THE NERVOUS SYSTEM AND RESILIENCE Jan. 2015 By Laurie Leitch, Director, Threshold GlobalWorks
“Mental Health:” an outdated term:
A criticism that used to be common about mental health professionals is that we are one of the few clinical disciplines that doesn’t ever actually see the very organ we target our interventions at. Today, in part because of the amazing advances in neuroimaging, we can see pictures of how electrical impulses travel in the brain and what parts of the brain light up when we think, feel, or do certain things. We know how clever the brain is at learning to compensate for damage. We know that no matter how old we get our brains are able to learn (thank goodness!)… creating new neuronal pathways. As the saying goes, “the neurons that fire together wire together.” This can be good news and bad news. The good news is that people can be helped to have greater resiliency by practicing skills that reinforce healthier pathways in the brain. The bad news is that remaining stuck in disabling beliefs, negative emotions, and hurtful practices wires dysregulation into the brain.
In fact, the term “mental health” is outmoded. We know that the mind and body are a system, inseparably connected; so we really need a term that reflects interventions that explicitly work with both. Candace Pert has called this “bodymind,” others refer to “holistic” or “integrative” models. The fact that there is not a term that is universally used and understood reflects the fact that this is a relatively new frontier for psychotherapists and other clinicians and practitioners. Regardless of the term that eventually is used, SRM is a model that works to connect and heal the bodymind system…from the inside-out.
The goal in this essay is to provide current neuroscience information that is relevant for work with others and for practitioner self-care. There is a vast and growing body of information about the human nervous system .The goal in this essay is to provide the information that helps you understand why it is so important to work with the nervous system and how SRM skills can amplify stability and resilience across stress-spectrum disorders as well as for self-care.
Neurobiology: Used to Design and Implement Interventions:
Understanding some key neurobiological reasons why we think, feel, and act as we do can decrease the tendency to pathologize symptoms as character flaws or weakness. I have intentionally presented the material in this essay in a way that is
accessible for lay people. Neuroeducation is one way to depathologize symptoms as well as to motivate people to use the skills and it is a key ingredient of a SRM session. This essay is not intended to be a comprehensive presentation of the complexity of the nervous system. Rather, material has been selected that provides a rationale for the skills and the therapeutic choice-points and which helps clients understand their capacity for building their own resilience.
After completing this essay, you will know:
1. How to explain the role of the nervous system in dealing with stress, distress and trauma as well as in building resilience;
2. How the nervous system is organized for survival;
3. How energy is directed to automatic defensive responses under perceived
threat
4. How to explain the functions of the key parts of the nervous system and how
they can be enlisted in healing trauma.
5. How to describe the reciprocal relationship of the two branches of the
Autonomic Nervous System.
6. Why some interventions contribute to resilience and others can contribute to
further dysregulation and re-traumatization.
Nervous System Regulation:
A question I often hear is “Why does the Social Resilience Model focus on nervous system regulation?” Most clinical models target cognitions (e.g., problem solving, positive and negative beliefs) and emotions. Although SRM includes attention to emotions and cognitions, they are secondary to the primary focus which is on the nervous system, specifically, the Autonomic Nervous System (ANS) ~ ways of assessing it, stabilizing it, and deepening its capacity for resilience. The focus on sensation (the “language” of the nervous system) enables us to work with what lies below the level of consciousness. When you can intervene at the sensation level to create stability and resilience, thoughts and feelings change for the better as well. That is why we call SRM a “bottom-up” model.
The nervous system plays a key role in shaping who we are. Understanding the parts of the nervous system and how each works becomes a guiding framework for the choice-points we encounter in creating change with clients. This knowledge helps in the design of and rationale for our interventions.
Primary Focus of SRM- Biology vs. Pathology
Responses to stress-spectrum events have a major effect on the nervous system. SRM uses attention to and knowledge of neurobiological patterns in the body.The nervous system lens changes an individual’s appraisal from threat to challenge
Greater awareness of the non- traumatic sensations in the body helps people live embodied lives.
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The nervous system is one of our body’s main information processors. As the picture above shows, it is divided into two major parts: the Central Nervous System (CNS) and the Peripheral Nervous System (PNS). The CNS, made up of the brain and spinal cord, is considered the control center of the body. The CNS does not come in direct contact with the external environment. It is completely enclosed. It is the Peripheral Nervous System, with its sensory and motor divisions, that interacts directly with the outside world and it feeds information to the CNS. Amazingly, our brain receives more information from our environment in just one day than the largest computer does in one year. And all of this sensory information comes into brain as electrical impulses along sensory pathways. That helps explain why working with sensation, as SRM does, is an essential tool for harnessing our natural resilience. Not all of our senses are equally important in learning. Sight, hearing, and touch seem to contribute the most.
Within the PNS, the sensory division carries impulses from the sense organs to the CNS and the motor division carries impulses from the CNS to the muscles or glands. The motor division is divided into: the Somatic Nervous System (which regulates all activities that are under our conscious control) and the Autonomic Nervous System (which regulates all body activities that are not under conscious control). The Autonomic Nervous System (ANS)~ the focus of SRM~ has two branches that work in balance with each other: The Parasympathetic and Sympathetic branches. One way we understand what is happening in the ANS is by monitoring and intervening through directed attention to internal sensations. The chart below shows how the two ANS branches fill opposite functions. What one branch accelerates the other branch decelerates.
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