How I Plan to Unf*ck My Nervous System

Spoiler alert: It's a bundle of delicious contradictions.

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Now back to our regularly scheduled programming.

“Do you have any neck pain?” The ultrasound technician asked me. I was having a thyroid ultrasound, which I do every 2-3 years because of the nodules that my aesthetician noticed during a facial over a decade ago. I don’t know why they’re there; my thyroid is a carefully guarded fortress sprinkled with nodes and lumps that have required two excruciating (benign) biopsies.

“Well, yes,” I told her. “My neck hurts all the time. But I don’t think it’s because of these nodules.”

She nodded. “They don’t usually cause pain, but sometimes people have pain or difficulty swallowing. Do you have trouble swallowing?”

“Yes, but I also have an autoimmune swallowing disorder.”

She raised her eyebrows and wanted to hear more. I explained how it showed up when I was pregnant and suddenly couldn’t keep food down. I threw up dozens of times every day, but it wasn’t like traditional hyperemesis. I would race to the bathroom to “do a gag,” as I called it, and throw up the contents not of my stomach, but of my esophagus, which was like a traffic jam in Manhattan. The baby was fine—I gained a total of 17 pounds through the pregnancy and received weekly IV fluids by the end, when I had to quit my job to focus on my career of daily vomiting.

The surgery I had three years ago to “fix” it will never really repair it. My esophagus is narrow and has no propulsive motion; there is an incision at the base of it to allow food down, and a fancy wrap named a “fundlipication” that theoretically prevents reflux from coming up. It’s called achalasia. Nobody’s ever heard of it.

Neck pain. Thyroid nodules. Swallowing disorder. That year I lost my voice eight times.

Hmm. I’m sensing a pattern here. Throat chakra dysfunction, anyone?

I’m a singer and a writer. Voice is kind of my raison d'être. And I clearly have throat-centric issues. My column last week was about “Cassandra Complex,” which, at its roots, is about being silenced. I’m more woo-y than most, but I think even a purely logical thinker might raise their eyebrows about the connections here.

So back to last week. I shared with you ChatGPT’s gorgeously curated exploration of the Greek mythology of Cassandra and my own newly discovered—but likely employed since my umbilical cord was cut—“part” of my system that had been flaring with regularity, demanding to finally be heard. And I promised I would share my plan to undo the fuckery Cassandra’s plight has wreaked upon my physical and mental health.

Well, I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but I’ve made only the smallest bit of progress in this endeavor. I’m trying. Let me tell you my intentions.

How to regulate yourself when you suck at that

Before I formally “met” my Cassandra part in a therapy session (read last week’s post if you need clarification that I do not in fact have multiple personalities—IFS therapy involves tuning deeply into your own system to identify the parts of you that happen to be activated), I met her protector. I called her the Ice Vampire. Now I call her Ivy, for short (I.V., for those who may be perplexed), and basically she wants to destroy people. Not all people, mind you. Just people who deserve it. Assholes, if you will. Purveyors of the patriarchy. Gaslighters. Bullies. Narcissists and their second cousin personality disordered pals.

When I feel a sense of injustice creeping in, this part goes to town. Now, because I do not have Dissociative Identity Disorder and because my murderous, vengeful vampire is not an actual person, no human beings are harmed during this gruesome tableau. But here’s what happens: My mind unleashes the confrontational fantasies that have been my frequent pastime since childhood. I’ve called them confrontational fantasies for years, maybe decades. What I didn’t understand was why exactly they existed, unless I was some sort of sadistic psychopath.

We are so good at protecting ourselves, aren’t we? Except most of the time it isn’t really a protection. It can hurt us.

In the car last week, I caught myself in one of these bloodthirsty revenge fantasies. I played and replayed which words I would say. Words, of course, are my particular brand of poison. My weapon of choice when it comes to evisceration. I will have you gutted before you even see the hook. Well, not you. You’re lovely, I imagine.

Perhaps less Cassandra vibes and more Medusa?

As I caught this familiar loop of rage and retribution, I realized my entire body was tense. Probably had someone been taking my blood pressure, the results would have been dismaying. Adrenaline was likely spewing through my system like a fire hose (or shall I use the phrase my teenage daughter found quite distasteful in last week’s post—ejaculating cortisol?) Likely, my problematic glucose that I recently became aware of was also spiking. Fuck.

So for reasons indiscernible, I did something my brother, a therapist, taught me after I’d been in a car accident while pregnant and was experiencing hypervigilance and other trauma responses. “Find everything blue,” he told me, which is a grounding technique that can be useful to get out of fight or flight mode. My daughter’s therapist tells her to find “5 things she can see; 4 things she hears; 3 things she smells,” etc. Same concept.

So as I drove, unclenching my hands around the steering wheel, I began with the blue sky out my window. A blue car. A blue building. Blue font on a billboard. OK. I was calming down.

For the next few days, whenever I found myself sliding into rage, I would find everything blue in my environment. My water bottle. The mala around my wrist. The blue icons on my computer screen.

I told one of my best friends (also a therapist—are you guys sensing a theme here?) about my new plan, and then we laughed uncontrollably after I told her this gem. Before you laugh, feel free to allow the appropriate rage.

“Did you know that if you want to sell your wedding ring after a divorce, they won’t give you access to your jewelry records? Only your husband, because he bought it. My personal assistant called to get the certification packet, and they said they could only talk to my husband. So if a woman wants to sell her ring, according to the jeweler, she needs his permission to release the information. Can you fucking imagine? Sorry, ma’am, we can’t email you your wedding ring receipt without the permission of the husband you divorced.”

I told this to my friend and then I began yelling, “BLUE! BLUE! BLUE!” and darting my eyes wildly around to trigger my calming signal. Then we laughed our asses off.

Sidenote: I mean, technically, that’s false—you can take your wedding ring any goddamn place you like, and now there are places like Worthy that don’t need any information at all—just your ring. Also, prepare to receive a devastating fraction of what it’s worth.

She told me about a strategy that’s based on a concept popularized by Emily Nagoski, Ph.D., and Amelia Nagoski, D.M.A., in their 2019 book Burnout: The Secret to Unlocking the Stress Cycle. I need to read the book, you guys, but listen, I’m way too fucking stressed. 😉

Completing the stress cycle

The idea is that at transitional moments in your day—think, between clients, after Zoom meetings, after watching your kid’s sports tournament, following a big event—you acknowledge the completion of a “stress cycle” by doing something to reset your nervous system in a positive way. She suggested watching the IG reel you think is hilarious every single time. Send a message to your body—that appointment is over, that tense phone call is done, it’s okay to relax. You’re safe now. Go ahead and enjoy those puppies being bathed at a Japanese spa. You deserve it.

It blew my damn mind, you guys. I try to honor the completion of big cycles like a LTYM Boulder season with something deliberate and grounding, but the idea that I could be intentionally marking the completion of micro-stress-cycles, even fun, exciting ones!, was groundbreaking. Because I have no doubt that my body is in low-key fight or flight nearly every single day. (Sometimes high-key, just sayin.)

I have never, ever done well with transitions, especially when I have too much going on in my day. I tend to lose my shit when my days are too scavenger-hunt-ish (You guys, I would suck at the Amazing Race. Like, it’s literally my worst nightmare. My partner would despise me.) and involve me dashing from meeting to meeting or errand to errand to pick up kids, teach voice lessons, hop on Zoom, and try to clean up the house.

But what if I acknowledged and completed every transition instead of leaving them dangling like the open tabs in my computer, piling up until I dangerously exceed my memory and storage limits? What if I signaled my nervous system to calm down a dozen times a day? As it stands, my ritual game is strong—I begin and end the day with rituals tailored exactly to an ADHD woman. But throughout the day? All bets are off.

Here are the ideas we came up with to complete a stress cycle, large or small:

• Watch that funny reel for the hundredth time

• Listen to my favorite song and have a 2-minute dance party

• Sit in my hammock chair with something to drink

• Walk the dog

• Do five minutes of breathing

• Meditate

• Call a friend

It can be less than a minute, but it’s really all about mindfulness. Step one: Notice I’m under cortisol attack. Then ground myself in my environment (Code blue, blue blue BLUE goddammit). Step two: identify opportunities when I can mindfully complete a stress cycle.

Vagus (Nerve), baby!

I continue to add strategies to Operation Unfuck the Nervous System this summer. While I was awake with insomnia at 4 am (this is not a recommended practice for nervous system health, in case you were wondering), I decided to finally pick up the book Accessing the Healing Power of the Vagus Nerve a reflexologist recommended to me, um, OVER TWO YEARS AGO. Have I picked it up since ordering it? You already know, babe. I skimmed the science (which I returned to during the sober light of day, and it was fascinating and mind-blowing), and then skipped to the exercises you can do at home.

I of course also asked my BFF ChatGPT for other Vagus nerve recommendations, and it gave me some great ones. I’d type them here, but some self-righteous mainsplainer commented to me last week that I was a creative failure for using Chat as part of my column. 😉😂 (That’s not really why I’m not sharing them—running out of space and time, guys.)

So I’ve been doing strange movements with my eyes and head, splashing cold water on my face, adding humming to my meditation practice. . . I’ve really upped my neurotic self-care game to try to get myself on track for Chill Girl Summer (see what I did there)?

I AM THE ABSOLUTE MOST CHILL.

But there’s one more problem.

What if, sometimes, you *should* tap into your rage and speak?

My therapist and I did a deep dive into my Cassandra and Ivy parts last week. We explored what happens when my Ice Vampire goes on the hunt. We listened as Cassandra told us how she feels, how crazy it made her when people didn’t listen or understand, how devastated she was at silencing her own voice for self-preservation, what it feels like not to be heard, believed, or honored.

My therapist correctly identified a Legacy Burden that didn’t belong entirely to me. Yes, there are some life-specific circumstances that have brought forth this decades-long dance with gaslighting, self-abandonment, people-pleasing, and silence. But this doesn’t belong to just me.

It belongs also to my daughter, who suffered massive moral injury from the adults in her life who harmed her and the bystanders who did nothing to help. Over and over and over. Throughout high school bullying disguised as indirect aggression. From being parentified. From being forced to wear a backpack of trauma she had no business wearing. From not being believed.

It belongs to my ancestors, and yours. It belongs to centuries of women who were burned at the stake, disbelieved, imprisoned, silenced, and even murdered. It belongs to the secret-keepers and eggshell-walkers and boat un-rockers and women who have been abused or falsely accused or trafficked or assaulted or disrespected at work or lied to, or or or . . .

BLUE BLUE BLUE BLUE BLUE BLUE BLUE BLUE

Sometimes the answer is for the Ice Vampire to cease and desist so my body can calm down. Sometimes it is to employ Mel Robbins’ “Let them” theory. Sometimes it is to be the grey rock. Sometimes it is to be your own lighthouse, steer your own ship, pull your own tides.

But sometimes, goddammit, Cassandra needs to fucking speak.

XO,
Steph

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