ACTIVELY CO-REGULATING WITH OTHERS
Our ability to co-regulate with others on an ongoing basis is the foundation of emotional safety and security within our relationships. If we were modeled emotional reactivity or disconnection in childhood, we may find it difficult to remain connected to others during times of disagreement or perceived conflict. But we can develop this “felt” emotional trust over time by consistently repairing or returning to emotional safety and connection after conflict occurs. This return to a safe and secure connection is foundationally important, especially for children, who are often left confused, alone, and overwhelmed by reactive or explosive emotions, like being yelled at or given the silent treatment when a parent is upset.
While much of co-regulation happens largely through our body’s unseen signals and our own nervous system safety, we can begin to intentionally choose to actively co-regulate with others by hugging, holding hands, exchanging loving looks, sitting close-by in shared silence, or practicing the heart-centered exercise here.
If you choose to co-regulate with another person, it’s important to anticipate some possible resistance, especially if they’re unfamiliar with the concept. To introduce the practice, it’s helpful to have a conversation with your loved one when they’re not actively upset, asking if they’d be willing to practice during future times of conflict or stress. Below are some basic facts about this practice, which you can share with your loved one to help them understand the power and potential of co-regulation.
FIVE FACTS ABOUT CO-REGULATION
Our body is wired to connect with others.
Co-regulation is a process that helps provide us with the safety we need to feel open to connect.
Our body’s nervous system communicates with other people’s nervous systems through electrical, hormonal, and energetic signals that we can’t see.
When we struggle to soothe our emotions (or regulate our nervous systems), we can use the peace and calm of another’s body to help us calm down.
We can start to use various tools and practices to feel safer with and more connected to each other right now.
Heart-Centered Co-regulation Exercise
Below is an easy exercise to help you practice co-regulation with a loved one. When you begin this practice it can be helpful if one of you is in a calm or parasympathetic state.
Sit across from each other and place a hand on each other’s heart or chest area. You’ll feel each other’s chest rising and falling, allowing you to synchronize your breath.
Breathe slowly and deeply.
Begin to visualize your nervous system sending signals of peace and calm to your loved one. And then visualize your nervous system receiving your loved one’s peace and calm.
This exercise is especially useful to do before potentially difficult conversations or stressful experiences because it increases our feelings of connection and can help rebalance our relationship’s collective energy.
CO-REGULATION MENU
The following is a list of some more things you can do to co-regulate with a loved one during times of stress or conflict.
Smile or send calming glances to each other, increasing the signals of safety and helping activate the ventral vagal state of everyone around you.
Practice breathing slowly and deeply in sync with each other while sitting facing each other or with your backs together.
Lovingly touch or cuddle with each other to activate the “love” hormone oxytocin while increasing feelings of trust and connectedness.
Look or comfortably gaze into each other’s eyes.
Ask a loved one to play with your hair or calmly stroke their hair to soothe and connect.
Hug each other to increase oxytocin and help relax any tension in your muscles.
Kiss each other to increase oxytocin and decrease cortisol levels.
Go for a walk with each other, focusing on syncing your pace and movement rather than on having an active conversation; this can help reduce stress and promote relational connection and communication.
If you are alone or unable to co-regulate with another person, you can imagine a moment of connection with them, which will also increase oxytocin and feelings of safety. You can even connect with an animal’s regulated nervous system to help you find safety in your own body. Petting, brushing, or even lying next to a relaxed pet can help you achieve the same calming effects.
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As we’ve been exploring together, it is only when we understand the influence our nervous system has on those around us that we can take steps to create true safety and security within our relationships. Embodying a sense of safety enables us to better navigate conflict with others, often without saying a word, and can help us become more collaborative partners. By extending safety to others through the process of co-regulation we can begin to shift our interactions and dynamics with another, even during moments of stress, hardship, or disagreement. As we reconnect with the compassion that lives in our heart, we empower ourselves to begin to break dysfunctional patterns in any of our relationships.
9
Empowering Your Relationships
In the introduction, you read about the five love languages, created by Dr. Gary Chapman in the early 1990s. He theorizes that each of us has a preferred way of receiving affection that, when communicated to our loved ones, can create or sustain the love we seek. According to Dr. Chapman, our five love languages are:
Words of affirmation. We want verbal affirmation or praise from our loved one.
Quality time. We want to spend frequent, preplanned, or mindful time with our loved one.
Receiving gifts. We want our loved one to give us visible or quantifiable symbols of love.
Acts of service. We want our loved one to perform chores or other favors for us.
Physical touch. We want our loved one to show us affection through physical touch or other intimate acts.
This life-changing concept helps many of us recognize that we each have separate, often distinct preferences. Some of us have even used these categories to directly communicate our emotional preferences within our relationships and transform our interpersonal experiences. Recognizing the uniqueness in our experiences, preferences, and perspectives opens us up to infinite possibilities in self-expression and emotional connection. But there’s a big difference between communicating our emotional preferences to others and expecting them to meet our needs in a specific way.
When we ask our loved ones to change their natural way of expressing themelves, we can close ourselves off to other kinds of emotional expression and opportunities for connection. When we overlook what comes naturally to those we love, we inadvertently limit the space we provide others to be themselves.
Complicating things, the ways we’ve all learned to feel valued or loved by others are based on our past conditioning and experiences. When we limit ourselves to these familiar displays of affection, we’re often simply asking our loved ones to re-create our earliest relationships, or what love feels like to us. Expecting others to treat us in these familiar ways, we risk re-creating our childhood dysfunctional dynamics.
