The Importance of Regulating the Nervous System
If you have found yourself in a perpetual cycle of arguments and misunderstandings with others, or your family, this blog may be for you. I know how hopeless it can feel. “This argument? Again?....” or, “Aren’t they over that yet?” I imagine you might be reading this because that feeling of hopelessness was so great you had to send your kid to wilderness therapy. I will never forget a moment in a group I was running as an intern with a group of adjudicated boys eight years ago. They were all so angry… non-compliant, rallying against me. I felt helpless. My supervisor happened to walk in during the near-mutiny, looked around for a second, and just yelled, “We need regulation!” She sent us out of the room and made us do a running game outside. Within ten minutes, it was like it had never happened.
Today, as I write this blog, I am 35 weeks pregnant with my first, and likely only, child. It’s been a long emotional and physical process for my partner and I to get where we are now. There were disagreements in our late 20s about IF we should have a child at all. There were a number of years of therapy to dig through the weeds of my own childhood trauma, my distrust of myself as a potential mother, and the open wounds within my romantic relationship. There was a painful miscarriage along the way. And now, over the past eight months, I am finding myself transforming into a mother at the age of 41. “Journey” is the only word to describe how becoming a mother has felt for me.
I have spent time in the wilderness in almost every condition imaginable and what I have learned over time is that every season and every element has its pros and cons. Its challenges and beautiful moments. As I begin to mentally and physically prepare for an upcoming field shift this summer, I am reminded of the unique experiences that summer in the desert brings.
Often, when speaking to prospective field instructors or parents of new students, the subject of sleep comes up in some fashion: “How will my child sleep out there?” “Are there tents?” and “How do you keep the [insert name of big scary creature] away?” are all common questions. I always look forward to these sleep-related queries because they allow me to highlight our risk management, the natural beauty of the high desert at night (truly my favorite time of day out there), and talk about just how good the sleep in the field can be. The truth is that there are no scary monsters lurking out in our field area and the weather typically allows for us to sleep out under the stars without tents. (We teach our students how to create primitive shelters in case of inclement weather.) It is this last piece, the importance of good quality sleep, that I want to touch on in this post.
A little less than two years ago, I had just completed my master’s degree in Mental Health Counseling. It was the midst of the pandemic: I was seeing more than 20 clients on zoom for hours at a time, constantly staring at a screen, and wondering when life would allow me to hold in-person sessions again. I thought to myself, “How could I have just started my journey as a therapist and already feel this burnt out?” I was exhausted and in need of a change.
When I first heard about wilderness therapy, I just knew it was for me. I thought, “That exists?! I’m doing that.” Being from the heavily wooded sprawl of the New York suburbs, when I saw the Evoke website, I immediately imagined doing therapy among sparse scrub, cactus, and red rock, with everything but what was absolutely necessary stripped away. And yet, when I began working wilderness (as this line of work is called by field staff), nothing felt more difficult or unnatural.
In August of 2019 I packed up my life and boarded a plane to Namibia. I was finally on the way to achieving my long-term dream of serving in the US Peace Corps. Little did I know that a mere seven months later I would be on a plane again headed right back home. Everyone has a story of how COIVD-19 affected their lives. This is mine about how the insanity that was 2020 brought me to Evoke.
“Children act out when they can’t or don’t know how to get their needs met. We are all children.”--Dr. Brad Reedy
The Evoke Therapy Programs team is a group of outstanding humans.
Here I sit, starting to write a blog that I knew for months was due today. This was a date I had chosen, and this isn’t my first go around. I wrote a blog a couple months ago too, unfortunately in the same familiar fashion for me, last minute. I remember thinking to myself then, “Why do I procrastinate these tasks and create all of this unnecessary stress for myself. If only I had started this a few weeks ago, then I wouldn’t be trying to figure out how to have this done an hour ago. Next time I won’t wait so long to get started.” And yet here I am, in the same position I have been in many times before, down to the wire.