Evie Mpras: you you Hey mamas, I'm here to give it straight on what it means to be emotionally regulated and how to get there so we can get out of fight, flight or freeze, get out of a sense of like shut down or immediately lashing out and just getting back into a zone of ease for our own relief and for more connection in our relationships. And this is definitely another great episode to listen to with your partner, because you both need to be regulated to have productive conversations as you're navigating so much together, loving conversations where you start. feeling more like you're on the same side and connected. Now, right off the bat, I gotta say, if you are parenting in the thick of postpartum, no, it is not a realistic expectation to quote, have it all together. When you're postpartum, in those first weeks and months, there's so much to adjust to, bringing baby home. And if you're a birthing mom, you have a physical and hormonal recovery as well, and maybe navigating feeding on top of it all, right? So in those fragile weeks and early months, nope, this is not a time to feel like you need to Be your best self, et cetera. Like you need others to give you calm, to soothe you, to reassure you, to protect you. Now, some of these regulating tips I'm gonna get into will help you too. It could help bring relief. I just don't want you to see them as like a measure of success or something that you're trained to live up to, but rather some tools that can help you feel some relief, okay? I'm licensed marriage and family therapist, Evie Empress, and I'm really here to bring my experience working with hundreds of couples in the same stage that you are. to bring your relationship relief and connection in the special time of your lives where you deserve to feel supported, connected, and essentially like you are in it together. That's how it should be. So I'm gonna dive in here. I really wanted to make this episode because I mentioned being regulated a lot in my different episodes and I realized it's not that easy. What does that mean? That takes actually a lot of understanding of how the brain and body works. It takes practice. And so I wanna offer some... episodes here, the next two episodes on easy steps towards getting regulated. And the reason this is important, look, I mean, we know why it's important for us on our own. We'll get relief, we'll have less anxiety and less tension, we'll have more clarity and it's just less stressful, right? Not to be reactive, not to be in this like tangled tense state. But think about it, when we're not regulated, what does that mean for our relationships too? And this goes both ways of course. If we are not clear on how we're feeling, if it's all tangled up inside, right? If we're like getting swept up in reactivity, then how can we let anyone in really? How can we be authentic? If we can't be authentic with ourselves, if we're not in that state of connection with ourselves, how can we offer that to our partners? How can we be present for them too, if they have something to bring that's hard to sit with? If we're getting deregulated really easily when they have something they also want to bring to us, you know, that can also be something that's going to block connection and vice versa. Like this goes both ways. Like I said, no, we all get dysregulated. Everybody does. And it's not possible to prevent that all the time, but it is possible to recover faster from dysregulation, to notice it faster and like catch it a bit faster. And over time for it to get easier and easier to catch before it starts going in a spiral. So I want to start by giving a visual that may help. Dr. Dan Siegel has this visual in one of his books. I forgot which one. And I use it all the time with my clients. I actually use it myself sometimes when I can feel myself go into that breaking point. And he has like three blocks of colors. And at the top, it's red. In the middle, it's green. And the bottom, it's blue. Okay. And the middle, let's start with the middle, the green is like when we're regulated. Regulated is a state of feeling like very comfortable in our own skin. We are at ease. It's easy to listen and consider what other people are saying without getting super defensive or prickly. Like you're able to be open to others. You're able to be curious about yourself to observe without. going in the red zone or the blue zone, okay? And the red zone is what you might think, it's like lashing out behaviors. So it's shouting or slamming a door, or I mean, it could be so many things, like huffing and puffing around the house, I don't know. They call it like externalizing behaviors. And the blue is shutting down. So even though they both look really different, they're both reactive. So shutting down, the blue is like getting really quiet, withdrawing. going off into like an island of yourself, right? Not engaging, maybe like thoughts start to kind of shut down, shut off, like retreating from others and even maybe from yourself too, like it goes kind of cold. So both of these are reactive. And when we notice ourselves, I mean, you may have one that happens more often than the other. Most people do both, but maybe one is more common for you than the other. And it's good to maybe just be curious about that in, you know, weeks to come, just say like, ⁓ just start noticing is what's my tendency when I get dysregulated to know that. And when you have that visual, I mean, I visuals really helpful. You can start seeing it like, am I in the green zone? Ooh, I'm getting to the red zone. Like it's something that you can recall in your mind that can help almost scaffold the process of observing. Okay. And look, triggers like these are. signs that something's wrong with you. Everybody gets triggered. It's basically something in your brain or body or nervous system trying to protect you. It's like trying to shield you from something. especially you guys, when we are in early parenthood, when we have babies or small children, look, we're not getting sleep. Hey, I have a two year old, like I'm in it too with you. We don't get sleep. There's the caregiving is pretty consuming. There's big identity shifts going on. And there's also relationship strain. So triggers are just more likely to happen, more intense. It's just kind of like a vulnerable period for it. Old attachment wounds can get activated too, right? Like if you feel that you're not getting the help you need, sometimes it goes global, like nobody's helping me. If your needs aren't getting met, it might go to my needs don't matter to anybody, right? Again, it goes global. I'm alone in all of this, right? So if there are feelings again that are really hard to sit with, it's gonna go reactive, okay? It's like your attachment system saying like, you need to get on high alert here because something is not emotionally safe. And that's why triggers are happening. And it touches a memory from your past, okay? Like if you've had an experience where, let's say when you were a kid, you really needed help from your parents at certain stages of your life and they were not available to help you. Well, if you're in the postpartum stage and you're going through something, you feel like your partner is not there the way you really, really need him, that may be getting triggered. The hippocampus in the brain is almost, it's like this filing cabinet that'll roll out and open up and be like, ⁓ this has happened to you before. Better be on alert, better be on protection. And it happens, we're not aware of it. It just happens so quickly. So when something happens that's upsetting in some way and we have feelings about it, we're gonna get triggered because something in our brain and body is saying, emotional danger, emotional danger, and we're like, oh, gotta make sure I'm safe. And your body's gonna react first before your brain. And your thinking part of the brain is like, nope, I'm out. And your body's just on this adrenaline, okay? So the first thing you need to do, the first first thing you need to do, and this will take time. This is not gonna be at 100 % the first time you try this, but. Observe, observe, observe. Because when you start observing what is happening in your body, in your mind, you start to be more in control than the anxiety, than the trigger, the reactivity. So for example, if you start noting yourself going from green to red, what happens in your body? Okay. Do you have palpitations? Do your hands start clenching? Do you get sweaty? Does something feel queasy in your stomach? Okay, like there are actual physical symptoms. So start noticing, noticing, noticing what's happening in your body. The act of noticing, again, I know I'm being repetitive, I'm being repetitive on purpose because this is so important. Almost imagine yourself like a lab coat. You are a scientist like above observing what's going on in your body. It will pull you out of the spiral to observe, okay? What's going on in my body? What thoughts are running through my mind and what's happening? How am I dealing with this? Right? Like, am I starting to snap? Am I shutting down? Am I criticizing or attacking my partner? Etc. Like start, just notice that too. Cause sometimes it happens before you can stop it, especially in the beginning or when something is like a very strong trigger. So just being able to observe, observe, observe, because the more you do this, the earlier you will be able to catch it and get out of the spiral. Okay. If you want to start a podcast or grow your existing one, Juliana Barbati and her team have you covered. They handle the entire process from building episode funnels to production and marketing. So you can focus on reaching your audience. Visit julianabarbati.com and let them know I sent you. Here's the next step. Once you get a little familiar with just observing that it is happening, that you're getting triggered, that you're going in the red zone or the blue zone. and you know, there's reactivity and you're dysregulated. That is a sign that feelings are getting suppressed, that there are feelings you're having that are hard to sit with, okay? There's a lot of therapists out there, I don't know if someone's listening, they're gonna get mad at me, but a lot of them say anxiety is a feeling. It's not a feeling, it's an alert system that happens that says like, something is not emotionally safe here. And it's because there are feelings underneath the anxiety. and they're hard to sit with. So for example, I know this is so taboo, it shouldn't be, but like we have mixed feelings towards our babies, towards our kids. And it's very uncomfortable for us to have those feelings because we want to protect them. We feel like, you know, they need to be shielded with our love and our love is actually what keeps us so attentive to our babies. So it almost feels like a threat to have mixed feelings. But you know, if you have been up with the baby, for six days, six nights in a row and you haven't gotten any sleep, it's gonna be natural to, know, even though of course it's not the baby's job to sleep, it's not their responsibility to sleep, but it's natural to feel irritated. And so is it possible to love your baby and to be irritated at your baby at the same time? It doesn't mean you don't love them. And feelings are not behaviors, you guys. That's another big thing. Like I think people often think feeling is like a threat. If I'm angry at my spouse, that's a threat. It's dangerous to feel angry. No, you can feel however you feel like that's just instinctual. You're just accountable for your behavior. And actually the more regulated we are, the more we can manage our behaviors and be accountable with our behaviors. So the reason I'm getting into all this is because it's very soothing to identify the feelings that are coming up when you're dysregulated and to reassure yourself that it's okay to have them. Okay. So for example, Let's say you had just such a long day and you asked your partner to pick up, I don't know, to pick up some formula from the store or to pick up like your favorite juice or something. And your partner gets back and they didn't bring anything that you wanted and you get majorly triggered for a variety of reasons, right? Like, and you're majorly triggered and you notice yourself get like totally shutting down, closing off. And you start to observe, ⁓ okay, ⁓ I notice in my body, like my body's kind of going limp. I'm turning away. I have palpitations. I'm a little clammy and you notice what's happening in your body. You notice that you're shutting down. That's good. The next step is to say like, what am I feeling right now? What are the feelings under this anxiety? What would you be feeling towards your spouse? You'd be feeling angry, right? And for many reasons, it's sometimes uncomfortable for people to just feel anger towards someone that they love. And that can cause a lot of anxiety. So sometimes just saying, am very angry at my spouse right now. This really like reminds me of times in my past where I really needed someone. I really needed help. And I wanted someone to show up for me and they didn't show up for me. And it's happening again. And just noticing that, Hey, it's okay to have. my feelings. It's normal to have these feelings is very soothing. The act of just even with your mind to identify them and to reassure yourself that it's totally natural to have your feelings is soothing. I promise you. Because sometimes a lot of the tension and reactivity will just stay pretty heightened because it's like, I'm feeling this, I shouldn't be feeling this, I'm feeling this, I should be feeling this. Even unconsciously, you may not be aware of it, but there's something really uncomfortable you're sitting with. So I want to go over this just step by step really briefly again, to give you just the bullet points here. Notice, notice, notice what's happening in your body, right? If you notice yourself going from green to red to blue, which means lashing out or shutting down in some way, notice the symptoms that are coming up in your body, where you're feeling it in your body, right? Is your jaw clenching? Is there heat in your face, et cetera? And that will help bring you back to the present moment. That will help empower you to be more in charge rather than this spiral of reactivity being in charge. Okay. So something's activated here. You can use your own language, right? Like, the red light's turning on in my brain. Whatever, like visual sometimes help, or I'm going in the red zone, I'm going in the blue zone, something like that. So again, you get in a position of observing rather than being in the middle of the spiral. Okay. Start to ground yourself, maybe observe things around you, sounds that you're hearing. the way your body feels, let's say on the couch or how a pillow feels at your side and just noticing like physical details, sensory details, basically, that could get you back in the present moment. Notice behaviors like, hey, what behaviors was I like acting out just now? Not to criticize yourself, but just to truly just to notice. And then, huh, what was going on under all that reactivity? Like, what am I feeling? Okay, is there something that was hurtful where I'm just feeling alone again, that I'm not valued, that I'm getting rejected? You know, start identifying what's going on and then what feelings are coming up. Okay, grief, anger, et cetera. And the more you do this in real time, it's like, you know, building a muscle. It's like if you go to the gym and you pick up a heavy weight, it's heavy, really heavy in the beginning. And then after, a few weeks it gets lighter and lighter. It's the same thing for our brains and our bodies. The more we practice this act of observing, the more relief we're going to get, okay? The more we can slow down the reactivity and tune back into ourselves so we can get some relief, some exhales, some clarity, which is soothing in itself, okay? And this also makes us more available, our partners more available, because both of you would be great if both are listening right now. So both of you can be available for each other as your authentic selves rather than like this reactive state. We all know like, you know, productive conversations are not going to happen that way. And already when you guys are dealing with so much, a lot of reactivity is just going to make that harder and create more and more distance and walls between you guys. Okay. So look, this is an opportunity for healing in real time. This is an opportunity for you to tune into yourselves so that it's easier to share more vulnerably with each other. And I wanted to let you know that next episode, I'm gonna get into co-regulation. So how you guys can actually help each other. Cause again, this is not something that should just be on you. It's an opportunity for you guys to help each other regulate. And I'm gonna get into details of how to do that for each other next week. Check out my coaching offers in the link below. I'm here for you and your family. Goodbye.