Co-Regulation
Have you ever noticed how grounding it is to be in the presence of another human who is truly at home in themselves? Or perhaps you have felt how pleasant it is inside yourself when spending time with a friend who is calm and at ease. It can be helpful to even pause here and take a moment to let yourself remember that experience. Really take it in, if possible, on multiple levels of your senses. As we allow ourselves to reflect on a situation where we felt especially settled when spending time with another human, we may feel the echoes of that settling in our bodies in this moment now. This reciprocal exchange that is occurring is a biological process called co-regulation.
In their intelligent design, our autonomic nervous systems are constantly attuning to what it is in our immediate environment. This autonomic nervous system is quietly, or sometimes loudly, assessing for safety or threat. Deb Dana describes this calibration as “a passive pathway always running in the background.” Naturally, our life experiences, especially experiences that are repetitive, or quite memorable, will influence this assessment. Nervous systems are built to remember.
Us humans have an evolved branch of the autonomic nervous system, one that is wired for social connection. Stephen Porges brought attention to this evolved branch, called the ventral vagal branch of the parasympathetic nervous system, through his Polyvagal Theory. Functionally, the ventral vagal system allows us to do things such as maintain eye contact, shift the tone of our speech, and adjust our facial expression according to our situation. Anatomically, the ventral vagal system is part of our vagus nerve, which is a nerve originating in the brain and literally wandering through our body, to most of our organs, glands and vessels.
This ventral branch of the vagus nerve is not fully formed at birth, meaning we do not have full access to this branch that mediates safety and connection when we come into this world. It is in the first six months of our life when the primary development of our ventral vagal nerve happens, and its development continues through our adolescence. These early months and years are instrumental in establishing our blueprint for being able to access safety and connection. The ventral vagal system develops in relationship to those around us, who, we hope, were attuned to our signals of distress. By bringing a calm and settled presence to our signals of distress, we infants experience co-regulation, an emotional attunement that helps us know we are safe. The ventral vagal system develops, and this experience of co-regulation will then bring us to the equally important task of self-regulation.
If co-regulation, or self-regulation, are challenges for us, the important thing to know is that movement towards more regulation is always available to us. Neuroplasticity, or the brain's potential to rewire, is available at any age. By making explicit some of these processes that have been happening under the radar of our awareness, we have the potential to achieve some distance, or space, from our habitual responses. It is within this space that we have the possibility to bring in self-regulatory tools that allow for our nervous system to realize safety in the moment.
There is not a uniform recipe to develop our skills of co-regulation and self-regulation; however, there are certainly reoccurring themes. With a very healthy dose of self-compassion, we might start noticing whether our own background system is more attuned for safety or for threat. Do we tend to notice when people around us seem friendly, or potentially dangerous? Are we able to detect sounds that are pleasing to the ears, or do we tend to notice the more alarming sounds? When we experience physical pain, are we able to bring an appropriately attuned response to it, or does the pain cause an escalation of anxious thoughts?
By starting to bring this essential ingredient of awareness to our patterns, over time, we start to develop a possibility of moving towards an action that is in support of our regulation. Let us be clear, this never means ignoring threats, or ignoring pain. However, we will be able to more accurately assess for true threat when we are able to bring more of a curiosity to our internal and external environment. Kathy Kain likens this to creating a “safety map.” If we have only ever had a "danger map", then this is the only map we know well. As we start to notice things that support us, be it humans, places, parts of our body, we develop a safety map. As our autonomic nervous system starts to know safety, less of our resources go to managing our survival physiology. Deb Dana sums this up quite well, “In a state of protection, survival is the only goal. The system is closed to connection and change. In a state of connection, health, growth and restoration are possible.” Each little step towards connection is a step towards this possibility. And many little steps in the same direction over time will, without a doubt, land us in a more regulated state. This more regulated state lends itself well to the co-regulation equation, as we learn to be the calm amidst the turbulence.
