Growth Under Pressure
Navigating Stress in Liberation Work
While learning how to revise our relationship to language and identity I keep encountering the growth-limiting power of stress. Sustainable change is only possible when we are able to be at least somewhat present. We need a baseline centering capacity to navigate the fear and shame that arise when we confront the patterns that have shaped us. But when we are stressed our adaptability is challenged, and we may fight against the very processes that could be growing us. This piece shares my current understanding of the ways stress affects our ability to change, and how we might take baby steps towards creating safe-enough conditions for transformation.
Stress & Survival
Like a smoky and cracked glass filter, stress distorts our ability to see other people, life events, and ourselves clearly. Our brilliant nervous systems interpret all the data we receive, from our internal processes and from our sensory interfaces with the world around us, and command our automatic body responses based on those interpretations. These systems have evolved to prioritize threat detection to keep us alive. But this tendency to focus on threat can cause us to see danger everywhere.
The autonomic nervous system (ANS) governs our automatic processes like heart rate, respiration, muscle tension, and digestion. Each branch, the more activating sympathetic and more quieting parasympathetic, plays a part in regulating the functioning of most of our organs. They tell our tissues when it’s safe to relax, digest, process, and connect; or when it’s time to run away, to fight, to appease, to bargain, to hide, or to shut down. A balanced system will respond appropriately to the true level of safety or danger within an environment or moment, activating when needed then relaxing as much as possible. When imbalanced we can experience a host of conditions that create barriers to growth, which we could lump under the umbrella term “stress,” including anxiety, combativeness, burnout, lethargy, and dissociation. Imbalance is common these days as we face an array of vast, overlapping crises that cannot be solved by running away, fighting, or hiding.
The nervous system’s tendency towards alertness is an adaptation that can be life-saving when facing an obvious external threat like a natural disaster. But when the danger faced is existential or relational, or if we are exhausted, overwhelmed, or ill, this tendency to perceive threat can be counter-productive and can create its own gravitational pull. A person with chronic stress or trauma is more likely to perceive threat in any given situation, whether or not there is true danger present. Most of us have inherited or experienced some type of intense stress that hardened into trauma related to aspects of our identities, especially race, gender, class, and/or religion.
In this context I understand trauma to be not the actual challenging event, but when the effects of an event have not been sufficiently processed and have gotten stuck in a person’s body, or have been passed down from an ancestor. When trauma takes over the person is no longer present in real time. They are fighting a ghost or trying to avoid a recurrence of a past event, which happens to be activated (sometimes called “triggered”) by the current person or experience but may not actually be about the present moment. What makes something not just temporarily stressful but harden into a traumatic injury varies by person and the factors surrounding the event.
Cognitive Dissonance
Our brains create models of reality that support stability. Change can be uncomfortable and energy-intensive. We fixate on the seeming permanent, attempting to base our senses of self on ideas we have decided will not change to conserve energy and reduce discomfort. Information that holds up our current worldview is more easily accepted. Information that challenges our identity stories or worldviews is more likely to be rejected. Cognitive dissonance can occur when our perception of reality is challenged by a difference between what we believe to be true and what we are seeing or experiencing. When our senses of identity are questioned the mind may cling to old self-perception at all costs, even when presented with clear evidence that the old perceptions are constructs or fallacies. New information may be perceived as dangerous, rather than as signposts to the inaccuracies that are already present in the perceiver, because it has a destabilizing affect on one’s orientation to life and self. This mechanism is even more likely to kick in if we are experiencing chronic stress and deep in a groove of perceiving threat and prepping to run, fight, or hide most of the time.
One example of cognitive dissonance is when someone who clings to the self-perception of being a “good person” has been told they behaved in a way that harmed someone else, and cannot accept accountability because the information belies their self-perception. In the context of growth work, this means that there may be times when your threat mechanism is engaged because you subconsciously perceive a person who appears to be outside of your cultural norms as dangerous, even if you consciously know that is not the case. In a broader sense, that threat mechanism is often the underscore when a person refuses to acknowledge another person’s gender identity, yells racial slurs, or commits more intense hate crimes. It also means that as you engage in liberation work there may be moments when it becomes hard for you to focus, or you may feel defensive, combative, edgy, or exhausted without it being exactly clear why. When a threat is perceived and protective mechanisms kick in it can become challenging for any new information to be processed, or for any truly relational activity to happen.
When cognitive dissonance appears around a behavior the solutions are to change the behavior, change the belief, or change the perception of the action. Part of our work is to gently but persistently examine the constructs that have made up our current identity beliefs and realign to greater authenticity. Even if we are consciously willing and desiring to change, we have to see and acknowledge the chemical, physical groove that has been established over years and rewire our cognitive patterns towards curiosity, adaptability, playfulness, and relationship. I’ll explore those four pillars in a future post in this Disarming Our Language section.
Window of Tolerance
When we are present, emotionally and mentally available, and able to respond appropriately to what is happening in real time, psychologists say that we are in our “Window of Tolerance” (WOT), a term that was created by Dan Siegel PhD. Diane Poole Heller PhD also calls this the “Range of Resilience.” This is where learning, growth, healing, and connection are possible. We can meet challenges and opportunities with curiosity, adaptability, imagination, and all of our mental and emotional tools. As we detect a real or perceived threat, consciously or unconsciously, we may begin to slip out of that WOT towards one of the protection responses listed above. This model has come under scrutiny for being reductionist, but I think it can give a helpful frame to discuss the neurological processes we may encounter, even as our work becomes more practical and embodied.
To cultivate this baseline adaptability it helps to engage in practices that support our literal and metaphoric suppleness, to gradually stretch our capacity to engage with challenging truths without overwhelming our systems. The orientation practice at the end of this older article is one, but most tools that enable us to be present in our bodies and engage honestly with the currency of the moment and our relational web can support this suppleness. This can include spending time in forests, dancing, writing, art-making, body-based therapy, communal story-telling and theatre, and breath-awareness and lengthening practices. A significant aspect of the Disarming Our Language book I will be sharing here over the next many moons will be centered around cultivating this capacity to see that which distorts our sight, and how we might see and be in new, more honest and more relational ways.
