Introduction This is a zine written from my perspective as a chronically ill person who likes learning about sex and sexuality, and sharing that with others. It’s a collection of troubleshooting tips, essays on self acceptance and ideas for you to consider, and it’s all written from the perspective of how we can use the things that disability teaches us for body acceptance, and how we can use the concepts from the science of sexuality to improve our relationship with our bodies, primarily drawing on the work of Emily Nagoski. This zine doesn't seek to be prescriptive or claim to be a self-help wonderguide; think of it as a bunch of suggestions that you're able to take, adapt and play around with. A power toolkit. I made this zine for you to empower you with the science, narratives and processes that allow not only body acceptance but the development of a partnership with your body that allows you to achieve your goals with self-compassion and awareness. It doesn’t shy away from the tough stuff, but neither does it avoid the joys of having a body. I hope it can be a springboard for you to think about your own wellness, your relationship with your body and to question what you think you know and why you think you know it. All that said, I hope you enjoy this zine and find it useful!
- Raz, September 2018 issuu.com/raz_zines Twitter: @the_zoharr Contact: raz.zines@gmail.com
Contents The New Normal: when your body changes................................4 Body Secrets and Shame............................................................6 Unlearning Body Self Crit...........................................................8 Health at Every Size..................................................................10 Your Body Under Stress............................................................12 Three game-changing models from human sexuality research and how to use them......................................................................14 Interlude: The Skill of Nonjudging............................................18 Your Body and Attachment to Others........................................19 Adapting Your Life to Your Body...............................................20 A Mini WRAP Workbook...........................................................22 Hacking Touch........................................................................24 Body Acceptance is part of the
series, made by boundless media. EmpowerZINES is a quick n’ dirty zine series which disseminates knowledge necessary to survive today’s world. This zine and the others in this series are completely available to reproduce, chop up, and be spread however you wish—just not for monetary profit. If you have a theme you would like to develop into an EmpowerZINE, please email info@boundlessmedia.co
The New Normal: when your body changes Hank Green has a video up on Youtube where he talks about how he adapted to life with ulcerative colitis. I first saw it when a partner sent it to me as I had been struggling with being a young chronically ill person, and the simple yet powerful thesis of this video has remained a theme of my life ever since. Fundamentally, when you get sick, you adapt to a new normal. This means that your baseline for everyday life shifts, and as time progresses the baseline starts to feel normal. The upshot is that you can live the rest of your life fairly happily with the same symptoms that used to rock you to your core at the start. It's a deceptively simple idea, but a widely applicable one. When your body changes, your relationship with it should develop as well, to maintain your ability to function and healthy self-image. If you ignore the changes or try not to adapt to them, they remain unprocessed and you don't get to live as comfortably as if you had acknowledged the new normal and taken the steps to adapt your life to it. This applies to any unexpected change to our bodies, and accepting our bodies as they are right now is something that many people struggle with regardless of ability level. So that's step 1 of the new normal: acknowledging that it has arrived. See: Body Secrets and Shame, Unlearning Body Self Crit Step 2 is processing how you feel about the change. It could be a grieving process; depending on how your life has been affected, the new normal can look really scary and unfair. The stages of grief aren't experienced by everyone, and certainly not in the same way or same order, but its ok to get depressed or angry, or to want to negotiate with your body to go back to how things were as you work through how difficult change feels. The most important part of this step of the new normal is to express and process how you feel so that you can get it out of your system and also start to develop functional coping mechanisms. You’ll need to allow your-
self to move through & fully experience your anger, sadness, and desire to bargain, and it’s going to be worth it. See: Your Body Under Stress, Health at Every Size, This part isn't always linear - you may find yourself going back through steps 1 and 2 if something changes again, even something small that you might be tempted to judge yourself for getting upset over. The good news is that through this process you’ll end up gaining a hell of a lot of skills in self-regulation, selfcompassion and emotional expression that can help you in other aspects of your life. Some more in-depth exploration of these skills is included later in this zine. Step 3 is starting to adapt your life to your body. All of your needs are valid and deserve to be catered for. Focus on and design the systems that you need to put in place to enable yourself to do the things you want to do, and most importantly be honest with yourself about what your needs are now. See: A Mini WRAP Workbook, Three Game-Changing Models, Adapting Your Life to Your Body The new normal is here and it’s going to be ok.
Body Secrets and Shame We all have secrets. The question is, do your secrets protect you or harm you? Some of us hide our disabilities or the things we dislike about our bodies & our needs, because they feel gross & shameful or because we don't want to seem weak to the people around us. As a person with inflammatory bowel disease, I've jumped through some truly hilarious hoops to hide my symptoms from others and avoid actually saying anything when I do have to disclose my illness. I move through the world with an invisible disability, navigating a society where all young people are assumed to be healthy & disabled lives are often assumed to be less worth living. What I've found with my illness is that it only gets worse when I pretend it’s not happening, when I go to lengths to hide it like avoiding normal self-care and treatment for flares. If I want to be healthy, I am forced to confront & be public about the fact that I am sick until I do enough work that I go back into remission - I have to do the work of accepting my body as sick if I am to become healthier. So how do we take the lessons of the body positivity movement and apply them to disability, and take the survival lessons learnt from disability and apply them to body acceptance? I think it starts with secrets. When you bow to the pressure that bodies like yours should not be seen or heard of, there's no outlet for the pent up anxiety and shame. We can only start to get better when we acknowledge that we're sick, and that we need to do something about it - which will involve making changes that are visible to others! Like taking meds and going to the doctor and doing less when we've got no spoons. We get even better when we ask the people who care about us for help and support - whether its helping with the things we don't have the spoons to do, being emotionally supportive, or just not making us do the emotional labour of hiding being sick from them. This probably sounds kind of obvious, but in practice it's hard - to be open, not to go with the flow and to actually take the time out to do what you need for your health (remembering to take your meds on a one-night stand, anyone?) and not constantly apologising for a basic fact of your existence.
It's the same with your body in general—not only do you not need to hide it, you’re better off when you don’t. If you want to be naked with people, do it. Give them the chance to be amazing and accepting of the parts you think are flaws. If you're insecure about something, talk to close friends and partners about it. When you bring your body secrets out into the open, they get less scary, and the shame that builds and builds in the darkness can shrink away when other people get to debunk the myths you've been taught by a body-shaming world. Moreover, when you no longer have to both carry your insecurities and do the work of hiding them, you get bandwidth back to start to heal. You get back the bandwidth back to do stuff with your body that makes you feel great - whether that's sports, dancing in your bedroom, masturbating or just staring at yourself in the mirror in admiration. But I hear you protest that some people are not going to be amazing! Some people are going to reinforce my shame and make my secrets even more imperative to keep! The thing is that those people have the same internalised messages that are hurting you, and it’s hurting them as well - literally nobody benefits from body shame. You deserve better than to spend time with people who contribute to shame, and you deserve to seek out the people who can appreciate who you are right now. At the end of the day, your body is a vehicle for you to enjoy the world. It is by definition a being in motion, which gains wear and tear as it takes you where you want to go, rather than being a china doll that sits on a shelf. You need to accept your body not so that you're finally happy with displaying it to others or disclosing facts about it, but so that you gain enough of a sense of ownership to use it for everything you'd like to, without limiting yourself due to insecurities. It's so that you can take care of it without the boundaries of shame and secrets limiting your ability to practice self-care*. *A note on self care: self-care is not synonymous with self-indulgence. It’s more like parenting yourself with compassion - bringing yourself hot chocolate and sympathy when you're feeling shit, but also dragging yourself to the doctor when you're sick and doing the human functions that in the long run improve your quality of life.
Unlearning Body Self Crit There are a variety of cultural messages we internalise during our lives about bodies that do not behave or appear exactly according to the modern ideal. We’re told to keep them around because somehow they’ll motivate us to be healthier or hotter, but really they achieve the opposite effect. Body self criticism is just as bad for you as all other forms of stress, except this time the stressor is your body itself. You live in your body, so its inadequacy is not a threat that can be fought or escaped. The only option left is the freeze response, plunging you into stasis and despair what we see when we study it is that self crit actually correlates with poor health & loneliness. As you can imagine, beating yourself up when you do self crit to stop self critting is about as useful as beating a sick cat. It’s not your fault you grew up in a world awash with negative messages about normal bodies, so let’s look at some more useful strategies. Strategies to heal from body self crit 1. Practise self-compassion. There are three key elements to self compassion, as developed by Dr Kristin Neff: · Self kindness not self judgment. This involves recognising that difficult experiences are an inevitable part of life & being gentle with yourself as you accept the painful experience of being ‘imperfect’ according to a cultural standard you thought mattered. Have sympathy and kindness for your feelings & body while accepting the (morally neutral!) reality of your body. Think about how you would support a close friend having these self-critical thoughts. · Common humanity not isolation. Suffering & feeling inadequate is a shared human experience. You are not alone right now. Most of us go through feelings of inadequacy in such a demanding cultural context. Your struggle in overcoming body shame is both common & normal.
· Mindfulness not over-identification. It is important to neither suppress nor exacerbate negative emotions. Dr Neff writes that “mindfulness is a non-judgmental, receptive mind state in which one observes thoughts and feelings as they are, without trying to suppress or deny them”. (see: Interlude: The Skill of Nonjudging). It is possible to avoid over-identifying with thoughts & feelings by not holding onto them tightly and getting consumed by them. Sometimes, the best way to deal with self crit is to notice the thoughts, acknowledge them and then choose to focus on something else (e.g. switching to an absorbing activity). 2. See your body. Look at your whole body in a mirror, regularly, and practise ignoring the self-critical thoughts and focusing on the selfappreciative thoughts. List the things that you like about how your body looks and also about what it can do. N.B. This exercise can sometimes bring up difficult emotions. You can tap out of this exercise whenever you need to and hold your process on your own terms, while keeping its principles in mind. 3. Change the media you consume. If there's media that makes you feel more critical of your body as it is today, stop consuming it. Conversely, consume more of the media that makes you feel good about your body as it is today! You're minimising the fuel for your own body self crit, and reducing the revenue going to harmful media. 4. Choose to trust yourself. Trust the reality of your body: where societal scripts don't match your experience, trust your experience - which is different for literally everyone. Be aware that other's bodies are also different to yours. Throw away the societal script for your body. All it does is make it harder to like how you actually function. Make space for goals that actually serve you. Self-compassion strategy source: self-compassion.org
Health at Every Size The basic principle of HAES is that if you want to improve your health, you should focus on creating & maintaining healthy habits, regardless of whether these lead to weight loss. According to the HAES manifesto weight loss itself should not be the goal as a) it is hard for most people to keep the weight off, b) there is evidence that being ‘metabolically healthy’ is also possible when you are overweight/obese and that yo-yo dieting can actually damage your metabolic health, and c) there is plenty of evidence to suggest that increased weight by itself is not a significant health risk. Most health markers can be improved by healthy behaviours regardless of whether weight is lost in the process. In fact, being slightly underweight is more dangerous for you than being obese. Your goal should be to feel better in your body rather than focusing on its fat content, and this includes being more emotionally healthy by not hating yourself & your body. Bear in mind that self -hate all by itself causes a measurable worsening in health outcomes. It is not only ok to stop hating yourself for your weight; it is essential that you love yourself and start treating yourself well with healthy behaviours now, not just in a hypothetical future where you weigh 10kg less.
Excerpt from the HAES manifesto with its four basic tenets: 1.
Accept your size. Love and appreciate the body you have. Self-acceptance empowers you to move on and make positive changes.
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Trust yourself. We all have internal systems designed to keep us healthy—and at a healthy weight. Support your body in naturally finding its appropriate weight by honouring its signals of hunger, fullness, and appetite.
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Adopt healthy lifestyle habits. Develop and nurture connections with others and look for purpose and meaning in your life. Fulfilling your social, emotional, and spiritual needs restores food to its rightful place as a source of nourishment and pleasure.
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Find the joy in moving your body and becoming more physically vital in your everyday life.
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Eat when you’re hungry, stop when you’re full, and seek out pleasurable and satisfying foods.
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Tailor your tastes so that you enjoy more nutritious foods, staying mindful that there is plenty of room for less nutritious choices in the context of an overall healthy diet and lifestyle.
4. Embrace size diversity. Humans come in a variety of sizes and shapes. Open to the beauty found across the spectrum and support others in recognizing their unique attractiveness.
Your Body Under Stress You don’t need me to tell you that stress isn’t good for you. What you might not know, is that stress lives in your body rather than your brain, and that the ways to discharge stress lie in your body. The health benefits of learning to discharge your stress are also even greater for your body than your mind. The Science Stress is a cycle. It starts with a threat that triggers the feeling of being at risk, which leads to a stress response and finally a feeling of relief & safety. There are four stress responses: fight, flight, freeze, and tend & befriend. In the fight response, the threat is assessed as being beatable. You feel anger and then go and try to fight the threat. Conversely, in the flight response the threat isn't considered beatable, so you feel fear and escape the threat. These are both forms of accelerator stress response (more on the accelerator and brakes later), meaning they are controlled by the sympathetic nervous system, which mobilises your body to action. Relaxation after the threat has been dealt with is mediated by the parasympathetic nervous system (the brakes), which does things like reduce your heart rate and slow your breathing. The freeze response is a little different: the brain decides that the threat can't be survived either by escaping or beating it. So it hits the brakes, and the body over-activates the parasympathetic system, initiating a state of ‘tonic immobility’. This can manifest as despair, emotional numbness & shutdown. The thing is, this is a useful response and evolved to keep you safe in the same way as the other two, by convincing predators you’re already dead (who knew science could be so cheerful, right?). The natural resolution to surviving a threat using this stress response is something called self-paced termination - a process where all the built up adrenaline of the stress response is discharged via vigorous movement, allowing the animal to coast to a place of relaxation. The tend and befriend stress response is more of a primate thing. It’s a response where we connect affectionately with others, building up our social connections to gain us allies against threats and to allow others to soothe our stress together with us. It allows us to complete the cycle by
feeling taken care of and feeling that we are taking care of others. Completing the stress response cycle So in a world where the threat usually isn’t something that’s simple to deal with but in which our bodies still respond in the ways they evolved to, how do we discharge stress and complete the stress cycle rather than letting all that adrenaline fester and mess us up? Here’s a bunch of possible strategies: · Exercise: running, dancing, meditation, yoga, tai chi · Outlets: crying, primal scream, art, journaling, singing · General self-care: sleep, grooming, body self-care, cooking, baths · Conscious relaxation: progressive muscle relaxation, massage, mindfulness · Connecting with friends: calling, messaging, meeting up, affection Here’s a list of questions to consider for dealing with stress: 1. What are my top stressors? 2. How can I tell when I'm stressed? What are the physical, emotional & cognitive signs? 3. What helps when I'm feeling stressed, overwhelmed or exhausted? 4. How can I increase my access to one of these stress management strategies? What are some challenges I might have and how can I minimise those barriers? 5. What might make increasing access to this strategy more important, and make me more confident that I am able to access it? 6. What's one thing I will do today to get closer to being able to use this strategy more? When trying to discharge your stress, recognise when you are shutting down processes of completion and try to identify the appropriate contexts (places, people, times) that allow you to complete the cycle. The good news is that just as stress is a natural biological response to stressors, discharging stress is also a natural biological return to homeostasis. When you give your body the opportunity to coast to a place of relaxation & safety, it knows how and it can. In general, emotions are things that need to be experienced all the way through to their natural conclusion (Nagoski compares them to tunnels), before a resolution can be achieved. But a resolution does exist.
Three game-changing models from human sexuality research and how to use them The dual control model The basic idea of the dual control model is that your sexual response is controlled by the combination of a sexual excitation system (SES) and a sexual inhibition system (SIS). The SES is the accelerator, identifying sexually relevant stimuli in your environment and causing arousal. This might happen spontaneously when you see something sexually relevant, or maybe only once you’re in a highly sexual context/starting sexual contact. That second one is called responsive arousal and its pretty normal. The SIS is the brakes, and it exists so that you aren’t distracted by sexual response in inappropriate contexts, and to actively turn you off when there’s threats around that mean sex is a bad idea. Physiologically, this consists of a) a constant inhibitory signal that needs to be lowered for sexual response to occur and b) reactive inhibition i.e. putting on the brakes when getting aroused could be disadvantageous or risky. This second part consists of two types of psychological brake: · Brake 1 - fear of consequences: identifies stimuli which would inhibit arousal such as threats and stressors, and fears about external factors · Brake 2 - fear of performance failure: worrying & internal fears e.g. about your appearance or skill level The combination of the sensitivity of your accelerator and your brakes creates your unique sexual response. So what’s the point of knowing about this model? Well, we can all have either high, medium or low SES accelerator sensitivity and high, medium or low SIS brakes sensitivity. Individual variation in SIS/SES sensitivities is normal, but for those of us on the extremes, this model can be a window into the parts of our sexual response that bother and mystify us. This is key for two groups: ·
People with high SES and low SIS. These people are at risk of ‘redlining’, meaning that when they get stressed and/or anxious their sexual risk taking behaviour shoots up, together with their compulsivity, and other general risky behaviours. Stress triggers a greater interest in sex by blocking sexual pleasure/enjoying while increasing sexual interest/wanting (terms
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explain in the next section). Interestingly, you deal with it in the same way that you deal with the next category. People with low SES and high SIS. Conversely, can become ‘flatliners’ when stressed: most people's interest in sex either doesn’t change or reduces when they're stressed, and sexual pleasure reduces for everyone when they're stressed, but people in this group may not get aroused even when they’re feeling ok. They can’t switch off the brakes even when they want to.
Most triggers for the accelerator/brakes are learned, rather than being instinctual. It is even possible to change what triggers your brakes/ accelerator, but the more efficient option for most people is to alter the context, both external and internal. This effectively boils down to actually dealing with stress and accepting your own body. Incentive salience Incentive salience is the cognitive process by which expecting, enjoying and wanting a rewarding stimulus link up to make you pay attention to it, approach it and seek it out. It originates in the reward system, and it is one of the two possible forms of motivational salience (the other being aversive). Depending on the context in which they are stimulated, the three interlinked systems detailed below cooperate to process all of your emotional/motivational systems, in particular stress and attachment. 1. Expecting (associative learning): linking a current stimulus to a future reward in a process of implicit learning i.e. it happens subconsciously 2. Enjoying (pleasure): identifying whether a stimulus feels good/ rewarding—key for developing attachments 3. Wanting (motivation): the desire to move towards or away from a stimulus. When this system is activated together with stress or attachment, it can trigger stress responses or feelings of yearning for the attachment object. Understanding how these systems work gives you the tools to understand your maladaptive behaviours and figure out where in the process you can stop them - this pathway even underlies stuff as extreme as addiction. For example, craving is when you want something without enjoying it, while dread is when you expect something without wanting it. According to Oxford Clinical Psychology, cravings can be dealt with by not
reinforcing the association when it is triggered so that it becomes less and less strong each time it is triggered and eventually fades away (urge surfing). You stop wanting the stimulus because you stop expecting it when presented with the trigger - you associatively unlearn. In terms of sex and sexuality, this craving pathway underlies the redliner phenomenon, which as we have seen is stress-triggered. Redlining can be dealt with using another craving management technique, stimulus control, which is just minimising exposure to the trigger - when the trigger is stress, you do this by completing the stress response cycle! There are correspondingly two ways to deal with dread. You can change from a state of active unwant to a state of greater neutrality towards the object of dread (“What’s the worst case scenario and would it change everything or just be a challenge?”). You can also stop expecting it entirely, either by psychological work (“is there really anything to be afraid of? How likely is the feared consequence really?”) or getting it over with sooner, which studies show is how most people deal with dread. When people dread sex, they can choose to participate in forms of sex therapy where they begin by dismantling the association between intimacy and (usually) penetration with a yes intimacy, no sex rule. They can then recondition themselves not to have negative associations with sex by a gradual process of escalating pleasant, wanted sexual touch without pressure, so that they start wanting as well as expecting sex after intimacy. You could consider a similar technique to deal with, for example, a dread of going running. Don’t think about going running for a bit so that the negative association fades a little, then reintroduce increasingly longer runs in pleasant/neutral contexts and with rewards afterwards like watching a favourite show, or by associating running itself with listening to good music, time to decompress and being in nature, so that eventually you start looking forward to it. You are a complex dynamical system Let’s start by defining a couple of terms. A drive is an unpleasant internal state which pushes you to act to survive e.g. hunger. An incentive motivation system is you being pulled by an attractive external stimulus to obtain it and thrive e.g. some people's desire for sex (which isn't in fact a drive). You comprise a collective of all of your drives and incentive systems, constantly interacting with your environment and with each other. These include stress, attachment, belonging, appetite, curiosity, emotional habits, roles and identities you hold, hopes, the accelerator and the brakes.
Each of these systems interacts with the environment to produce your internal states: comfort, hunger, thirst, sleepiness, loneliness, frustration etc. Integration is the process by which all these internal states influence each other. It can either be subtractive, where one state interferes with another state (being sleepy interferes with concentration), or additive, in which one state actively reinforces another state (feeling well rested aids concentration). Fun fact, additive integration is also the cause of unhealthy coping mechanisms! Nagoski’s metaphor for understanding yourself as a complex dynamical system is to imagine it as a flock of birds, which fly according to three rules: 1. Fly towards the magnetic pole (towards your goal state e.g. deep concentration) 2. Fly away from predators (recognise and respond to stressors/ threats) 3. Fly together with the other birds (use all available systems to avoid threats) Here are the ideas that follow from this model that make it a gamechanger: if one bird notices a predator and changes course to escape it, a few others follow rule #3 and try to fly away with it - often away from the goal state. This subtractive integration can be avoided by dealing with the things causing birds to fly in other directions so they're freed up to fly towards the goal state, i. e . s a t is fy in g your d r iv e s . Additive integration can then be harnessed, as birds flying enthusiastically towards something like an attachment object pull their neighbours to fly faster (adding motivational incentives). A great example of this is a study that showed that women found it easier to orgasm with socks on, which turned out to be because not having cold feet anymore meant the body temperature bird could rejoin the flock and result in a more cohesive flock flying towards orgasm. Complex states like working productively on a project or sexual pleasure are emergent properties of the dynamical system, and are therefore achieved with greater success when more birds are flying in the same direction. This is why you need to take your needs seriously, meet them, complete the cycle on stress and optimise the context in which you're functioning. It changes your very capacity to reach your goals, and relatively small changes can have disproportionately large rewards.
Interlude: The Skill of Nonjudging Let’s talk for a moment about the skill of nonjudging, which we introduced in our definition of mindfulness in Unlearning Body Self Crit. It’s an incredibly powerful skill to develop: a study on anxiety by Hoge et al found that the people whose lives were least disrupted by their anxiety symptoms weren't the ones with the least symptoms, but rather those who were nonjudging about how they were feeling. It’s a skill you develop by practise. You look at your negative, unprocessed feelings about your body, and choose to maintain compassionate self-awareness, just observing your internal experience neutrally. Recognise those feelings & don't judge them as good or bad, even if they are distressing or not what you think you 'should' feel about your body. Feel what you feel.
Nagoski's tips for beginners at nonjudging: ·Feelings are biological cycles with a beginning, middle and end, so moving through them and completing the cycle is something your body already knows how to do (see: Your Body Under Stress). Simply allow it to do so. ·Cultural rules mean that there are sometimes inappropriate contexts in which to allow your feelings, but that just means that letting out emotions requires that you wait for or seek out an appropriate context in which to express them, not that having those feelings is inappropriate. ·Nonjudging means allowing predator-spooked emotion birds in the flock to fly away rather than caging them ("I shouldn't have that feeling"). Allow them to flee & convince themselves the threat is gone, and trust that in time they'll rejoin the flock and resume flying towards your goal state. In other words, don’t be afraid of the consequences of letting yourself feel your feelings.
Your Body and Attachment to Others If your emotions live in your body, then so do the methods by which you build attachments. Here are the steps by which attachments form: 路 Proximity seeking: enjoying being with someone, eagerness to be close a lot 路 Safe haven: tend and befriend dynamic - urge to "soothe your stress by connecting with your attachment object" - getting support from that person 路 Separation distress: pain when they're away 路 Secure base: they become your "emotional home" Two body-based ideas for creating deep connections: 1. Do stuff together that raises your heart rate and feels exciting: talking about stuff you're passionate about, hikes, scary movies, concerts, political rallies. The feeling of general arousal is associated with the person you're with and they are labelled an exciting person in your brain. 2. Undertake meaningful challenges together: do something novel that you've always wanted to do together, and connect over doing that. Lastly, a quick overview of the the 'sleepy hedgehog' model of emotion management in relationships as developed by Nagoski. While using this method, keep in mind that a) your feelings are neither more nor less important than your partner's and b) each of you is 100% responsible for your own feelings. When treating your feelings like a sleepy hedgehog you found on your chair: 1. Name the feeling(s) 2. Welcome the feeling - no running, judging, shaming or anger, and sit still with it 3. Take responsibility for the feeling - what will help? Sometimes you can't always manage the threat or heal the loss, only let the feeling complete the cycle 4. Communicate the feeling & the need - "I feel x and I think what would help is y"
Adapting Your Life to Your Body Everyone needs to practise self-care. Everyone needs to become familiar with their limits and build enough white space into their life so that those limits are respected and they can continue to function. Everyone has goals or desires, and everyone needs to balance their pursuit of these with the realities of their body, or end up burned out. We’ve addressed the why, so this section is about the how of adapting your lifestyle to the reality of you. The science of why this can feel so frustrating or even pointless There's a 'little monitor', as Nagoski terms it, stationed near your incentive salience system. It’s there to check that the environment is behaving as expected and to investigate any discrepancies between reality and its expectations. The monitor’s goal is to reduce these discrepancies. It does this by monitoring three relevant factors: 1. What your goal is 2. The effort & resources being expended to reach the goal 3. How much progress is being made towards the goal The monitor synthesises this information into a quantity called the criterion velocity, which is basically an effort-to-progress ratio. Having an acceptable ratio is very important to the monitor. When you are making good progress for little effort, you are highly motivated to reach your goals. When you’re going slower than the monitor expects, frustration happens. You get to despair when you’re making lots of effort and no progress and the monitor reassesses the goal as unreachable. You stop even trying, in a process of ‘learned helplessness’. If you’re at frustration Start by reassessing the situation: 1. Is this the right goal for me? 2. Am I putting in the right type and amount of energy? 3. Am I being realistic in how much effort I expect reaching this goal should take? If the answer to #1 is yes, then great! Let’s work on #2 and #3. Here’s
how to reach the goal: 1. Make a plan with concrete, specific, detailed steps - when, where, what, how - be realistic! 2. Anticipate barriers. The secret ingredient to a good plan is having contingency plans for each anticipated road bump: · What obstacles might you encounter? · Specifically where and when will you encounter them? · What can you do to prevent them arising? · What can you do to move past them when they do appear? 3. Make your goal a part of your identity. Making something part of your identity makes it important to you, and you start carrying out your plan because it’s a part of who you are now, not just because you're supposed to follow it. Think about how you can create synthesis between old & new aspects of your identity. A personal example for me is being a sick person and being a queer creator. I often theme my queer content like my zines around disability because it’s both a goal of mine to become more mindful of my illness, and to have successful creative outlets. If you’re at despair The strategy above will be useful to you eventually, but first you need to come back from the depths of despair. Release your body from feelings of despair using the strategies below: 1. Connect with others. Hug someone with whom you share a bond of caring & trust for twenty full seconds, while both standing over your own centres of gravity and holding on tight. 2. Move your body. Prove to it that it can enact change & is not helpless with at least thirty minutes of movement where you’re over your feet e.g. walking, running, yoga, dance. 3. Belly laughter and rough & tumble play. This hacks into basic brain systems engendering feelings of safety & bonding. Play tug with dogs, have tickle fights with people you’re close to, or play a contact sport. 4. Be creative or make something. This can allow processing of your feelings by letting them out into writing, or prove to yourself that you are capable of doing things by making something with your hands. Source: https://medium.com/@enagoski/despair-and-its-cure-1befc3ae8717
A Mini WRAP Workbook WRAP stands for wellness recovery action plan, a framework for overcoming distressing symptoms & unhelpful behaviour patterns. It was originally developed by Mary Ellen Copeland primarily for mental health patients, though it’s useful for those with chronic physical illnesses and anyone else with delicate mental or physical health. This one is adapted from the Cheshire & Wirral NHS WRAP. 1.
Wellness Toolbox
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What do I do to keep myself well?
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What has meaning for me, inspires me & my values?
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What would I like to try to see if it supports my wellness?
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What do I do to feel better after a rough day?
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Daily maintenance plan
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What am I like when I am well?
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What do I need to do every day to maintain wellness?
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What do I need to do less often to maintain wellness?
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What are the things I need to do, but do not actually do for my wellness?
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Understanding triggers and what you can do about them
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What triggers me? I.e. sets off a chain of unhelpful behaviours/ thoughts/feelings/physical symptoms
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How can I limit my exposure to my triggers?
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What can I do when I’m triggered to prevent things getting worse?
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Identifying early warning signs & an action plan
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What are my early warning signs?
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What actions can I take when I see my early warning signs?
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Signs things are breaking down & an action plan
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How do I think, feel & behave when the situation is serious?
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When things have gone this far my top priority is caring for myself. What can I do to stop things getting worse?
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Crisis planning
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How would others know that I need more support?
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What are things I would need help with from others, and who?
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What are things others might do that wouldn’t help or would make things worse?
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What further medications/treatments reduce my symptoms, when would I use them and why?
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What medications/treatments do I need to avoid and why?
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How can I maintain the level of independence I want?
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If I am in danger what do I want my supporters to do?
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Post crisis planning
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What did I learn about myself & others throughout this crisis?
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Are there parts of my WRAP that didn’t work out as I hoped?
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What changes can I make to my WRAP to reduce the likelihood of a future crisis?
Hacking Touch Consensual touch is freaking awesome, and it's a good idea to learn how it works and what makes it pleasurable if you're interested in giving and receiving it. Here's a whistle-stop tour of some biology-based tips that I think are interesting, mostly presented in a sexual context but adaptable for platonic touch as well. This list is mostly drawn from Emily Nagoski's 51 Sex Nerd Tips, which is available for free from her blog The Dirty Normal. 1. Context matters: ·
Minimise stress triggers and promote relaxation, to avoid activating the brakes - you can't enjoy pleasant touch when your brain is too overwhelmed by stressors as it interprets almost anything as as threat when already feeling threatened.
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Create an environment with smells that the other person associates with feeling cared for/relaxed
2. Different nerve types are responsible for sensing each of the types of touch below. Stimulate each of the nerve types in turn to avoid saturating any one set, by alternating between a variety of types of touch: ·
Light touch - on the skin's surface, e.g. scratching, stroking, brushing. You could apply this with fingertips, your tongue or a feather.
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Deep touch - applying pressure, massaging the muscles and moving the skin over them, e.g. pressing, moving, massaging, holding
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Temperature - e.g. a warm palm, cool nails, air moving over damp skin
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Speed - light touch is sensed by Meissner’s Corpuscles, which are rapidly adaptive receptors, meaning that they only sense rapid changes in stimulus intensity & rate and do not sense continua-
tion/duration of sensation. Make sure to keep light touch moving & changing (not necessarily quickly). Other nerve ending types can be slowly adaptive, meaning they keep producing signals for as long as they are stimulated, and pick up signals across relatively wide patches of skin. ·
Rhythm - consistency is good because it tells the body what to expect, but unexpected changes are great too
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Even lighter touch - there is a specific set of nerve endings responding only to disturbances to body hair, so gently brush over the surface of hairs on the skin (without touching the skin itself)
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Skin stretch - sensed by Ruffini corpuscles, which are slowly adapting. Combine stretching & rotating motions on the earlobes & joints (like in the fingers) to stimulate these nerves.
3. Interesting places and things to do there (we’re just gonna look at the sensual, not the sexual): ·
Lightly nibbling on & licking the earlobe - scrape your teeth slowly along the lobe. You can also utilise a change of touch type by pressing it between your lips or biting a tiny bit harder.
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Slow deep touch on the scalp. You could give someone a head massage interspersed with light touch scritching, or stimulate it by gripping & pulling their hair gently. Bonus points if you do the latter while kissing them to move their head to get to other areas to kiss.
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Brush the tip of your nose in places where light touch is pleasurable, like the neck, behind the ear or the inside of the forearm.
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The back: have the other person lie on their front, straddle them and brush your front up and down their back slowly. Nerves in the skin are organised in patches, and their size determines sensitivity; sensations in the back are quite diffuse as the nerves are arranged into the largest patches in the body. This means that simple actions on the back can feel amazing & complex, such as slowly running your tongue & nose along a shoulder blade or up
the entire back, adding in bites, sucks and kisses. ·
The back of the knees is sensitive and therefore great for light touch, the location of which is hard to tell just by feel
4. Use your voice: ·
Whispering can be great if it’s something that works for everyone involved. It creates intimacy, and you can tell someone how it feels to be with them, appreciation for their body and them as a person
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Let yourself make noises when you’re enjoying receiving a sensation, whether just a loud breath, an appreciative moan or a shout
5. There are ways to raise pain thresholds and increase the intensity of stimulation available to you in a number of ways, which can allow you to hack touch for kink. You do this by turning off the nociceptors (nerve endings that sense pain): ·
Get them into a state of high endorphins as these block nociception, e.g. high sexual arousal
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Overwhelm the pain sensation with other sensations e.g. pressure, light touch, gentle temperature (warm or cool)
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Ice numbs all the nerves on the surface, leaving only the deeper nerves sensing pressure and stretch sensations, and these become more intense in the absence of other sensations - try sucking, stretching or massaging the skin
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Feelings of affection, safety, trust, love (i.e. attachment) increase dopamine - eye contact, face touching, intimate conversation, smiling & laughter are all attachment behaviours