Emotional processing is essential for humans, but our society doesn’t value or provide time for it. This is why when you finally have some space, like on a vacation perhaps, you may get hit with a trauma response seemingly out of nowhere. Just like it did for me on my recent trip to Paris. I’m not just talking about the ones we all know, fight, flight, and freeze. There are three more “F”s that belong to that system! Today I want to share with you the DENT(Dynamic Experiential Narrative Theory) model of trauma.
Let’s discuss:
🔹Your body’s different responses to trauma, stress, and anxiety, including flight, fight, freeze, fawn, flood, and fatigue.
🔹How somatic or embodied yoga practices can be helpful for emotional processing and regulation.
🔹Why listening to your body and practicing self-care is crucial for maintaining balance and well-being.
💖 Now is the time to register for the fall cohort of my Somatic Yoga Life Coaching program. Find more information and book a call here => https://www.brettlarkin.com/somatic-yoga-training-certification/
FREE Practice: GENTLE SOMATIC YOGA | Emotional Release for Stored Trauma & Anxiety 💜 Yoga for Vagus Nerve Health
Relevant Blog: Somatic Yoga for Trauma: Techniques to Reclaim Your Body
Relevant to Today’s Episode:
📖 Yoga Life Book
💖Somatic Yoga Life Coaching
🎧 Also Listen to:
#318 – What Is Somatic Yoga?
#314 – Stop Abandoning Yourself By Leveraging Yoga & Meditation
#288 – Burnout, Loss & the Yoga of Parenting with Sarah Ezrin
© 2024 Uplifted Yoga | BrettLarkin.com
Transcript
Brett:
Hello, my friends. Welcome back to another episode of the show. Today is a little bit of a personal share, and we’re also going to explore a little bit the DENT model and different ways that our body responds to trauma, which is really important to know about whether you’re a yoga teacher or just a practitioner. This is explaining how your body responds to trauma, stress, and anxiety, and I promise you there’s likely some new things I’m going to talk about that you haven’t heard of yet.
Let’s get into this.
I also wanted to let you know if you are a yoga teacher, I have put together some of my favorite yoga sequences for you to download as well as a free sequencing masterclass. I know as a new teacher, it can be really difficult to get those first couple sequences designed. I also give you PDFs of sample warmups and cool downs. So if you want to grab that, look at the link in the show notes or go to brettlarkin .com forward slash teach. You can download all of that video, the PDFs completely for free.
Now let’s get into this week’s episode. So at the time of recording this podcast, I have just recently returned from Europe where I got to spend a week in Paris with my beloved husband for his 40th birthday. And what I wanted to share about this trip is that first of all, it took a long time to plan. It was a huge deal for us because it was the longest we together had been away or alone since having children. Definitely the longest we’ve been away from our kids.
And it was absolutely incredible and revitalizing for our marriage. And I feel so lucky and privileged that I got to do it. However, what was really interesting is that after landing in Paris, the first 48 hours, I felt extremely tired, which makes sense, jet lag. But it was more than the jet lag. It was a deep set fatigue. And I also felt incredibly emotional. I found myself kind of thinking about…
all the things that I don’t have time to think about or process in my day -to -day life, like the death of my father, which I was his sole care provider and have to basically watch him die of cancer and get thinner and thinner and thinner and die in front of me while I was also caring for a newborn. I talk about that in the opening chapters of my book, Yoga Life. If you haven’t got the book or the audio book, you can get the full story there. But there’s clearly a lot of trauma.
that I still haven’t processed from that whole time period, even though it was now four or five years ago. I also found myself thinking a lot about my childhood and my grandmother and my parents’ divorce and all sorts of things that I have been working on in therapy surrounding that for years and actually got to a very good place with. And yet, here it all was again, in my dreams, just kind of surrounding me.
And I initially felt a little bit discouraged about why I was thinking about all these things when I was supposed to be on vacation and having a blast. And then the funniest thing happened that was then one morning, we got a text from home that really was something about, like, that was not that big a deal related to childcare and scheduling, but I just lost it. And this text made me cry.
I literally just like started bawling because the text is not a big deal as it was. It was sort symbolic, there we go, it was symbolic of all the weight that I carry at home in terms of not just managing my business, but managing my home and my kids and their childcare and all their activities in addition to a very large business. And so this, this text just pushed me over the edge and tears were flooding and I just couldn’t believe it. I was like, why is this happening? But then I remembered that I remembered.
That what was happening to me was actually that I was having space and time away from my day -to -day life and environment to actually feel my feelings and do what’s called emotional processing. And I write about this in the book as well that
You know, eons ago, life was harder in many ways because we had to hunt and gather for food. We had predators surrounding us. We did not have any of the common conveniences and amenities that we have right now. But one thing that was ample that we did have that we don’t have now is that we had a lot of time. And studies have shown, and there’s some anthropologists who’ve looked into this, and I have footnotes around this in the book, but that…
While we had to hunt and gather and build fires and all of those things back in the day, we actually had, like when we weren’t hunting and gathering, a lot of spare time to sit by the fire and talk to fellow herdsmen or tribespeople or to gaze up at the stars. Or we were often walking for miles and miles in order to obtain something at a market or as part of a migration pattern. And so we had this time to…
think and process and be in solitude. And then when we flash forward in time and we look at the prominent role that religion and rights and rituals played throughout time, throughout culture. I love historical fiction, so I am always reading novels about England and France and, you know, the…
Tudor era and the Habsburg dynasty.
And what was cool is that being in France, I actually got to go and visit some of these huge cathedrals. I got to go to Saint -Chapelle, which if you’ve never been is so beautiful. But the thing that we see, even as we move forward from primitive times, is that religion was a huge part of people’s life and that people would often, not often, like go to church, sometimes once a week, but often like every single day in order to pray. It was also a social thing.
So regardless of whether you think religion is good or bad or what these people were praying for or actually doing, the point is that they had time built into the fabric and the structure of society to sing, to sit, to be still. And all of that was, guess what, emotional processing time, time to ruminate, time to think. And the more the technology has advanced and the more that we’ve seen, again, I’m not saying like we should all, you know, you have to go to church or whatever.
But what I am saying is that like that has decreased globally, you know, this importance, this reliance on religion or religion being such a huge part of the social fabric of our lives.
And any downtime that we had for that emotional time, emotional processing time that we had when we were on our knees in a pew, praying or sitting in silence or staring at the stars or walking for miles and miles, all of that has been replaced with Netflix and notifications on our phone and instant access to information and micro -optimizing and multitasking and trying to do more, more, more and more.
So I’ve been talking more and more about this in all of the trainings, but like you are the owner of an animal that is your body. Like maybe you own a cat or a dog, but you also are the owner of an animal named your body that wasn’t built to operate at the rapid pace that society is currently demanding of us. It’s just too much.
Our animal body needs time to just do nothing, to stare into space, to slow down.
What’s so incredible too, is that our animal body, if you listen to the podcast I have on somatic yoga, which I’m so passionate about, your animal body also knows what you need in order to come into balance. Like how to discharge emotion or how to feel and process something. So if you look at when animals have like a kerfuffle in the wild, or there’s these great videos of, I mean, not great and that they’re happy, but great for the purposes of demonstrating what I’m talking about.
There’s these videos of like polar bears or animals being shot in the wild and then that animal immediately starts shaking and trying to discharge and recalibrate that impact of trauma out of its body immediately before it becomes a habitual bracing pattern or instead of repressing it and then, you know, it being a habitual bracing pattern in their body that’s causing them pain and constriction potentially for years or decades.
So we’re in this go, go, go, high stress, no rest, constantly busy. I mean, even when we’re walking, most of us are listening to podcasts or texting as we go, there’s absolutely no downtime. And then you end up, like me, on a vacation, and what happens? All of these things that you’ve been avoiding feeling, or this deeper processing work that has to happen, end up flooding you. And that’s something we’re gonna talk about in a moment in terms of these trauma responses, and one that’s not talked about enough, but that I’m trying to talk about a lot because it relates to somatics, is the flood response, where it’s like you were just overwhelmed by emotion, and then it’s like the littlest thing, like that silly text message, like sets you off and opens a floodgate. I mean, raise your hand if you can relate to this, a floodgate of emotion from like an insignificant little trigger.
So a key message I want to get across in this episode is that if you’ve ever found yourself with some downtime and then you end up feeling like exhausted and just like you need to take a nap or like you need to cry or just completely depleted, that’s normal. It’s because we don’t have time in our day -to -day life to process emotion. So how much better might it be if we created a life or cultivated a life in which some of that emotional processing time was built back in?
So instead of Netflix or instead of all the million other entertaining, razzly -dazzly things that you do to quote unquote relax, you just did nothing. You just stared off into space or you just stared at a wall or you know, you try to create opportunities for yourself. I really have stopped. I love podcasts and I listen to a lot of them and sometimes in the car. But when I go for a walk now, I try to always at least do one walk a day where I just don’t have input.
I’m not listening to anything. I’m not listening to music. I’m not listening to a podcast. I’ve really been working on reducing my social media consumption, my TV consumption. I used to love riding on trains. Do any of you feel that way? Like trains used to just be so relaxing for me as a teenager. I spent a lot of time in Europe. I loved just riding trains. And I realized that I loved it so much now because I wouldn’t do anything on the train. I’d just stare out the window at the landscape.
And it was so, so healing and relaxing and rejuvenating for me because it was just this nothing empty time in which I could think about life, ruminate, reflect. And that is seen as not valuable or society would tell us that’s not being productive, but that’s actually taking care of your animal. It’s like a basic need. I mean, imagine your poor little cat or dog, like if you put them on a treadmill of like constant things to do, like ticking off stuff from a list, would they be happy?
Would they probably end up completely dysfunctional? Yes, probably, because they naturally know. You think about how your cat stretches, it puts its paws out and its tail up and how it kind of shakes and how it knows when to eat and it knows when it wants to go outside and when it feels like napping, it just naps. It has that primitive, instinctive intuition and we have that too. It’s just been completely lost, completely buried.
So now that you know why I was crying on vacation and we’ve gone over how our society just doesn’t value or give any time to this emotional processing that is absolutely essential for humans. I mean, think about it. We need to sleep. We need time to reflect. We need time to self -care. You know, so much of this has been taken away from us. Let’s talk a little bit.
about the six responses to trauma, stress, and anxiety. And this is called the DENT model, D -E -N -T. It’s the Dynamic Experiential Narrative Theory is what that stands for. I talk about this in the somatic certification I have, which is called in body yoga life coaching.
So there’s a lot more theory like this in that program if it’s something you’re interested in. And some of these I’m sure you’ve heard of and some of them you may not have heard of. So the first response is flight. And that’s often our first reaction is something stressful happens and we want to flee. We want to run away. And to tie this to somatic work is when we want to flee, what happens physically in the body? Well, the muscles of the lower body tense up and prepare to move.
So even if all I’m reading is like a scary email that makes me want to run away, or maybe a parent is speaking to me in a way or a tone of voice that makes me want to run away and hide, but I can’t because they’re my soul care provider, or I can’t because I’m in an office building, right, whatever the situation is. Well, what happens? Well, when like an animal, we can’t flee, like we can’t do the flight response, well, what happens? Lactic acid starts to build up in the lower body where we are tensing to go run.
And that’s going to cause pain and that’s going to cause tightness and that’s going to lead to nervousness and anxiety and hypervigilance. So those of us that have a strong flight response often have a lot of tension and chronic pain in the lower body and a lot of times in the digestive system as well. So let’s look at the next one fight. You’ve also probably heard of that trauma response and that’s when something scary is happening and we decide.
A lot of people say this is happening in the dorsal vagal complex. We decide that we want to, instead of running away, the better choice is actually to attack or to defend ourselves in the fight. So maybe we know that unless we stand up for ourselves and scream, because we’re the youngest in the family or something, like no one’s gonna hear us, no one’s gonna give us what we want, right? Or no one’s gonna pay attention to us.
So again, a lot of your childhood is informing which of these programs are your preferred program, but you also might have different programs for different people in different certain situations, right? We’re extremely complex socio -emotional beings. But think about the fight response for a second. So if I’m deciding I wanna fight, and that could mean like yelling and getting up in someone’s face or, you know, screaming at your partner or saying, you’re wrong, right? Or sometimes we kind of fight and then we flee. That would be like the yelling, the screaming, and then the door slamming.
Um, but in fighting, you know, what’s happening somatically energetically in the body in those moments? Well, if we’re angry and preparing to attack the upper body is going to tighten. Right. We’re going to prepare to punch someone by making a fist, tensing the shoulders, lifting the arms up, contracting the bicep, or maybe we’re going to try to shield our face, right. Expecting someone to punch us. So either way.
it’s going to cause upper body tightness and it’s going to lead to self -criticism, negative self -talk and physically headaches, chronic neck and upper body and shoulder tension and pain, maybe a protective posture. Think of that like hunched over posture. You know, we don’t associate that so much with the fight response, but it can be like that shielding. If we think of, I’m putting my hand in front of my face and kind of leaning back because I don’t want someone to punch me.
You know, it’s connected to this fight response. And then TMJ and jaw issues. See it a lot. Connected to this fight response. Okay, the third one you’ve probably also heard of is the freeze response. And that’s when if it’s not safe or socially acceptable to fight or flee, run away, the body actually clamps down on itself like a deer in headlights and we just play dead, right? So this is like the mouse playing dead.
so that the lion or tiger or whatever stops playing with it. So it’s just like a different strategy essentially. The problem with this is this inaction and playing dead leads to chronic tension. And then, you know, emotionally it can lead to feelings of isolation, disassociation, and here we often see under digestion, because it’s like we’ve frozen our digestive system, which is where the fire. Tapas heat resides in the body according to the yogic system.
Emotionally, we also see hypervigilance attached to this freeze response, right? Because we’re on the lookout for when we need to stop and play dead. Okay, so the fourth response to trauma and stress and anxiety is the fawn. Okay, so fawn as an F -A -W -N. And this is people pleasing and emotionally fussing over other people to make sure they’re okay while totally ignoring our own needs. So most people have heard of fight.
flight and freeze. Not as many people have heard of fawn, but this is classic, especially for women. So if we feel unsafe, even if it’s just in our own mind, like technically we’re safe, but we’re afraid that if we say no, like dad won’t love us anymore. If we say no, the guy we’re on a date with will think we’re misleading them or who knows what it might be. But basically we say, you know what, let’s just self abandon.
I’m going to let go of whatever my needs are right now. And instead I’m just going to be whatever this other person wants me to be. That’s like the fawn response in a nutshell. And what does this lead to? Well, it leads to codependency, deflection, lack of boundaries, putting on like a happy face, even though you’re really angry and this causes a ton of resentment, a ton of repressed anger, guilt. And ultimately we’re abandoning our own needs and just kind of play acting, being an actor in our own life. It makes me think of in the somatic training I have in body yoga life coaching, we actually map all this to the chakra system in one of the six frameworks in the life coaching portion. And it’s really interesting. And the archetype that we look at for the heart chakra is the actor, right? One who is basically acting and in order to protect their heart or for fear of not receiving love, decides to just become somebody else and just abandon our own authenticity in order to either feel safe or get what we want or because there’s a trauma response there. If we don’t put on a happy face and do what the other person wants, they will hurt us, whether that’s physically or emotionally. So that’s the fawn response. Now, the next one, I’m putting my money on the fact that you probably haven’t heard of, and I kind of hinted at it earlier in the episode, and that is the flood response. Isn’t it fun that these all start with F? Flood. And the flood response is like an uncontrollable wave of emotion that hits out of nowhere and drowns you. And it makes it very difficult to stay present in the present moment or see anything rationally. So it’s almost like seeing red.
So it’s interesting, because when I started first looking at the flood response, I was like, oh, this sounds something that would be very associated with women or the feminine energy, because we look at polarity as one of the life coaching frameworks as well. And, you know, because we see like a woman sobbing or being like overcome with emotion. But when I dug into the science, it’s actually more common to have this flood response with men.
And the example of this would be like a man who just ends up seeing red and like punching someone at a bar who just gets like this flood of anger and rage and wrath. So again, you could also get a flood of sadness and grief, but this actually happens 80 % more with men. And it’s this feeling of like, you know, a man later might say like, oh, I didn’t even know I did that. Wait, I hurt someone, I hit someone or whatever. So it’s this inability to think.
communicate, reason. It’s an uncontrollable emotional reaction. And it could be grief, but it could also look like lashing out. So I thought that was super, super interesting. And this flood response would, you know, most likely be to stress, chronic stress and anxiety, right? It builds up, it builds up, it builds up. And then just like me on vacation in Paris, like it comes out, right? It’s like that, that emotion that’s been dammed up, whew, it like all comes out at once.
And even though I knew rationally that this text message had no reason to make me cry, I was sobbing anyway. Okay, and then our sixth and last kind of trauma, stress and anxiety response that we’re going to look at is fatigue. And I bet you haven’t heard of this one either, at least not in this context. I just love that these all start with F. I know it’s really fun. So fatigue is so interesting to me because this one is what happens or occurs.
when all the other responses fail to restore the body to homeostasis. So I’ve been fawning and fawning and fawning. Maybe my nervous system was even like, let’s throw in some fight or freeze, but like none of it’s working to recalibrate me or I’m under a ton of stress or something traumatic is happening in my life. And then at some point the body’s like, none of these other responses are working to restore me to homeostasis. Like none of these other things are allowing for me to express and feel.
my emotions in order to recalibrate, I am going to shut off. And the body will literally insist on staying in a horizontal position to increase blood supply to the brain and require much more sleep than is normal. So if you’re like, I need to lie down or you’re feeling that fatigue, that is your body trying to get more blood supply to your brain. Because when you lie down, it’s easier for your body to pump that venous blood return up to the brain.
And so what this looks like is extreme exhaustion, rejecting interaction, feeling totally isolated, depression, an inability to focus or think clearly, and total emotional shutdown.
And my guess is that if you’re listening to this, you’ve probably experienced this fatigue, like trauma response at some point in your life, maybe even recently. It’s just like the body can’t take anymore. And I think the big takeaway hopefully is that like you want to listen to that. You want to listen to that. You do not want to push through. If you feel tired, take a nap, do a yoga nidra, listen to your intelligent animal body that can’t.
You know, just march on and on forever, checking things off your to -do list and being as busy as our society wants us to be. You need to rest.
And my goal for you as we come to the end of the episode is maybe just to start thinking about, or this is my ask, start thinking about how you can create more open, empty, void space for emotional processing and regulation in your life today. And unfortunately, a lot of the traditional yoga that so many of us love, or a lot of the meditations that so many of us love, are helpful in recalibrating the nervous system and have value, but they’re not exactly this.
Right? This is why I so love incorporating or also having as part of your self -care routine a somatic or embodied yoga practice, because that’s time that’s like totally for emotional processing. It’s like we’re not trying to tame the mind or recalibrate the nervous system or do anything other than like fully feel our feelings and trust that our body can alchemize, transmute them through movement and through sound and through breath.
and that we instinctively know how to come back into balance.
And that often means you feel worse before you feel better. But think about how you feel after a good, good cry. Right? Do you feel lighter? My guess is yes. So I invite you to start thinking about how you could move through the rest of the week until we meet again in our next episode with just a little more empty space for yourself.
And I’d love to hear how this landed for you. So make sure to contact me and let me know. You can always find me on Instagram at Larkin at Yoga TV. I always love hearing your thoughts and reactions to the show.
More about everything we’ve talked about in my book, Yoga Life, which is available globally everywhere books are sold. And thank you so much for listening all the way to the very end. I’m sending you so much love from my heart to yours. Namaste.
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