Assure Your Security Guard:
In this workshop we provide and introduction to the Security Guard and provide a strategy of emotion management called "Notice and name the movies in your mind."
Assure Your Security Guard continued:
In this workshop we focus on three emotion management strategies: Healthy Distraction; Resourcing; and Anthropomorphize your difficult emotions.
Assure Your Security Guard continued:
In this workshop we focus on three more emotion management strategies: Turn Fear into Play; Self-Soothe Box; and Best Hope Exercise to rewire your frontal lobes.
Assure Your Security Guard continued:
In this workshop we focus on how Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) can form.
We also share another strategy of emotion management called "Flying by the Seat of Your Pants. "
In this workshop segment we continue to focus on how to Assure Your Security Guard with the strategy of making meaning for pain.
In this workshop segment we continue to focus on how to Assure Your Security Guard with the strategy of understanding how emotional pain is supposed to hurt; it tells you to mend, amend, or end relationships.
In this workshop segment we continue to focus on how to Assure Your Security by learning to manage perfectionism. Learn how perfectionism is toxic on the body and how you can unlearn this unhealthy style of being.
Assure Your Security Guard (Step 3 – Week 3)
Once you are really good at creating a relaxed muscle body, which gets blood back to your frontal lobes, the next step is to use your conscious self to assure your Security Guard that you are not in immediate physical danger. The Security Guard is really the amygdala located near the center of your brain. Its primary job is to watch the movie screens playing in your brain’s neural networks and look for evidence of immediate physical threat (much like a real security guard would do). The movie screens include information coming into your brain from the outside world (through your five senses); from the thoughts in your imagination (ideas, words, images, impressions, and memories); and from your pain sensors (like the insula, which is responsible for triggering the sensation of pain). If your Security Guard perceives that the movies indicate that you are in immediate physical threat* it tells the Lizard Brain to engage one of the fear responses (Fight, Flight, or Freeze). This is wonderful when you are in immediate physical danger, because it instantly prepares you to manage the immediate threat. However, if the threat is actually emotionally based (which happens when connection is being lost in a relationship) or is of a future danger (like knowing you will need shelter from the cold in the winter) then it is not as helpful to have a fear response. Instead, you need lots of oxygen and glucose in your frontal lobes to process and manage the complex details of relationships and future planning. Remember, your Security Guard does not do “complex;” it has three options to handle situations: hit something, run away from something, or shutdown (Fight, Flight, or Freeze). All of these tend to make emotional and future threats even worse. So, you can learn to Assure your Security Guard by changing the movies or changing the meaning of the movies your Security Guard watching. When you do this, the Security Guard is able to relax and stop sending the message of danger to your Lizard Brain.
Write your own plan to practice Assure Your Security Guard for the next week:
“If I have a relaxed muscle body, then I will _______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________.”
(Strategy to change the movie or change the meaning of the movie like: "anthropomorphize my difficult emotion, I'll see it as a human outside of myself" )
(Slowly and deliberately repeat this plan to yourself several times each morning for the next week.)
*This is called Neuroception as described in The Polyvagal Theory by Stephen Porges M.D.2011