Level Setting on Terminology for the Terrain between Ventral & Sympathetic - Connect, Enjoy, Play, Compete, Negotiate, Accommodate, Appease (1 of 2)
AUTONOMIC PHYSIOLOGY
illustration copyright Gabriel Kelemen
There are a fairly broad range of hybrid states that exist between pure ventrality (pure Connection state) and the realms of the Sympathetic (fight-flight response). Depending on where our neuroceptive center of gravity resides, as these transit from being more grounded in safety to being more grounded in danger, our enjoyment of the state decreases.
I will suggest to you that the gradations of overlap between these two systems are quite extensive. If this was a Venn diagram, the center space would be enormous. As a quick example of this, a phenomenon near the edges of the activation of the sympathetic, you cannot shift from supine (lying down) to standing without invoking the sympathetic nervous system. You can be in a pure ventral state, but if you move, your sympathetics activate. If your sympathetics don't activate in just the right manner, with just the right intensity, at just the right moment, you'll get light-headed when you stand up, because blood pressure has to modulate when you shift from horizontal to vertical, and since we are in the field of terrestrial gravity, the blood wants to flow down from your head. Chronic disruptions of this mechanism are called Orthostatic Hypotension, and refer to this phenomenon of low blood pressure when you change position, generally from sitting or lying down to standing up. This phenomenon can give us some appreciation for the precision of the ANS, and the consequences when it is not calibrating accurately. The mechanisms required for this coordination are remarkably complex, and not simply neural. There are baroreceptors throughout the body, and particularly in the carotid sheath, between your chest and your head, that monitor blood pressure, and relay this information to your ANS. To accomplish these graded changes, your pressure-sensing receptors have to talk to your heart, neurally. This dialogue is mediated through your brainstem.
This example can give us some appreciation also for the TRANSLATIONS happening in your ANS, in this case between blood pressure and heartrate. Your ANS is hooked up to all your intero- and extero-senses. Blood pressure is a particular intero-sense. When we think about our senses, it is not generally on the list. But is a distinct faculty of interoceptive awareness, with dedicated neural receptors. So too, we could notice, is our sense of thirst. Or hunger. Or knowing when we have to pee, or to poop. These are all intero-senses, again with calibration. Their operational range, and our attentional engagement with them, is derivative of state. One of the things we have noticed in our research is that when people miss a night of sleep, their sympathetic systems tend to go into over-drive. When we are sympathetic, our intero-sensing of thirst diminishes. Often if people miss a night of sleep, paradoxically, they find it harder to sleep the following night, when you think they would be more tired. If this has never happened to you, and you don't know what I'm talking about, count yourself fortunate. The longer you go without sleep, the harder it is to sleep. One of the very simple and interesting ways to interrupt this sympathetic spiraling is to actively hydrate. And to drink significantly more than you think you need to. Our intero-sense of thirst seems connected to having a certain amount of ventrality online. In the same way that when we are stressed out we don't hear certain frequences of human prosodic vocalization, or the birds in the background, when we are sympathetic, our attention seems to de-focalize awareness of thirst. As we get more dehydrated, we get more sympathetic. The human body is made of 70 to 80% water. Sympathetic states, which are high-energy states, deplete hydration reserves. If we don't hydrate pro-actively this seems to create a self-reinforcing feedback loop.
What I'm hoping to begin to illustrate for you here is the subtle overlap between the ventral and sympathetic realms, and some of the ways these exchanges mediate our felt interiority. What I want to do in this essay is to try to bring some coordination to the terminology that we are using to describe this hybrid landscape. I'm going to begin with the foundational distinction between having a center of gravity in safety versus threat, before we eventually complicate this, because a number of these phenomena happen in the gray area where people don't have clarity about whether or not they feel safe.
When we feel safe enough to have ventrality present, with respect to this hybridity, we see something like the following:
My favorite image of pure ventrality is two friends having tea or coffee, close-talking animatedly, and leaning in. Here is the classic face/voice expression of sociability. We might be eating or drinking (these are both social, and explain why good house parties end up in the kitchen). We are sitting close enough to note the micro-expressions in our friend's face, and the micro-modulations of their voice. From this distance we can see them, in the Sawubona sense of seeing. We can really witness them. Sawubona is a Zulu word that means – I see you. Yet it conveys the notion that this seeing is not just me. My ancestors see you. And in this seeing I acknowledge your humanity, and that I am accountable to you by beholding you thus. Pure ventrality is this friendship with the gaze of sawubona. From within this framework, being seen, we are safe to tell our deepest and most important and most vulnerable stories, and our friends, the ones we let in to this inmost circle of who we really are, are the ones we trust to catch our stories. Take a moment to think about who in your life you allow to receive your most sacred stories, and you know who you experience pure ventrality with. Knowing this is also a template for how people generally want to be received.
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