Transcript:

Emma: Welcome to Positive Disintegration: A Path to Authenticity. This episode is the first episode of a two-part conversation. Chris and I are talking to Autum Romano about polyvagal theory and how our nervous system plays a part in our development and our relationships. We explore what polyvagal theory is, how our nervous system works, and talk about the three states in the theory.

We also draw out connections with the theory of positive disintegration. I hope you enjoy this episode and will join us again for part two.

Hello, lovely listeners. Welcome to Positive Disintegration. I'm Emma Nicholson.

Chris: I'm Chris Wells.

Emma: And Chris, today we're talking about something that I know we've mentioned before on the podcast, but we've never really had a deep dive in, and that's polyvagal theory.

Chris: That's right. I can't wait to talk about it tonight with my friend Autum.

Emma: Awesome. So without further ado, our guest today is Autum Romano. Autum is an educator, author, and bodyworker who's passionate about nervous system regulation as a foundation for transformative whole health. She has certifications as a neuromuscular therapist, licensed massage therapist, Safe and Sound Protocol provider, craniosacral therapist, Reiki master, and certified trauma-informed care provider, and she has over 28 years' experience in the field with an intuitive healing approach. Autum thinks she's likely twice exceptional, but still exploring and discovering her special blend of spices. She recently collaborated with Stephen Porges and Karen Onderko on a case study for their upcoming book, Safe and Sound: A Polyvagal Approach for Connection, Change and Healing. And in collaboration with her son has authored a children's book titled Body Wisdom and the Polyvagal Theory. Welcome to the podcast, Autum.

Autum: Thank you. I'm so happy to be here. Thank you both for having me.

Chris: We're so happy to have you with us, Autum. Since I met you at the Soul Spark Empowerment Series in 2020 during the pandemic, I have to say that you are one of my favorites, and I'm so happy to have you here tonight because you are just one of the people whose energy is so calm, healing—you are just a great person to be around. And I know that this is the kind of episode where you're not only talking about something important and educating our listeners about something, but your very presence in this episode will be good for them to hear. So thank you so much for joining us.

Autum: Thanks, Chris. It's really interesting—even though the three of us here are across the globe meeting, and then all our listeners will be all over the globe, it's fascinating that this is polyvagal theory in practice because our nervous systems are responding to each other, even though all we have is our audio.

That's part of what polyvagal theory explains—what is happening inside of me? As I'm preparing for our interview, yes, I'm thinking because we're using words, but I'm mostly really trying to regulate my body in preparation because my voice carries the information of what's happening inside of me into your ears, Chris, and your ears, Emma. And then your body responds to that. When you say what you feel when you're with me, you're putting it into words and bringing it into consciousness.

But this is one of the core principles of polyvagal theory. Dr. Porges—he is the creator of polyvagal theory—and this is a term that he coined called neuroception, and it is detection without awareness. It's how your body is trying to figure out always—same as mine, all mammals—am I getting cues of safety or am I getting cues of threat? And then how the body responds to that.

Chris: While you're talking about this, I can't help but think that it's a testament to where I am compared to how I used to be. Even though we screwed up—and listeners, please know that we've already recorded this part of the episode and then we had to go back and start again because I didn't hit the record button—we talked through the whole first part of this, and when I was younger, even five years ago, I bet I would've—I'd still be thinking about it. I'd be like, “I can't believe I didn't hit the fucking record button.” And I would still be in my head worried about it. But now I know that it's going to be okay. I know you. I know Emma. It's cool. And so we can all still be regulated even though we made a mistake.

I think that's one of the things I've loved about learning about my nervous system. When I'm preparing to do an episode, when I'm doing anything really, I'm checking in—how am I coming across for other people? I don't want to jump too far ahead, but later I would like to come back to the fact that I realize that anger, when we're in a hard situation and struggling, that energy comes through. It's all impacting us. When we're doing something like a podcast, we want to make sure we're in the best conditions for having our voices carry our message.

Autum: And that was a whole other part of—to me, one of the big principles of how I think about nervous system health, what I would call applied polyvagal theory, especially in my work with clients. When we're talking about something being upsetting, whether it's already happened or it's something in the future that they're preparing for, I always say, “Hey, a healthy nervous system is a dynamic one.”

There's no such thing that we don't get upset. That's not how it goes. We're hopefully not getting stuck. That's the difference between a trauma response. A trauma response is—we're not recording, and then that's upsetting, and then the body stays stuck in that and isn't able to come back to this place. What we're talking about now, this place of resonance, which is a ventral state. This is a social engagement system so that it's the way our bodies can come back into connection and regulate together, co-regulate together. A healthy nervous system is one that goes through—there are three main states that our autonomic nervous system goes through. Knowing, trusting the body's ability to go ahead and be dysregulated and then return to regulation—sometimes that's with assistance and sometimes it's not. But knowing that is just a healthy part of being human.

Emma: One thing—we're going to ask it because we asked it to you about 10 minutes ago—but our first question is how you first discovered Dabrowski's theory. I know you and Chris were in each other's study groups, because this theory seems quite important—polyvagal theory. So tell us a little bit about how you discovered Dabrowski's theory, but also what piqued your interest in that overlap area.

Autum: Thanks, Emma. So I first heard about overexcitabilities in 2019 at the SENG conference in Houston. And then the next year, Chris introduced me to the theory when we were in the Soul Spark Empowerment series together. So I had a brief introduction to the work of Dabrowski via overexcitabilities, and then a deeper dive from Chris. And then I was like, “Oh my gosh, I want to know more.” And then Chris's study group was open at the time during COVID, so my husband and I joined that together. I was like, “I want to swim around in this theory. I want to totally get to know it.” And then, so cool that I was co-leading a study group—I think it was later the very same year. I think this was all 2020, and Chris was able to join that study group of polyvagal theory. Really cool.

I think from the beginning, as soon as I started to understand theory of positive disintegration, I could see the overlap, especially when you think about OEs first. When you think about overexcitabilities—even what Chris was saying about starting to understand the body—I'm pretty sure I have, I identify that I have all five OEs. So of course what's happening with me somatically each day will influence the OEs. How rested are you? How are my hormones? My stress level—all that. But the more that I can understand how my body's going to have a big response to sensory information, then that helps me plan better, recover better.

I think of that as a big overlap with polyvagal theory. Both of the theories have an overlap there, just in really understanding nervous system health, and I think that nervous system function and then specifically sensory integration has a lot to do with overexcitabilities. Basically, it's like: are your OEs going to dysregulate you or not? Because you can still have overexcitabilities and not have that be so overwhelming that your body goes into a defense. If we think about polyvagal theory—the body, the autonomic nervous system is always asking (not consciously—neuroception is detection without awareness), so the vagus nerve is always saying: am I safe or am I not? Is the body going to respond by going into a connection mode or into a protection mode?

If we think about overexcitabilities, you can have the very same person who has overexcitabilities and they can be responding to a situation by either moving into connection mode or moving into protection mode. There's a lot of overlap between the theories there, and I think self-understanding is a big part of how we can bring these theories into our own understanding, know ourselves well, and then use that information to hopefully be the best version of ourselves. Does that make sense?

Emma: Yeah, it does. And I also see the connection between that and somatic signs of disintegration, particularly unilevel disintegration—when stuff comes out through our body. But what I want to do is lead into a little 101 on polyvagal theory. I know very little about it. So I want to tell you my understanding of it, and then you can correct me if I'm wrong and expand from there.

I've noticed there are three basic states in the nervous system. One, as you talked about, is when you're in a safe space and you're wanting to socially connect. And positive disintegration is all about relationships and how we relate to other people and ourselves. Then there's a second—it's almost like a fight or flight mode where you don't feel safe and everything's switched on, trauma responses and stuff like that. Then the third state is basically freeze. So when we talk about fight, flight, or freeze—I'm quite familiar with this because when I get threatened, I go into complete freeze and shut down, and that can lead to inaction. So is that a reasonable approximation of it?

Autum: Yeah, definitely.

Chris: I'm a fight responder.

Autum: Yeah.

Chris: Sorry, I just had to—it's so different.

Emma: You so are.

Autum: Yes, Chris is red. I also use colors—Chris is totally red. I'm blue, Emma. I'm like—so that's the dorsal vagal complex, the freeze or shutdown. So yeah, I have a blue tendency also. That's the protection mode. If the body isn't going to move into connection mode or the ventral vagal social engagement, or what I call green, then it's going to move either into red or blue.

Typically, the body decides this without our conscious thinking early on. I haven't heard anybody say they know exactly when, but this is tied to our early development, like zero to three. It's almost like if we went and asked all of our mothers, “Oh, did I cry for a little bit and then stop crying? Or did I just scream and scream and scream?” It's kind of interesting. I haven't heard anyone specifically say, “Oh, we know that our response is chosen by a certain age,” but this is early stuff.

What's interesting about the body—all mammals have a vagus nerve. When we talk about polyvagal theory, we're talking about the autonomic nervous system, and the vagus nerve is one of our cranial nerves, and it's the largest one. In Latin, vagus means “wanderer.” In Resmaa Menakem's book My Grandmother's Hands, he calls the vagus the soul nerve, which I love.

The vagus comes into our face—this is the social engagement part—comes into our face, our ears. It is regulating how my voice is, even how we swallow. And then into the heart, there's a vagal brake on the heart. That's all the ventral branch of the vagus, the social engagement, everything that is above the diaphragm.

Everything that is below the diaphragm is part of the dorsal branch of our vagus, and it goes into virtually every vital organ in our belly, in our abdomen. Has a lot to do with digestion. When our body is exposed to information, it is deciding: do I go into protection mode or connection mode?

The vagus—80% of it has afferent neurons, meaning that a lot of times we think about nerves as starting in our brain and then going into our body. Well, for the vagus, afferent means it's starting in the body and then taking that information to the brain, and then the brain responds. All of this happens—this is lower brain, brain stem. Our body is deciding without our personality or will. We don't get to think about how we're going to respond. If you think about hearing a car backfire—are you going to startle or not? Are you going to have a jump response, a jump scare?

That is wholly dependent on your vagus nerve and how it responds. Chris might get mad. And someone else might have a startle response or they might not, or someone else might—it might scare their body so much that then it even has a diminished heart rate. That would be more of that dorsal response.

Chris: We definitely need to talk about the fact that I was such an angry kid when I was younger. That's how I was perceived, because I was a fight responder. It's interesting—one of the things that really helped me when I learned about polyvagal theory was to reframe myself in the past. I was an angry kid, which has such a heavy emotional gravity to it. I was angry. I was so hurt. But it's so different when you think, “Oh, I'm a fight responder.” So I was constantly fighting with everybody because I was just in crisis.

When you look back on it—here's something heavy, or it would be, but it's not because I've done my work—I'm about to be 52 and my father died when he was 52 because of alcohol. When I was young, I was reacting to the fact that I had a father who drank so much. He was never sober. I think now, wow, he died when he was 52. I'm about to be 52. But when my father was my age, he was like an old man and he was in terrible shape. He'd had both of his hips replaced when he was like 41. Alcohol destroyed his life.

So now when I think back—I wasn't an angry kid. I was in fight mode. I was reacting to my environment and the crises in my life and trauma.

Autum: When you say that, I think: scared kid. In protection mode. Under threat all the time.

Chris: I was very explosive. But that was also such a self-sabotaging way of being, and so that's part of what makes it a unilevel phenomenon—it would sabotage me in relationships especially, because that would scare people. I was very impulsive. I always took it through a pathological lens, never thinking about it as a natural response. It was just my body's way. We all have preferences for how we respond and how our nervous systems are.

It's interesting too, to think—as we're sitting here, I'm thinking about the Dabrowski connections. Of course, that's what I do. In his 1972 book, Psychoneurosis Is Not an Illness, he talks about the nervous system in ways that align perfectly with polyvagal theory. Right now I have that book up on my screen and I'm looking at the section like “emotions as disintegrators and integrators.” Psychosomatic disorders, autonomic disequilibrium—this is what he was writing about. Your body reacting to your environment. And when you get control over that, and you can live in a regulated state and be in social engagement most of the time, you have worked through a unilevel disintegration to get there. Now I still get angry, but I'm not a fight responder the way I was even 10 years ago.

Autum: Well, and there's so much self-awareness inside of living either of the theories—having the self-understanding of what's happening. I'm guessing now when you know that you're in a fight or flight response—does your body tell you first? What are your early signs, Chris?

Chris: It's really my words. I'll say something in a way that is more loaded than usual, or more of a lashing out. For sure, the person who gets lashed out at the most probably is Michael. We have plenty of conflicts about things. And so what'll happen—I'll catch myself in my words and be like, “Oh, that sounds angry.” But sometimes I just let it go and he'll always call me on it, of course, and be like, “Well, you're lashing out at me again,” and I'm like, right. Because we have that kind of relationship where he can say that to me and it helps me wake up to the fact, if I haven't already realized that it's happening.

But I see it in my words. Because I write every day, and so I can tell in my angry words as I'm writing on paper. If I go to write the word “fuck,” you know that I'm mad. I used to swear all the time in my writing. If you look at my journals, even when I came to the theory, it was like, “fuck this, fuck that,” in my writing. I don't really swear in my writing anymore unless I'm pissed.

Autum: Emma, do you know when you're in a freeze? Does your body tell you, or your words tell you? How do you know that's where you are?

Emma: I first want to qualify—I say “fuck” with abandon, but it doesn't mean that I'm angry. I think Aussies maybe have a completely different relationship to swear words because we drop the C-bomb to refer to our friends. So it's not—

Chris: Well, it's not always in anger. I swear all the time. It's not that I'm using the word “fuck,” it's that I'm using “fuck” when I normally wouldn't. I don't usually use the word “fuck” with Michael, but I will when I'm mad about something.

Emma: I just don't want listeners to think that I'm angry every time I say “fuck,” because I'm not. I'm normally excited actually. The freeze thing's interesting though, because it was something that developed in childhood, but then when I was in an abusive relationship, it just cemented that behavior so badly. Because when you have someone who's very angry at you and you feel threatened for your safety, fighting back is just going to make it far more problematic than it already is. So this was ground into me.

Then as I got in a safer place, that behavior went away and I was able to have more constructive, challenging conversations in difficult times. Every now and then it will get triggered, and it's almost like my entire body stiffens up. Everything's whirring in my head. I want to say all these things and I don't, and it's so overwhelming that everything just wants to shut down. I think it's because my body thinks if it shuts down, it can shut down my brain. That's not what's going to happen. But I just feel my body becomes stiff and I start staring ahead and not making eye contact. I'm like, “Oh, that thing's happening.” It's very rare these days that that happens.

But when it does catch me, I'll just notice my body's gone very still, very stiff. And I stop making eye contact with the person I'm having an argument with or a conversation with. I just won't look, and then I can get literally to a point where someone could be screaming at me and I will just sit in a chair and look dead ahead. It's like a lizard when there's a predator—it's like nothing. It's complete shutdown.

Autum: Yeah. It's death feigning. Play dead. It's really fascinating. They're both adaptive responses. That's what's so fascinating about this—look how cool and smart your bodies are. Both of them are like, “Okay, what is our best chance of survival?” and then it chooses that without us having to think about it. That's what's so cool about how brilliantly designed our bodies are—you have these very dynamic and different responses. We're also talking about how there are some similarities over our lives thus far in this same body, but then there are some nuanced changes to it.

When people get healthier, their nervous system becomes hopefully more resilient. That's when you were saying, “Oh, it doesn't happen as often anymore.” Or Chris, you're also saying it happens like this. Even when you're talking about with Michael, and both of them actually are blended states. I want to explain that real quick.

Like Chris, when you're talking about you and Michael having a debate—that's kind of the difference between a debate and an argument. Maybe there is still a lot of this red fight or flight sympathetic energy. Maybe someone's warm, their heart is beating fast, they're maybe kind of sweaty, maybe their breathing is faster. But when Michael says, “Oh yeah, are you going to lash out at me?”—he probably has enough of a teasing, playful aspect to it. He's saying, “Hey, let me extend a hand to you.” It is a peace offering because he's asking you to come back into relationship with him. And then when your body says yes to that, then your social engagement system is coming back in. So it's actually a form of play that would be a blended state of play. You have this green, ventral vagal connection happening with your autonomic nervous system, and then you also have the sympathetic fight or flight. That's a blended state.

Same as Emma, when you're talking about the freeze—when it first starts, that your body gets stiff. When the body gets stiff like that, it goes into this hyper-awareness, which is close to fleeing. So you have fight and then you have flee, like run away. And then freeze is like that deer in the headlights, where the mind kind of gets pretty slow, doesn't really have a whole lot of capacity to respond. But the body gets hypertonic—it gets really tight and rigid.

If the body is in that space for too long—because it's metabolically costly, it takes a lot of calories and oxygen to stay in that high fight or flight stage, that high sympathetic, it's like sprinting—if the body's in it for too long, then the body will just say, “Hey, our best way to survive this is to go further into that dorsal.” So that freeze, that deer in the headlights, is a blend of red and blue—red being the sympathetic and blue being that dorsal shutdown. And so then Emma, when you said that if it gets bad, you'll just be in a chair and someone can yell at you and you're sort of dead to the world—that's more of a shutdown. I'm guessing at that point your body's probably getting a little bit softer. It's not going to have as much high muscle tone.

Emma: Yeah. You go through a state of hyper-awareness where you're like—I have to pay attention to every single stimulus because it's almost like two fighters waiting for someone to throw the first punch. And you're like, “I've got to be still and watch them with this intensity.” Even if you're not looking at the person, you are picking up every single signal because you're like, “I'm just waiting for them to lash out.” I want to duck the punch, kind of thing. But then yeah, you get to a point where you're just like, “Let's try and block this out.” Even your mind will try and wander away and not think about it.

Autum: Yeah. Well, it's dissociation. And it's a numbness.

Emma: Your body knows how to react. I've occasionally gone into fight mode, but it's in situations where I'm threatened but threatened by a loss of relationship or an abandonment—”don't go” kind of thing—where you don't actually feel a physical threat to yourself, but you are emotionally threatened. And I've also gone into flight mode as well where I'm like, “Fuck this. I'm running away from everything.” I literally just get in the car and drive off. Normally the freeze mode applies to a more imminent physical threat. So when I've been pushed into those places of that reaction, my body knows the level of danger and whatever, because it will choose for me which path that's going to go down.

Autum: So smart. Our bodies are so cool.

Chris: Our bodies are so cool, and I'm sitting here thinking in multiple directions and I almost wonder if I should start making notes because it's going to be hard to remember things.

But one thing I was thinking was that it's fascinating for me to listen to you both talk about your experience because it's so different from mine. It's really fascinating because it's just another area where we don't know until somebody else is talking about having a different inner experience than ours that other people react the way they do. And it's like, “Oh wow, so not everybody—” I'm realizing too while I'm listening to you that when I think about the issues I have with Michael that I get upset about, they're always interpersonal conflicts with people, or I've been—I'm perceiving that I've been mistreated in some way.

The thing about what I was describing about my father—my wound is having what I perceived as a rejecting parent when I was a kid. Having a parent like that is tough because you're like, “Oh wow, they're unreachable.” So now in adulthood, it's been amazing for me to have a mentor like Michael, who I could have an authentic emotional relationship with who could be the mirror that I needed to show me how to not lash out, how to be like, “Okay, I don't want to hurt you just because I'm hurt.” That's not the answer. But these things are so hard to figure out and actually work on because they're the way that we react when we're hurt.

Autum: To know it is so good. It's also like shadow stuff too. You want to know, because one isn't better than the other—they're just different. And really, every single mammal has access to all three states. Blue, that dorsal shutdown—that's also like deep meditation. It's this high parasympathetic, which is part of the dorsal branch. Just being able to be in a deep state of being present. Like Chris, for your imaginal world—that's part of your dorsal space, I'm guessing?

Chris: Well, it's the place where I was able to have a relationship with a father. What did I have in my imaginal world? I created a family that I didn't have in my everyday life and interacted there, which I desperately needed. Now I realize what an extraordinary coping mechanism that was for me. And yet it was more than a coping mechanism because it was also access to another reality. I was able to see myself operate there and in adulthood, develop myself. It became a place of rehearsal and it became a place where I could observe relationships in my mind and be like, “Well, that's who I want to be. That's not who I want to be.” That's where the dynamisms played out for me, really on a stage in my mind.

Because I could observe myself screwing up with people—I'm the kind of person who really plays things out in my head. But this is another issue: I've learned that it's healthier for me to not operate that way in that dissociative state because when I do, I'm reinforcing the intense emotions that keep me in fight mode. The more I'm dwelling in my imagination and I'm reliving traumas and hurts, the more dysregulated I am. So I do so much better to not live in my imagination, and I'm happy to have integrated that process.

Autum: All the connection opportunity you had was not with other humans in your imaginal world. That's the through line of when I think about these last few minutes of conversation and the topics we've been bringing up—the through line is that each one of us is talking about when I understand this more, what I want is I want to make sure that I'm really prioritizing my relationships. That's the connection bit.

As you understand, “Oh, my body is taking me into this deep protection mode, but I really want to stay in connection.” For Emma, that looks like, “Oh wow, maybe a little bit of that fight energy is needed to be like, ‘Oh, focus, there's something you care about here. Go towards it.'” Take action towards keeping this relationship. It's the same, Chris—if Michael, if you guys are having a debate—because it can't be a siren's call. Going deep into each of these old states, if we talk about getting stuck in them, that is the trauma response.

You can have the trauma response of rage—rage is a little bit numbing. So is that deep dissociative—that's numbing too. It's interesting to have to be able to learn your body, understand where you are, and then to have that deeper connection with yourself and hopefully that multilevel understanding of what you're going for. And then to maybe resist a little bit of that siren's call into staying firmly planted in either that deep sympathetic or that deep dorsal response and being like, “Oh, I've got to move back towards connection.”

Chris: It's so important. It's really interesting—another theory that I came to around the time I came to the theory of positive disintegration was relational cultural theory, which talks about the impact of connection and disconnection. There are so many things I was learning at the same time that the overlap—it's just amazing to me. For me, having relationships is the most important thing in the world, being in connection.

When I was young, even though I was a fight responder, what's really beautiful about my story is I had all of these adults who were able to be supportive presences for me and safe people for me to lash out at and just be terrible to. When I was young—and so Dabrowski's word for that, it's an ambitendency—when I was a kid, I was the worst to the people who were kindest to me. The people who were nice to me, I was like, “Go fuck yourself.” I really remembered myself badly as a kid because I was lashing out at everybody because I was so hurt. But these people really saw me, and they were so great, and I considered them trusted adults. Lo and behold, all of these theories make sense of what it was that saved me when I was young. I'm sure that I would've killed myself if I hadn't been able to find relationships with people who could be there for me when I was young.

Autum: Two things. Learning about co-regulation was so powerful. I was like, “Oh yes, totally.” This connection, the way we're talking about relationship and the social engagement system—your life is better. But what's fascinating about polyvagal theory is this is literally what is underneath our health, our wellbeing. When you're in relationship, your liver is functioning better, your brain is functioning better, your actual heart beats differently. It's fascinating. This isn't just like, “Oh golly gee, life's better when I'm in relationship.” This is what polyvagal theory explains—our bodies are designed to be in relationship, and this is the actual foundation of our health.

We try in the western world to separate this with body, mind, spirit—it doesn't matter. All three. It is the foundation of body, mind, spirit health. Our organ function is incredibly influenced by whether we're in connection mode or protection mode. So much so that a lot of times when people hear about the vagus nerve, they hear, “Oh, vagal toning. You can get a vagal stimulator or you can hum, or you can sing and breathe.” All those things are 100% true, but also the most impactful is being in relationship.

This conversation—that's what's so cool about it. All of us feel good, our brains are working, our hearts feel sort of open, but this is a vitamin. This is like getting an IV right now, and you're having all the goods be put into your actual flesh because this conversation is a vagal toner, just because we're in relationship.

Chris, when you were talking about how it was good for you to hear what Emma and I were talking about—our experience of having a more dorsal threat response, more of a shutdown—what's really fascinating is it's so good for us to know them all really well. Because typically when we're in partnership with a person, one is red, one is blue. In most relationships, there's a person who has a red tendency and a person who has a blue tendency. So it's always really good if we can understand our friends, loved ones, partners.

Chris: I'm laughing because yeah, if Jason was also like me? I mean, how could we live together if we were both like this? People do live like that and it's pretty rough. I think that the key to our relationship is how he is able to absorb the way I am so well, and we complement each other so beautifully in the ways that we are.

Autum: Well, and for me, as I get healthier, I can move into a red response and I can be like, “Hey, hey, hey.” I can kind of be like Michael.

He definitely is. It's good for me to really—and Emma, this is sort of a question for you too. For me, as I become more responsible and the more sovereignty that I can inhabit means I will move into a red space more consciously. Kind of be in that more shutdown and then notice, “Oh wait, you can't just pull out, you can't just go numb. You have to go in there and move into conflict and try and have enough courage and grit to do that.” Do you notice that, Emma?

Emma: Yes. I've noticed I can get a little bit red and snappy, but I get red and snappy when I feel safe actually in expressing my feelings with people. It's funny because that whole thing about a red person and a blue person together—when that power balance gets out of control, because arguably the red person's going to be venting all their feelings and having everything they have to say, and the blue person's just going to be sitting there feeling threatened. That's really bad.

I found that with me and my husband, now that I’m in a place of safety, we kind of cycle through these things. At first we’re testing each other—okay, that doesn’t work, try something else—because our defenses are starting to fall away. Then the red comes out and it’s like, okay, how do we get back to green space?

Sometimes it’s literally about saying, “The disagreement right now is about a coffee mug.” I say that because there’s one sitting on my desk. One person goes blue: “Why won’t you engage with me and talk about this?” The other goes red: “Why are you raising your voice at me? What did I do wrong?”

So we put the coffee mug aside for a moment and have a separate conversation about how we react and why. For example: “I shut down because when you raise your voice, I feel threatened and don’t know how to handle it.” Or, “I raise my voice because I feel abandoned and like you’re not listening to me when you shut down.” That kind of honesty helps us get back to green space together. We can always come back to the disagreement later when we’re in a better headspace.

Autum: Exactly. What you’re talking about is curiosity—the willingness to ask, “Why are you reacting this way?” That’s part of the green ventral space: curiosity, creativity, learning, problem-solving. Shelving the topic and asking questions brings in that green energy.

Two body-based tips can also help. First, go for a walk. Even just walking laps inside the house helps. A body that tends toward blue shutdown stays more engaged in motion, while a body in red can metabolize some of that extra sympathetic energy through movement. Walking together helps both bodies move closer to green space.

Second, add touch if possible. Even just holding hands makes a difference. Or imagine sitting on the couch, foot to foot, trading foot rubs while you take turns speaking. That kind of contact naturally shifts the conversation toward being more constructive.

Chris: That’s a great point.

Emma: This concludes the first part of the conversation. I’d like to thank our guest, Autum, for joining us, and thank Chris—it’s always a pleasure. And thank you, listeners. We hope you’ll join us for the second part of this conversation.

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