Calm Your Emotions Naturally Using the Community Resiliency Model (CRM) - Part 1

In this video, I'll introduce the concepts of a powerful body-centered way to calm and regulate your emotions. This is the first video in a three part series.

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Hi, everyone.  This is Lara Hammock from the Marble Jar channel and in this video, I'll introduce the concepts of a powerful body-centered way to calm and regulate your emotions.  It doesn't require a therapist or a lot of expensive training.  It uses the power of your own nervous system to make you emotionally stronger and more resilient.  It is based on a therapy for trauma and anxiety called the Community Resiliency Model, but I believe these are great skills for all of us to have. This is the first video in a three part series.

Down / Bottom Up
People come into therapy for a lot of reasons -- but generally it’s because they are unhappy about some portion of their lives or how they are reacting to things.  When we think of therapy, we tend to think of "talk therapy" -- come in, talk about your problems, your childhood, your relationships.  Now — I'm a big fan of talk therapy -- you can gain powerful insights about your behavior and the behavior of those around you by talking thing out with an objective, trained professional.  This is known as a top down approach to processing -- meaning you start with the brain and thoughts to work things out.  But there IS another approach, which you can do entirely on your own once you know what you are doing.  And that is referred to as bottom up processing.  So, if top down processing accesses your behavior and emotions from your head, bottom up accesses them from your body.  And the great thing is -- you don't have to choose -- you can use both methods at the same time for even better results.

The thing is -- we can all be pretty cut off from our bodies.  We tend to live primarily in our heads and most of the time, we aren't even paying attention to how our bodies are reacting.   People who have experienced trauma or have very stressful lives may be even MORE cut off since, in their experience, not feeling anything has made them feel safer in the past.  But for almost all of us, the key to feeling better is by actually being MORE in touch with our bodies and listening what our bodies are telling us.  So that we can better understand how our bodies react to stress in our environments, let's talk about the

Nervous System
for a second.  Our nervous system consists of our brains, our spinal cord, and all of the nerves that send and receive messages from other parts of our bodies.   The main function of our nervous system is to keep us alive.  It's on high alert for threats to our survival, like tigers.  When we lived on the Savana, this was a little more reasonable than it is now, but unfortunately our nervous system hasn't evolved much in the past several thousand years.  So, what happens when our nervous system senses a tiger?  It calls in the Sympathetic Nervous System to activate our fight/flight or freeze response.  So, what does this system do?  It makes our breathing speed up, our heart race, our blood pressure increase, our digestion stop, and our muscles tense.  We get ready to either run from that tiger OR go to battle with it.  So, what happens if we realize -- after the fact -- that the tiger we THOUGHT we saw, was actually just a tree blowing in the wind?  Our body has a separate system called the Parasympathetic Nervous System that reverses all of those responses.  It comes in and it calms everything down from that state of fight or flight readiness.  It slows our breathing and our heart rate, it lowers our blood pressure, it gets our digestion going again, and relaxes our muscles.  Why am I telling you all this?  Because sometimes modern humans get stuck in a state of readiness -- or anxiety -- and we haven't figured out how to easily call in our Parasympathetic Nervous System to restore our sense of calm.  The skills that we will be learning in this video series will help to do this. 

Hand Model of the Brain
So, at this point, it's useful to know a little bit about how our brains are set up.  I could show you a photograph of a brain, but as it turns out, we all are walking around with our own little brain model attached to us.  It turns out that if you make a fist with your hand with your thumb tucked in, that's a pretty good model of the human brain.  This is the back of your head, this is the front. 

Our brain grew from the inside out.  So, all of the most basic stuff is on the inside and

[g.r.]

Great explanation of this concept. I will watch this again and take notes to better understand it.