093 – Small Doable Pieces

Sarah Tacy:
Did you know our decision making and ability to connect with others, including our kids, is influenced by the state of our nervous system? When our nervous system feels well resourced, we are more likely to make heart based decisions instead of falling into protective trauma patterning. We will be more likely to connect with loved ones in creative and generative ways because we’ve met the hard emotions in ourselves first. And please hear what I’m saying too is that we can then meet our kids in their wide range of emotions in more fun and generative ways when we have resource ourselves to meet ourselves in these places as well. After feeling like I nearly disappeared postpartum, nervous system resourcing brought me back to life to fully experience joy, build meaningful relationships, strengthen my marriage, and embrace vulnerability. I would love to invite you and or someone you love to resource, a 4 month program designed for women who have navigated matrescence, that transformative threshold of caring for tiny humans, a threshold that can bring immense joy, but also make it challenging to recognize your own existence, let alone your preferences. My dream is to help us become well resourced, alive mothers, because this is the basis of familial and generational healing, but also because feeling embodied and alive is our birthright. The program starts January 6th. But I want to offer this opportunity to you before the holiday season, so you can invest in yourself first. When you sign up by Black Friday, you’ll save $270 The early bird price being $693. Check the link for more details. It would be a total honor to meet you in this journey.

Sarah Tacy:
Hello. Welcome. I’m Sarah Tacy, and this is Threshold Moments, a podcast where guests and I share stories about the process of updating into truer versions of ourselves. The path is unknown, and the pull feels real. Together, we share our grief, laughter, love, and life saving tools. Join us.

Sarah Tacy:
This week’s episode is about small doable pieces. The reason why it felt so hard to start this sequence on the nervous system was, oh my god. Will I be able to get all of these years of information into one coherent segment where everybody will understand exactly what the nervous system is and why it’s helpful. And let me make some bullet points, and maybe I’ll read a little bit more up on the amygdala and what research is there that shows this. And let me get more research, and let me open up 5 different books and pull from all these authors. And suddenly, I’m like, maybe I should just write a book. And the small doable piece was, hey. Maybe I’ll get outside, and I’ll just see what happens when I go for a walk and I just talk to you about what the nervous system is to me and how I think it might be helpful to you.

Sarah Tacy:
There is also something I’ve become aware of through Mel Robbins called behavioral activation theory. And the idea behind this is that when we take small doable steps, which is a Bridget Visknin’s phrase, small doable steps over time, that it can change the way we feel, and it can change the way we think, and it can change what we believe. So instead of believing that I’ve got this and I can do it and then I start to do it, I can just take a small step that might help me in the direction of this. A small doable step. I’ll say a little bit more about behavioral activation therapy. So my understanding is that in one research study, which I will put a link to in the show notes, they had a group of people who used antidepressants and another group that used behavioral activation therapy. And those people who took a behavior that they implemented and did it every day, even if they didn’t feel like it, that that behavior would change their mood. When their mood changed, it would change the way they see the world.

Sarah Tacy:
It would change their belief system, And that the people who did the behavioral activation therapy had better results than the people on the antidepressants. Even as I said, I’m going for a walk, and as my muscles contract and they release, that I get little happiness molecules that go through my body. I take a small step, and in this case, a literal step that might begin to shift my state. Where this stuff can get confusing is saying, well, I really want to listen to my state and I really want to learn how to listen to my preferences. And part of the skill here is to both listen to the resistance and to the desire beneath the resistance. There might be a day where you’re supposed to work out, but you’re not feeling like it. And most people who show up anyway because they have it set up with a friend or they have it set up with a trainer are so grateful that they did. Because when they start to move their muscles and their bodies, they start to feel different.

Sarah Tacy:
And then they have more of a feeling of I can and I want to. When we begin to listen to our bodies, we might also hear, like, actually, I’m really sick today, or I really didn’t sleep last night. And so what I did in my years of being super sleep deprived was to show up to the session if it seems really appropriate and doable and do the warm up and do it in a way that honors my body. It’s a small doable piece. And then as I go along, I can keep making choices, and I can keep moving with the behaviors that are going to help me feel better while also honoring that I don’t wanna drain a battery that I don’t have. Small doable pieces when it comes to the nervous system, which is something I know even better, much better than behavioral activation therapy, is the idea that sometimes when we’re in a trauma response, we have all or nothing thinking. And all or nothing thinking might be, I have to do this massive program. I’m gonna do this massive launch or nothing at all.

Sarah Tacy:
And we end up in a freeze. Or we do the massive launch without the proper setup and support, and then we collapse. We may want to change the dynamics in our workplace or have a conversation with our lover, our spouse, our partner. And it may feel like they have to change their way or we’re done. And the small doable piece might be getting a therapist. It might be, can we try co listening where we just sit side by side and you talk for 8 minute and I’ll tell you what I hear you saying and then I’ll talk for 8 minutes and you tell me what you hear me saying. Right. We can start with small pieces of communication.

Sarah Tacy:
We can start with say, instead of a massive program for me, I released just 21 days of support. I took clients here and there without advertising, without making a big thing, so that as I got into my business, I could do so in a way that really honored where my nervous system was at. And you may be listening and saying, isn’t that nice? Isn’t that so great that you got that choice with your work? I can’t do that. I need to support my family. And to that, I would say, please go listen to Kate Northrop’s podcast. You can listen to it on Plenty, or you can listen to it here on Threshold Moments, where I interview her and she kinda interviews me back. And we talk about the time in her life where her husband was hit by a car. She was a mother of 2, had just moved to Miami, and was fully responsible for funding her family’s life, where they lived, any of the support that they got.

Sarah Tacy:
And moving from the all or nothing, thinking of like, I just need to go put up a tent in the woods and get off the grid, or I gotta push so hard until my body collapses, which then that is what would happen to the question of what are small, doable pieces of showing my body that it’s safe to relax even before the outside environment tells me that’s true. And she would test it every day, and some of those small doable pieces were going outside and putting her feet on the grass with a little view of the water and talking to the goddess. And that was her resourcing herself and teaching her body that she was safe and there was plenty, even before her external world said it was true. Small, doable pieces of nervous system work, for me, was that even when I was in the pits of despair, I would show up once a month for this nervous system training. And I knew that I was not going to get it all right away. I was not going to process it the same way that my 20 year old pre kid self would process it. I would not do all of the exchanges that were recommended. I would show up and do the best that I could.

Sarah Tacy:
And sometimes that meant turning off my camera and getting into the path while listening to the material. Sometimes it meant having an assistant partner with me and help me to stabilize when I didn’t have the resources to do the exchange. And I continued to show up for this course, month after month, year after year, as my resources began to replenish themselves. It was an anchor, And this is part of my motivation of offering a course that feels really aligned with my work with the nervous system and the body and the mind and the spirit over the last 20 years, to give daily 5 to 12 minute videos that will offer nervous system support, which means body, mind, spirit, that you could have with you 5 to 12 minutes a day. You can build capacity in a way that feels doable. And then live recordings for those who feel like they have capacity to be with me for an hour or 2 live on Zoom. Hear more information, more orientation, more conversation, some possible exchanges, and a step away from that, like a right distance from that might be, I’m not gonna come to the live, but I will listen to it in my own time, in my own space. And I will not with the exchangers, but partners.

Sarah Tacy:
When we use small, doable pieces to come out of a freeze response, It might be that we do a micro push. We push into the practitioner. We push into a wall, and it gives us the smallest sense of activation from a body that feels like the only safe thing to do is not respond to the world. And then the body goes, oh, okay. I did that. We don’t necessarily go from freeze to, like, let’s run away from the thing. We can start with micro outlets and the system, over time, starts to defrost. And in between those layers of freeze and coming back to life and having more choice, we often find shame.

Sarah Tacy:
And so we go slowly so that we can meet it with love and compassion and time and honesty and without bypassing. The same way that life can stack with hard things, and we don’t pay attention to the hard things and it can add up to feeling a massive overwhelm or a panic attack, it can happen in the other way as well. We can reverse engineer where we are destacking hard patterns in the body, one little piece at a time, until maybe one morning we wake up and we don’t feel anxious upon awakening. Maybe somebody yells at us or gives us a critique. And we may be in awe of, wow, I feel wildly unbothered by that, and I feel in my body. I didn’t dissociate and I didn’t have to fight in the moment. Small dual pieces is a way that incorporates the idea of a pause, of choice, of pacing, and all of these things are opposite from trauma physiology. There is a line in one song that says, rushing is violence.

Sarah Tacy:
And I’ve also heard violence be described as, anytime we go with more velocity, more speed than our body can digest it at. So people who are on the monthly calls with me for relaxed money will hear me start each call with, I speak slowly, on purpose. You can move at any pace that you want depending on your state, depending on your needs. My purpose of moving slowly is because it’s here that we can feel. Sometimes, velocity and speed is a total gift when things that are really too big for us to feel, or we are in a conversation or a place where we don’t feel safe to feel, where velocity is the right choice. With the nervous system healing, we can pendulate between the 2. And as we build resources, we can move into healthier fast, and we can move into medium, and we can move into healthy slow, where you feel resourced enough to feel your desires, feel your preferences, make choices that you trust and are aligned, and begin to rewire your system to be in a body that you enjoy being in, that you feel safe in, and that you have choice with. I hope this segment of small doable pieces was helpful for you.

Sarah Tacy:
It’s been life changing for me. Until next time.