{"id":7012,"date":"2021-03-22T12:20:22","date_gmt":"2021-03-22T16:20:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/?p=7012"},"modified":"2021-03-22T12:20:22","modified_gmt":"2021-03-22T16:20:22","slug":"social-distancing-is-difficult-for-me","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/?p=7012","title":{"rendered":"Social Distancing is Difficult for Me"},"content":{"rendered":"

I suspected that I was having a very hard time with the social distancing because I was traumatized by being left alone too much when I was an infant. \u00a0The problem has to do with regulating the nervous system. \u00a0Your nervous system resonates with the systems of bodies near you. \u00a0As a baby, your nervous system regulates itself by being in contact with the body of someone calm<\/a>. \u00a0If you are upset, you can be calmed by someone holding you, rocking you, perhaps singing or cooing soft sounds. \u00a0If there is no one there, or if the person who is there is upset themselves, you are unable to calm down, or perhaps unable to wake up. \u00a0Babies left alone too long can become apathetic.<\/p>\n

This is from the website GoodTherapy.org, given by the link above:
\n“Although infants are born with the capacity for stress response (fussing, crying, etc.), their parasympathetic pathways, which help downregulate the SNS stress response, are not online at birth. This means babies can go up, but they can\u2019t come down on their own. (They will go into a \u201cfreeze\u201d state if ignored long enough; this looks calm, but it really isn\u2019t.) The baby\u2019s nervous system develops the ability to calm down through thousands and thousands of supportive, soothing interactions with caregivers. At first, the caregiver is essentially functioning as the child\u2019s parasympathetic nervous system. The development of this \u201cbraking system\u201d continues throughout childhood, through continued positive interactions that meet the child\u2019s needs.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Once you have been traumatized, your system dis-regulates more easily. \u00a0You go into hyper-activation \u2014 anger, fear, upset \u2014 or hypo-activation \u2014 depression, numbness, apathy. \u00a0Seeing people on Zoom doesn’t work to help your nervous system regulate. \u00a0I have noticed, as the social distancing goes on, gets more severe with lockdown, that I have more and more trouble dealing with things. \u00a0I’m very tired, but I have difficulty sleeping through the night.<\/p>\n

Now that it\u2019s two weeks past the date when the last of us had our second vaccination, Kendal has opened up a tiny bit.\u00a0 <\/span>We can reserve a table in the dining room, sit there with friends, be served dinner, and eat and chat with our masks off.\u00a0 <\/span>The tables have fewer seats than usual, and they are 6 feet apart, and most of the residents still have to get take-out dinner.\u00a0 <\/span>So I sat there with three friends, we chatted about ordinary things, but being with real people, sharing food, helped counteract the difficulty I was having with social distancing.\u00a0 <\/span>Being with real bodies, sharing food and conversation, helped my dis-regulated nervous system to regulate<\/a> itself.\u00a0 <\/span>When we left, I felt 3-dimensional instead of cardboard, and my heart was fine, no longer feeling \u201cshocked.\u201d<\/p>\n

But of course, I will have to have that every night in order for it to make a long term difference. \u00a0I realize that in some ways I’m finding it scary for Kendal to open up, even a little. \u00a0I helped a friend recently by driving her to pick up something she needed, but I felt like Hanover was a strange city, it felt weird to be driving around.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I suspected that I was having a very hard time with the social distancing because I was traumatized by being left alone too much when I was an infant. \u00a0The problem has to do with regulating the nervous system. \u00a0Your … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[19,11,4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7012","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-interesting-link","category-present-day","category-trauma"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7012","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=7012"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7012\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=7012"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=7012"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=7012"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}