Limbic System Retraining Support Flashcards
Limbic system retraining consists of what cognitive tools?
- Changing our running thought patterns throughout the day: from thoughts that feel like they threaten our emotional or physical safety to ones that soothe, comfort, and uplift, and train our limbic system in the truest story about our lives.
- Visualizations: memory and future visualizations done in the present tense
How does attuning to what your body needs in the moment help?
The body may respond better to a certain kind of tool based on how it’s feeling.
Sometimes when the mind feels like it’s darting or shut down, the body might want some somatic work before a visualization. Other times a visualization is the best tool in the moment.
Why are visualizations so important?
The daily visualization time gives the brain a break from stressors and also is a guide for it as to what regulation looks like.
Visualizations (warm and fuzzies in particular) also help the brain FEEL safe instead of just TELLING it.
Reason for doing both memory and future visualizations?
Limbic system is very involved in processing memories and is impacted by long-term stress, so engaging memory visualizations helps rehabilitate the limbic system. They help the body to remember the good felt emotions/bodily memories of those times.
Future visualization help signal to the brain what we expect to do.
What to do if feeling grief during a memory visualization?
You may be looking at it through your current self. Try to just be in the moment as your younger self and how you felt then. Or if it’s too triggering, move to another memory.
Window of Tolerance Visual
What is the Window of Tolerance (WOT)?
The zone within which your nervous system is resourced to process the stimuli and experiences of your life.
What happens if you spend too much time outside of the WOT in sympathetic activation where you are under-resourced (hyperarousal)?
The body pulls the emergency brake placing you in dorsal vagal shutdown (hyposarousal)
Key point about my relationship with my Window of Tolerance:
If I live at the top of the window or just outside of it, this perpetually depletes the nervous system, hindering the WOT
What’s one of the key characteristics of being outside the WOT?
An adversarial relationship between your thinking brain and survival brain
How to use attunement with DNRS?
Instead of an adversarial relationship where the thinking brain tries to suppress the survival, we teach them how to work in collaboration to transition from the old ways of thinking to the new.
This is done by teaching the thinking brain to bring curious, loving, empowered awareness to the messages that our survival brain is sending in the form of emotion, thoughts, and sensation, then to respond with love and care.
Some keys to widen the WOT?
Using our awareness to bring the thinking brain and survival brain into collaborative relationship to learn to work together.
Consistent, regular resourcing helps us expand the WOT.
Incremental training: incrementally expose to a stimulus that feels a little activating over time with consistency, resourcing your nervous system with each exposure.
