New Year, New Nervous System!
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Day 7: Shame & The Nervous System

Hey Regulators!

Shame—-uhhhhgggggg. It’s an incredibly powerful emotion and visceral feeling I am all too familiar with. It can have devastating consequences on our lives, the nervous system, and on our neurophysiology (check out the stock image above of the Vagus and how deeply it wanders into our bodies. More on this below). We cannot separate this radically heavy emotion from the way it physiologically plays out inside our bodies.

Brenee Brown talks a lot about the difference between shame and guilt. On her website, www.breneebrown.com, she defines shame as “the intensely painful feeling or experience of believing that we are flawed and therefore unworthy of love and belonging—something we’ve experienced, done, or failed to do makes us unworthy of connection.” She talks about guilt being more adaptive and helpful. “It’s holding something we’ve done or failed to do up against our values and feeling psychological discomfort.” It moves us more toward morality, away from chaos.

The main difference between the two is this: when you have shame, you feel as though you are inherently bad or not worthy. When you experience guilt, you feel bad for something you may have done which means you are holding yourself accountable for your actions. With shame, we mistake it for who we are. With guilt, it's a temporal experience that passes by. There's a reason for this, and it can be best understood through the lens of evolutionary psychology. 

First, I just want to credit where I learned this information just in case you want to research more about this topic. You can look these courses up and take them yourself! Years ago, I took an Evolutionary Psychology class through Coursera with Teacher, Journalist, and Author, Robert Wright, who wrote the books “Why Buddhism is True,” and “The Moral Animal,” which I highly recommend. I also did a series with Dr. Stephen Porges on the neurophysiology of shame through NICABM. This work is widely talked about in the Somatic Experiencing world as well. 

First and foremost, we are WILD ANIMALS! Comprehending this will change how you see yourself, your relationships, and your body. For me personally, grasping this has allowed me to be so much more compassionate to myself and my body for the things I've done and how they’ve manifested in my life and in my somatic experience. We are all just trying to stay alive. In doing so, we act out some crazy scenarios people might not understand (we don't even understand them!!). But it's just our body attempting to self-regulate and not be ousted by the tribe.

In our evolutionary history, rejection could come with death. Not having the protection from a group was the difference between life and death. And death is the very thing our biology is trying to avoid. Because of this, our bodies have some extreme responses. One of them is to deeply feel things in service of moving us away from experiences that could be dangerous and potentially end our lives.

I've come to understand our nervous system, our responses, and our incredible bodies best by looking at them through the scope of the phylogenetic evolution of the nervous system. This is the representation of the way our nervous system evolved from reptiles, to mammals, to human beings. We see this laid out in the way the brain is structured as well. The triune brain: the reptilian brain, then the limbic system, and finally, the neocortex. Under stress, we lose our sense of logic and language, and default to our limbic system, and our reptilian brain-- our original brains. In short, we go into survival mode. This is where a lot of our responses are born from. 

Most animals are pack animals, or at least needed the support and care from the group dynamic at some juncture of their existence. Obviously, there are exceptions to this rule, but for the most part, animals move in groups, which was part of the design of natural selection. The group scenario provided care, resources, protection, and mates. This results in a good possible outcome of gene proliferation. This is what it's all about: getting your genes into the next generation and carrying on the species! So, as you can see, being a part of a group has been essential to survival for time immemorial. Humans are the same way! 

Okay, so if that's the case, it would make sense that there may have been some qualities designed in the process of our selection, that could be strong enough to keep us moving within the group structure, and not away from it. Shame is one of those qualities. We need our groups, so we have deeply felt emotions and feelings that keep our bodies moving toward being together versus apart. These strong emotions also are what drive us toward people pleasing, fawning, appeasing, and overall just trying to stay appropriate and copacetic in groups. Being liked, respected, loved, admired, and needed is a part of our evolution and of staying alive. 

Shame is what happens, when you feel like an outlier of these qualities or act in the opposite way. Doing something harmful or shameful, (or just feeling like a reject or that you don't belong) could potentially get you ousted from the tribe. Getting rejected from the group could result in death. This is why shame can feel like death or a desire to disappear. It evolved so it would be dramatic enough you wouldn’t do anything to evoke it. Or if you did, you would have a strong enough response, you wouldn't do it again. All of these responses are about survival! At some point they were adaptive. But for a lot of us, they've become maladaptive. 

What I'm getting at is that Shame lives in the body and has deep neurophysiological repercussions. Because it mirrors feelings of death, it manifests as a deep seated dorsal vagal freeze response. When the dorsal vagal comes on, there's a slowing of the heart, blood pressure, and all bodily resources and viscera below the diaphragm. This is the body's self defense mechanism and its way of preserving what energy we have left, for our very survival. It's our conservation system. It can show up in a variety of ways. But I've experienced it as depression, gut inflammation, irritable bowel, Crohn’s, ulcerative colitis, gastrointestinal issues, and the overall feeling of just plain yuck-- from my ribs down. 

The shit news is that our bodies are not going to stop doing their job of protecting us– even when they don't actually need to. The good news is that knowledge is power. Before I even understood this information, I felt the impact of shame in my guts, and started doing all sorts of weird things to wake that area up. I was trying to regulate my system even before I understood that's what my body was doing! My body was trying to work for me! Once I understood what it was moving me toward, I was able to consciously jump in and help it function even better! 

In the video below, I'll show you the personal gut practice (nauli kriya) I've been doing for years that has helped me bring this part of my body back to life! Because the Vagus nerve runs from the brainstem to the colon and innervates so many of the parts in this lower digestive and reproductive zone, it makes sense that doing body practices that target this area have the capacity to also target the Vagus nerve from the viscera up! This work has been deeply healing for me! Just study the picture in the header and check out how many places this particular nerve commingles with! Vagus means: wanderer. I'm sure you see why. This brain body connection is so undeniable!

The last thing I want to say for now is that doing this physical work is not a substitute for the therapy it might take to understand why you feel shame in the first place. Or that information may even arise for you as you are targeting this area of your body through the gut work. Remember, we are a MIND-BODY system! Having both a felt and cognitive sense of what's going on– is a more complete and holistic package of healing! You gotta shine a light on all your parts! 

Practice Day 7: Shame & Dorsal Vagal Gut Practice (Nauli Kriya)

Love you all!
LDD