and you know the example that Luke brought up in class from his experience of doing whitewater classes, and you know a lot of people come into those classes having had a really scary swim, or something gone wrong that scared them, and then they come to a class to learn, but they're coming in with a bunch of charge in their bodies related to their mishaps beforehand, and so he shared a story about someone who came into class, and when they were getting ready to do their first swim in the river was like quite activated, related to her previous swim, so what this person was found was like their right amount of titration into that challenge initially was just sitting on the bank of the river with their feet in the water and watching other people do the swim that was that was enough that was the right amount of challenge for their system initially and then after spending some time with that then they were able to go and feel okay doing a little swim managing that activation, getting coming back to the bank, resting and regrouping, and then doing a little harder swim, you know, so the if you really take the time to titrate your way back into the challenge and let your body reality test the experiences that it's having, like, have it, you're trying to give your body little wins, basically along the way, like I did, I did one thing successfully. Okay, I'm all right, like, let your body land and feel safety, feel okayness, and then try another one. Land feel safety, and like every time you do that, your body gets to reality test that that stretch it back into that thing that feels familiar that went really wrong one time, and we like don't want that to. Happen, you're kind of gaining the experience that shows the body that there's, it's also possible to have a different type of cycle with that same type of sport or same type of experience, and we can learn, I mean, we can learn in that way, just like we learn what not to do. We can learn, help the body learn what feels good. It does tend to be a little slower on the learning what feels good side of things, because the will often jump to what doesn't feel good, or avoiding the threat pretty quick, and the reinforcing of okayness is often a slower process, but it does happen if we give it the time and the space and the support that it needs. Okay, so that is what I wanted to say in response to this question, so I hope that is useful. Yeah, I hope that's useful. Hope that you have some experiences, opportunities. opportunities to play with some of those strategies this summer. If this is something that you're grappling with, and can you post it? Okay. Great. Take care. Take care of yourself and each other. And I will talk to you next time.

Unknown Speaker 26:40