Kate: Welcome back to the Selfworthy HSP Summit, Erika BĂ©langer is a somatic yoga therapist, trauma informed coach and nervous system educator who helps highly sensitive women transform their relationship with their emotions. Her work is grounded in a body first approach to healing, helping women move from emotional overwhelm shut down and shame into self-trust regulation and embodiment.
Hi, Erika.
I know so many highly sensitive people who were taught really early on. That their feelings are too big and scary. Mm-hmm. So they've gotten really good at suppressing them or managing them.
Your work offers a radically different perspective. You say the goal isn't to feel better, it's to get better at feeling.
Erika: Yeah. From the perspective of a highly sensitive person, the goal is not to feel less, or to know how to make yourself feel better all the time. It's really how to be better at feeling.
So you're not feeling that overwhelm, that shame, that need for disconnect. Because those things hurt you in the long run.
Kate: Yeah. I can completely relate to this.
So how can someone tell the difference between truly trusting themselves with their emotions and avoiding or intellectualizing them?
Erika: I think that's a really good question to ask. As highly sensitive people, we say, what's wrong with me?
If you trust yourself with your emotions, you're gonna be very neutral towards them.
Emotions are neutral experiences. We make a lot of stories about them, especially as highly sensitive, because we've been told, you're too much, you're too sensitive. That version is not acceptable.
If you have a sense of inner safety, you're not consumed by your emotions. You're just okay. And that allows you to stay connected with your body, to stay connected with other people.
If you think about it from the nervous system perspective, you cannot be in protection mode and in connection mode at the same time.
If you're able to be honest about your experience in that moment without fear of being abandoned or rejected or shamed. That's a sign that you're acting from trust and not from fear. If you're okay in your own skin, like you can be yourself, you can be authentic in that moment, even when hard things are coming through, that's a sign that you're acting out of trust.
When we're lacking that sense of inner safety, it shows up as if we're reacting to an actual physical danger. As if emotions were something that were going to kill us. It might sound dramatic, but that's how we see things at that level and we go into defense mode.
So think about it this way. Think about the last time you cried. What did you do? Did you just slow down what you were doing and stayed with it and felt the tears or did you turn to someone and say, oh, I'm sorry. You're fine. Did you walk to the other room to hide the fact that you were crying and not make other people uncomfortable?
Did you tell yourself, stop it. That's enough. Don't do that. Did you start an argument? Like, what did you do if you did anything other than, I see you. That's tender. Huh? You are not in self-trust with it. You are in fix it mode.
Kate: Right? So, for me.
Erika: Yeah.
Kate: My go-to is anger. When I'm angry, there's immediately a layer of shame that pops right over it.
Erika: Yeah. And that's the clue in that case, if you think of anger that way, any emotion that brings in the judgment and the shame right away.
Kate: Yeah.
Erika: You are not in a space of self-trust at that moment. Right? Yeah.
Kate: It's like a clenching in my gut.
Erika: And that sense of clenching is also a way that you're repressing, you're interrupting the processing of that anger.
If you are not only holding space for the emotion, but able to help it move through the body instead of shutting it down, you are moving from trust.
Kate: Why does learning to trust yourself with your emotions matter, especially for highly sensitive people?
Erika: It matters so much because it affects every aspect of your life.
If you think of it from the nervous system perspective, if emotions equal danger, you're living in fear, you're living in stress mode all the time, and that's gonna have its own cascade of effect on your mental, physical, emotional, all of these aspects in your life.
If you're feeling always controlled by your emotions, then you are disempowered. You feel a victim of your circumstances, of the people around you.
If you're constantly fighting your emotions, like we were talking about. There's a lot of judgment and shame, and that affects your self-esteem.
You're going to tell other people that their emotions are not okay in one sense, because you can't hold their emotion, 'cause you can't hold your own.
It's gonna hurt your relationship. It's really hard to take accountability, because of the shame. And within your relationship, your only sense of control is gonna be to try to control them. It makes for relationship that can be inauthentic. And then you'll feel unseen, misunderstood, because you're not allowing them to see who you are.
Kate: What changes in everyday life when that trust does become real?
Erika: Yeah, I think there's a lot more peace, a lot more calm, a lot more presence, a lot more connection.
A sense that you're gonna figure it out. You have the sense of resilience of choice. it's complete opposite. And that sense of choice leads you to better coping mechanism that can also have really long-term effect on you. You learn to soothe yourself to meet your own needs.
You don't depend on others to have to fix you and make you feel better. And things feel resolved. You don't have to notice that you're getting triggered by the same thing you were a year ago. You're able to move on. There's this natural flow and ease that comes to your life instead of this constant inner battle.
Kate: For someone who does feel flooded by their emotions or totally disconnected from them, what's the tiny first step toward rebuilding trust with themselves?
Erika: It's building that safety, whether that means getting out of your head and into your body, or rewiring how you understand what emotions are, or learning to practice feeling sensation as a neutral thing.
Kate: I just love that. How you describe neutrality in a sensory way. 'Cause, highly sensitive people, it's all about the sensory.
Would you be willing, Erica, to guide us through what it actually looks like to stay with a difficult emotion in real time?
I'm just curious what that process looks and feels like in our bodies.
Erika: Yeah. Do you want me to do an example with you and people can mirror that and do it on their own?
Kate: You can use Me as a Guinea pig if you want to.
Erika: Okay. So let's start with the tiny bit of safety. Look around your room and look for something that feels good to you.
That's either supportive or pleasurable. Or neutral. And at home you can do the same. And when you find something, let me know what it is.
Kate: I've got some water with watermelon juice in it.
Erika: Hmm. So look at that for a moment and just really take it in. Like why does that feel good to you?
Kate: I like the color.
Erika: Yeah.
Kate: It's flowy.
It's sweet.
Erika: Yeah. What happens in your body when you look at that watermelon drink? I see things on the screen, but what do you notice in your body that tells you, yeah, I do like that.
Kate: I feel my muscles of my mouth turning up. Mm-hmm. There's a salivation that happens. My tongue remembers the taste of it. My eyes crinkle at the size. It's
Erika: like a little sparkle. Yeah.
Kate: And yeah, there's an anticipation of the cool temperature and the sweetness and the hydration.
Erika: Yeah, yeah. Great. We have the crinkle in the eyes, we have the smile on our face, we have the mouth that is like anticipating and excited about drinking. So stay with those sensations just for a moment. Hmm, like you're lingering in them. You're savoring them.
That brings a sense of safety in your body, a sense of calm, a sense of goodness. So it extends our capacity for when we go into the discomfort in a second. So now can you think of something that happened recently that did bring a little bit of frustration up? It doesn't have to be like this huge thing 'cause we don't have a ton of time to unpack it, but just a little frustration.
Kate: My dog was barking. I was trying to interview you.
Erika: Good. Okay. So stay with that for a moment. You can be internal if that feels comfortable, or you can keep your eyes open if that feels better. Feel your body while you think about your dog barking when you're trying to start this interview. What are you noticing inside your body in terms of sensations?
Kate: Clenching, wincing
Erika: in your jaw?
Kate: Clenching in my jaw, wincing, my ears. And also trying to suppress it.
Erika: Yeah. So go back to it for a second if you are able to stay with it. There's the clenching and there's the wincing.
The dog is barking, like, ugh.
Kate: Hurts my ears.
Erika: Yeah. Yeah. I hurts your ears. Okay. Reopen your eyes and look at the water melon. Take it in again. Taking a deep breath, remembering the smile, remembering the sparkle in your eyes. Yeah. Bringing that experience back into your body.
Are you noticing anything new? Anything different? Is it staying the same? Is it changing?
Kate: It's really different. Yeah.
Almost instantaneous shift.
Erika: Yeah, this is where we're going. So put the watermelon aside for a second and come back to your dog and that idea that he was barking when we were starting our interview.
And maybe you'll find the clenching again and the ears tension and the eyes. Is there anything else that's here? Belly. Is it different? Your belly now? Yeah.
Kate: And like it shouldn't this shouldn't be happening.
Erika: Is the judgment coming through? Yeah.
Kate: Wanting it to not be happening.
Trying to blame.
Erika: Mm-hmm. Yeah. Okay, so go back to the watermelon. Maybe take a sip or smell it or, involving your other senses into it as well. We know your body likes this. Yeah.
Kate: Smells even better than it tastes.
Erika: Mm. I wish I could smell it.
Kate: Feels like it's bathing that lump in my gut.
Erika: So if the feel good sensation, the pleasant one are blue, the less pleasant one, we call them red. So we the meaning they're good or bad or pleasant, unpleasant. Some are blue, some are red, right? So you're looking at the watermelon and you have these blue sensation in your face, and even now down into the body.
Now, keep your eyes on the watermelon drink and split your attention and remember that your dog was barking and see if you can hold both at the same time. There's the yumminess of the watermelon and there's the yuckiness of the dog barking.
In your body, can you bring them together so it either becomes like purple or the blue kind of calms the red? They both live here.
Does it feel a bit less intense to be with the frustration when we also can hold the pleasant things?
Kate: Yeah.
Erika: Yeah. So instead of completely avoiding, we're splitting our attention. We're going back and forth, right? We're going in a little bit until, oof, it feels a little overwhelming.
We're gonna back off. We go into something good. We resource our system with the goodness. The comfort, the pleasure. We have a bit more capacity to go back into the discomfort and we're like, oh, oh, oh. We get out and we resource ourself again, and we can put our toe in and get out.
We're so accustomed that emotions are like a tsunami, right? That we wanna do just a little bit at a time. And that changes our relationship with them because we become more tolerant over time. We're like, oh, I can do five seconds and I'm not lost through my whole day.
Right? And over time we can still do the same, but maybe spend a minute in the frustration instead of 10 seconds.
If you go back to your face, does it still feel like there's a lingering clenching or intensity?
Kate: Actually, no.
Erika: No.
Kate: Surprisingly no.
Erika: It's done with. We allowed you to be with the emotion enough that it moved through you. It's over.
Kate: Do you have a gift for our attendees that you'd like to share?
Erika: Yeah, I will have a downloadable that they can explore: how to reconnect to physical sensations in a neutral way. That will be a good step to build that sense of inner safety.
Kate: Thanks so much, Erica.
Erika: You're welcome.
