Coming Up For Air

In my mid-twenties I broke up with a man by jumping off his sailboat and swimming to shore. To be clear, we were on the Columbia River, and the swim was a matter of 20 yards on a warm, sunny day. That is not to say that it was a terribly mature or rational action on my part. It just seemed like the only thing I was capable of doing at the time. It was a total flee response. I was simply done. 

I was done with the stupid boat that always had something that needed fixing. I was done with the afternoon of trying to figure out why the centerboard wouldn’t go down. I was done with feeling I could never get my insides to match my outsides when I was around this man. I was done with the relationship.

The man wasn’t a bad man. In fact, he was (and is still) lovely. It just wasn’t a right fit or the right time or didn’t have some ineffable right thing that would make it work. After we broke up and stayed friends, we used to joke it was all in our names. His last name was VanDerwater, of the water, and he was an avid sailor. Before we met, he had sailed across both the Atlantic and Pacific. He was completely at home sleeping in a tiny hull with fathoms of dark water beneath his body. As a woman who felt most at home in the unflinching solidness of the desert, a Fields no less, I just couldn’t fathom how we could inhabit the same daily world.

I thought of this story from my past earlier this week when one of my clients was talking about how busy the last month had been for her. A wife, a mom of two, a small business owner with one location of her business under renovation, she has a lot of things and people to attend to on any given day. She reported that she had, as we discussed in our previous conversation, gone back to carving out quiet time for herself each morning before her kids woke up. I had given her this assignment as a way of bringing down the high-rev of her activated nervous system when things were beyond busy. It had helped. She said her alone time in the morning was like coming up for air before diving into another crazed day.

Right idea, I thought, but I wanted to challenge her to do better. Taking that time for herself is what Deb Dana, a Polyvagal Theory researcher and educator, calls a glimmer. It’s something that helps you to regulate your nervous system, in this case, out of a high-rev, can’t breathe you’re so busy place, and back into a place where you can see more clearly, make more effective decisions and be more efficient with your time.

These glimmers are powerful in terms of changing how we experience ourselves and how weighty/overwhelming/relentless the external word seems. And they are important! The challenge, however, is when we use these glimmers simply so that we can keep going at the same break neck pace. It’s the mentality of “I’ll rest so I can keep up,” or “I’ll take this deep breath so I can go under water again” rather than looking at operating in a new way altogether. 

In this case, the underlying factor is a common one—valuing everyone else’s needs over your own. That looks like “I’ll just do this one more thing for you (and you and you), even if it means I’m at my wit’s end.” I’ll go out of my way for this unnecessary errand for you, I’ll say yes to helping you with your kids even though I’m already overwhelmed, I’ll take on one more work obligation even though I’m burned out. 

This kind of behavior stems in part from an underlying (and sometimes unconscious) belief that someone else’s experience or reality matters more than your own, and so you leave your reality behind in order to make something ok for someone else. It’s as if you go underwater to be in their world even though the world where you can breathe is on land. You get me?

We do this when we believe that in order to be ok/accepted/loved/respected we have to enter someone else’s world. We learn this from a childhood in which no one entered our world by doing things like showing that our feelings and needs were valid and made sense, showing curiosity for things that were meaningful to us, and supporting us in being ourselves no matter what others thought. In that kind of scenario, we learn that if we want to have any closeness, we have to go to the other person’s reality because they won’t come to ours. The secret hope is that if we’re good enough to them in their reality, they will want to come visit ours. But why would they? They get all the closeness they need with you in their world!

This common experience leads to a whole bunch of adults out there who are swimming in other peoples’ worlds and coming up (or not) for air occasionally to go back to their own, whether it’s 30 minutes to themselves before their family wakes up or a run after work or perhaps saying no to something that feels like too much to take on.

One alternative is to live only on the land of your own experience and never enter the water of others’ experiences. But that’s an isolated and lonely existence. There’s an alternative, a metaphor for which I came up with when I was talking with my busy client this week: snorkeling! To learn to snorkel is to inhabit both worlds. To have the sun from your land reality on your back, and to breathe as you engage with the foreign, below the water reality. It is the embodiment of saying, “Your experience is important to me, AND so is mine.” 

How do you do that? You ask yourself how would it feel to you to take on that obligation before you commit. You speak your opinion, even if it’s a dissenting one. You make a commitment to not hold your breath, whatever that means to you, until the next time you can come, gasping for air, back into your own world.

I share this snorkeling metaphor with my jumping ship story to suggest that the other person, even if they are a lovely person, still inhabits a different reality than you. They inhabit theirs, and you inhabit yours. And if you want to have closeness without losing yourself (whether it’s a romantic partner, a child, a friend, a coworker, a parent), you have to find out how to share the space where your worlds meet without giving your youness away. If you don’t, it’s only so long before you either run out of air or, in my case, have an impulsive stress response that might make for a good story fifteen years later, but isn’t really you being your best self in the moment.

To wrap up what I’m saying, I will pass on to you what my wonderful and brilliant therapist, Nancy Dreyfus*, says: “loyalty to your own reality is not selfish or dishonorable.”

All this to say, if you’re going to participate in a self-care practice to regulate your nervous system, great. Yes! Do that! AND, use the internal sturdiness that is the natural consequence of a regulated nervous system to dare to go one step further in the direction of self-care: pause before you hold your breath or jump ship for your own land, and ask yourself if there’s a way you could be snorkeling.

*Side note: if you want to know how to put this “your experience is important AND so is mine” into practice in a skillful, loving way, I can’t recommend Nancy’s book enough. It’s called Talk to Me Like I’m Someone You Love. I recommend buying the book and reading it. And then rereading it. Let your tongue form the words out loud, let the words reform your cells into the body of a person who knows how to simply communicate from the truth of his or her own experience.

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