Or Listen On:

Show Notes

In this episode, I continue the conversation from the previous episode by exploring the companion skill to meeting and matching: reality testing.

Reality testing is often thought of as a cognitive process — reminding ourselves what’s true or finding a more accurate perspective. But in this episode, I explore how reality testing can also be deeply somatic, helping the body take in what is actually happening through the senses.

Using a very Alaskan example involving fresh bear scat on a hiking trail, we walk through the importance of timing: why reality testing tends to work better after we've acknowledged and allowed the initial wave of activation, rather than trying to talk ourselves out of it immediately.

We also explore how orienting, sensory awareness, and noticing present-day resources can help the nervous system recognize that a stressful experience is over and that safety is available now.

This episode is an invitation to bring a little more patience, awareness, and embodiment into the way you work with fear, stress, and nervous system activation.

Timestamps

00:00 — Introduction to reality testing
01:00 — The relationship between meeting & matching and reality testing
02:00 — A fresh bear scat example
03:00 — Noticing the body's initial response
04:00 — Why we don't want to skip the first wave
05:00 — Timing: feeling before reframing
06:00 — Orienting to where you actually are right now
07:30 — Resources, support, and present-day safety
08:30 — Activation → settling → perspective shift
10:00 — Bringing the senses into reality testing
11:00 — River crossing example: helping the body catch up
12:00 — Letting the body notice what's true now
13:00 — Cognitive and somatic reality testing working together
14:00 — The deep breath at the end of a cycle
15:00 — 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
Okay, so on the last episode I was talking a bit about what meeting and matching is, and how to do it well, and part of that skill, what came up there was also the its partner skill, which is reality testing, and reality testing we often use a lot, it's the self-talk and the cognitive strategies that we can often employ to come up with a different interpretation of a situation. It's often really helpful and accurate, and also, as someone who really believes in somatics and bottom up work. I find that well, reality testing is it has, can have a somatic component to it, body based, bottom up way to do it, and it can have a top down cognitive way of doing it, and so, yeah, that's one thing I want to talk about. How to expand the way we use reality testing, and then I also want to talk about the timing of it, because this is the most common issue I see people having, is just rushing into reality testing, or leaning on it as your first or maybe only strategy, and we can improve significantly our interactions if we learn how to use, how and when to use reality testing. Okay, so that's what I'm here to talk about today. Hope this is useful. Welcome to my hike. If you're watching the video, I'm going to show myself, and then I'm going to show that we're going to walk by a pile of bear poop here soon. Okay, so maybe that's the story, you know, reality testing, because there's a pile of bear poop, which could be scary. It might read as scary. I mean, it's like fair. There it is. It's like fairly fresh, honestly. So, I don't know how often you come across bear poop in your life, but it's not in frequent here in Alaska, and there might be a stress response that's coming into your body right now, just with the idea of walking across a pile of fairly fresh bear poop, bear scat, so this is actually, we're doing like a very embodied experiment here together, because I am curious, what is happening in your body right now as I bring this idea to mind, and we're just looking around, we're like mapping the terrain and the sensations of our bodies with stress response related in this situation too, being a bear country. Okay, so in some way we want to say just yes to this response that the body is having. If that makes sense, then follow it. If that doesn't, just let it pass on through seeing if you can notice the sensations of that, and yeah, we want to come up with some way of saying that makes sense, saying or feeling, or like allowing the whatever's there to be there, so if that's like fear or anxiety or tension, or could be many things, excitement, thrill, and then what are the sensations of all that? Okay, so from there. So we just want to let that wave have its time, and this is the magic of what I am going to call the timing of me of the strategy of reality testing, so instead of trying to talk ourselves out of feeling that whatever that was the fear or the stress or the excitement we're going to try to feel it first have like a meet and match experience maybe internally or like a validation experience, and then we're going to try to reality test when you're ready, so take however much time you need here too, and then when you're ready, what I'd have you do would be to bring your attention to where you are right now and the idea is to like use your senses to notice where you actually are right now, because you're definitely not with me right now, walking past like actual bear scat, because I'm just here on my phone by myself, so you get to use your senses to help your body notice where you actually are right now, that would be looking around and listening and smelling, noticing if it's true that you're out in bear country right now, or if it's not, and if it is, notice any resources you might have. We can all do that. Actually, notice who is with you, who has skilled notice your own resources and skills, notice your equipment if you have any experience.

Speaker 1 7:31
Yeah, and then once we have some resources on board, we might start considering what that means about what reality is right now, is you know, is it true? What kind of stress response do you need right now? Is useful, are you more safe than you, your body realized? Okay, so that is timing, it's an experience of timing and of allowing a change of perspective to be what happens after the initial wave, most of the time, that's how I would map out the physics of the nervous system with a stress response that there is an initial wave in which it's really helpful to be with the body and with the experience in the body and then as that wave settles, we often need to like bring some resources in or support ourselves in that time as that wave settles, and we are able to, on a somatic level, take in the actual, the new reality, then that allows the wave to settle, and then we might be able to bring in the cognitive shifting, so I think of that as maybe the it's either the second wave or it's what happens after in the valley between the between waves and Okay, so I'm getting close to the parking lot. I'm going to come back and talk about the ways to bring the body into our reality. Retesting, so it's not just cognitive, not that cognitive is a problem, but we're just adding to our skill set, right, adding to our toolbox. Okay, okay, so this is about reality testing, somatic style. I love this strategy. It's just a simple tweak, and honestly, it's just like a little bit more of mindfulness and self-awareness to something you're probably already doing naturally. So those are my favorite strategies that we're already doing, and we just get to like, like, turn up the awareness dial a little bit, okay. So the deal here is that when we are trying to help our perspective shift, or others, ours, or others' perspective shift to something that is a maybe a different, or maybe even a more accurate view of reality, but we're not there yet. We can try to cognitively get ourselves over there, but it can be very supportive if to before you try to get your brain over there, let your body notice what's happening over there. What it doesn't even have to be over there, just what's actually happening. We can let our body through our senses. This is how this is like the how to do it is to let the body let the senses notice the situation. It's very simple. Let your eyes notice. I mean, I'm thinking about I'm like in a river example of after like a river crossing, having made it to the other side of the river, but nervous system, my nervous system still being like, oh, that was really intense, which is accurate, it was intense and challenging, but we made it, and so now I'm trying to help my nervous system notice that we made it, as in looking around at the at the river, the rocks, the dry ground that I'm standing on. I mean, it sounds simple, but we don't always - our body doesn't always have enough time to notice that, so we gotta - we often have to benefit by slowing down enough and really intentionally letting the body see the dry ground, and then also maybe, maybe it's like noisy because of the river, the rapid in this example, so we might actually want to relocate a little bit further away from the rapids, so that it's quieter, so that they have sound, I can have other sounds that are more dominant in my sensory experience, and then my body will jet like start to notice that too. So sensory experience, it's like the, we want the senses to reality test the situation, let the eyes see what is real, rather than being caught in what's what's already passed, you know, that's the thing, it's like we're, we're not really, we're not trying to trick ourselves of into anything that's not actually real, we're just trying to help our senses actually reality test notice, notice actual reality through the senses is the magic, though. And you'll, I mean, they come alongside each other, you know.

Speaker 1 13:29
You're not like, not going to be noticing your thoughts too, and trying to help your, like, maybe even using language to be like, we're look at, like, good job, or we're safe, you know. Okay, let me see if there's anything else. Yeah, I mean, I guess I'll just say that the summary here is that you can bring somatics into your reality testing process. Often this is also something that is more accurate or more fruitful if we've been through the meet and match process of the of the heart of the wave first and then there's like a moment when activation drops a little bit get a little bit less stressed a little bit more availability for taking in new information like oh my gosh I actually am on dry ground now. I actually did do that. That is, that is actually over. Okay, I actually can chill out now. Yeah, and like usually a deep breath like that comes, and actually this is an this is another little secret, but if you start to look for. In yourself and in others, that deep breath, that like that, it just happened for me naturally, as I was describing this phase of the cycle. So it's cool, it's like become something I've been able to notice my own body doing that at the end of cycles, and it feels really good to have awareness of it. So that's just a little bonus if you are looking for, like, the next next step in awareness, growing internal interception development. One of my favorite things to share about. Okay, that feels like complete on this topic. And I hope it's useful. And good luck, keep practicing. And good luck out there. I'll see you next time.

Unknown Speaker 15:42
Bye.