To protect ourselves, our body automatically scans for signals of safety and of danger. Through trauma and prolonged periods of stress, the body can become overly focused on signals of danger. It then judges innocent situations such as being together at a birthday party as dangerous. You then notice this by not feeling at ease, without really knowing why. This causes you to experience more and more stress. And therefore it is difficult to relax and let go, you feel as if you are always on.
Further explanation Neuroperception
Neuroception is a term described by Stephen Porges. It refers to the way our autonomic nervous system examines whether we are safe or not.
When the processes of neuroception determine that we are safe, we move to ventral. When sufficient signals of insecurity are perceived, we move to our sympathetic stress state. And upon the perception of life danger that can no longer be helped, we lapse to our depressed dorsal state.
Neuroception (= the search for signs of insecurity) takes place at three levels:
- Inside: in our body, for example, heartbeat, blood pressure or a thought.
- Outside: in our environment, for example, an animal or vehicle coming towards you.
- Between: in relation to others, for example, when someone looks at you angrily or happily.
These three streams of information operate continuously, from micro moment to micro moment, for the sake of our survival. And the processes of neuroception run outside of our awareness, but continuously drive our behavior. From rapprochement to avoidance, from feelings of anger, fear to joy.
When you dwell on this, you understand how all of your experiences, thoughts, feelings and behaviors are determined and colored by these processes, and that everything begins with the processes of neuroception.
But how are you going to get a handle on this if these are unconscious processes? The answer lies in what happens as a result of neuroception. We are going to add perception to neuroception, we are going to make the implicit experiences explicit, so we can work with them. The conscious experiences of neuroception are often experienced as intuition or a gut feeling, we all know what this feels like. So that sense of intuition can also be called an autonomous sense of intuition of the underlying process of neuroception. The goal is to start learning to listen to it.
Only then can we dwell on which state has been activated by the process of neuroception and if we follow this path then we come to thoughts, feelings and behaviors and thus the story of your autonomic nervous system. Only then can you begin to change the stories, with the goal of coming into harmony with yourself.
If you find this interesting and want to develop yourself further in this, you can do so with the course you get with the order of The Safe and sound Protocol.
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