The Threat Response Cycle

orienting

When I was 22, I made a punk-yoga video. I set up a tripod and VHS recorder and did a bunch of stretches, describing how to do them while also saying “you can just skip all the slow parts of yoga, and the breathing stuff, I mean, who wants to do that?!”

If I slowed down, I cried. Sometimes I embraced this fact, but often it was embarrassing and kept me from being able to do things I wanted to do and be a person I wanted to be.

When I found out about somatic approaches to therapy, I was surprisingly relieved. I had thought through everything I could think through, and it was a gift to be invited and guided into the body within a pretty defined framework so I didn’t just have to experience everything that was going on in the body all at once. I was so relieved to have a way to befriend it and learn from it in a framework that did not assume I was already ok being there, in my body.

The somatic framework I first learned about was Somatic Experiencing. I learned about the threat response cycle, which is how most mammals in the wild respond to and recover from threat. As humans, we’ve moved away from this instinctual knowledge.

It goes like this:

Startle

Orient (far then near)

Fight/Flight/Freeze

Discharge the stored energy

Reorient

Return to grazing.

As humans, we tend to override or get stuck somewhere in the pattern, and so we get stuck in feeling all amped up or shut down. I liked the idea that I could shift some patterns in my physiology and that would shift ways of being that I had been trying so hard and unsucessfully to change for so many years.

I started with orienting. I was constantly hypervigilant, and it was exhausting. To restore the orienting response I did a lot of things. Mostly really trying to take in my surroundings in as chill as possible way every time I was in a new space. At first, I was mostly frantically scanning for escapes, but even that was interesting to notice. I would look for the doors, and let my body take in the fact that I had marked the escape routes. Then I would look for anything to move towards. If it was a party, that would be noticing where my friends were. If it was a grocery store, it would be whatever vegetable I was looking for in the produce section. Before moving I would let my body take in that I was moving toward my object.

I did scaling as well. On a scale of 1-10, how much danger was I in? And let my body take in that level of danger. Maybe the danger was feeling akward or uncomfortable, and that was a 3-4 but my body was sending signals of 8-10, so noticing that, and letting my body catch up with this insight.

For awhile, I was vigilant about orienting, which was fine. I did it when I was walking around, it helped me take in the beauty of the falling-apart-world. I did it when I walked from room to room in my own house. It helped me get a little more mindful of my every day. It helped me not turn on my friends all the time. It helped me start to feel able to slow down without crying.