Cattitude: Purr! Hiss! Freeze! Polyvagal informed self care for trauma and/or ADHD. With cats

This week, we’re making Polyvagal Theory even simpler with the help of Rainbow MagnifiCat and your own beloved animals. I developed Cattitude (aka Cat Coaching and Feline Better Every Day) after adopting Rainbow MagnifiCat from the rescue cat shelter in 2013 and realising how attending to her nervous system, practising what I had learned about Polyvagal Theory and other trauma-informed therapies was helping me (and later clients and groups).With ADHD and/or trauma histories, your extra sensitive nervous system can be a gift when you treat your whole self with compassion.In this week’s episode, this simple but effective practise, adapted from Deb Dana’s Befriending your Hierarchy exercise (from her book, Polyvagal Exercises for Safety and Connection, Norton) is a wonderful way to build on what you’ve started from last week’s dopamenu episode (and deeper dives in the Sole to Soul Circle).It really works. Simple Cattitude.Am really looking forward to hearing how you get on with it.le grá,EveiFULL TRANSCRIPTRainbow is part of my branding so I do probably have a disproportionate number of clients and supervisees who love cats but it works with any kind of creature and it just I love seeing people's faces change as they embody that sense of care for themselves that they've already been giving to their cats or dogs or toddlers or others they love. I love seeing the way people light up and I love that kind of eventual recognition that of course they deserve, of course YOU deserve the same compassion and tenderness and care. Hi, I'm Eve Menezes Cunningham and welcome to The Feel Better Every Day Podcast.I am so excited to be sharing new trauma-informed and ADHD-friendly ideas for you to help you take better care of yourself, that highest, wisest, truest, wildest, most joyful, brilliant and miraculous part of yourself, as well as the basic self-care which we all know can be so challenging at times. I really appreciate you tuning in. If you want a deeper dive you'll be getting bonus content each week if you sign up to the Soul to Soul Circle.You can do that for free or from as little as eight euros a month and you can also find more ideas in the book, 365 Ways to Feel Better: Self-care Ideas for Embodied Wellbeing. Hi, welcome to episode 48 of The Feel Better Every Day Podcast. For today's episode I want you to grab a piece of paper and a pen and get ready to improve or even transform any issue that you've been struggling with just by befriending your nervous system more.We're taking inspiration from cats to work with Polyvagal Theory in a really simple but fun and effective way. I started the whole Cattitude element of my work years and years ago after I brought Rainbow Magnificat back from the cat shelter in 2013. I'd learned about Polyvagal Theory doing my yoga therapy for mental health training and, as I realised how Rainbow was helping me embody it, I created Feline Better Every Day and cat coaching.So much of what I have done with Rainbow and now with Meadbh, and Teri Crews Cat and Angel Houdini, helps my nervous system as well as seeing the enormous improvements with them. Angel now lets me hold him and purrs at me! And then looks at me and remembers, oh no, he's feral and runs away. But there's something transformational about talking to ourselves as if we were a beloved cat, kitten, puppy, toddler, someone, another mammal.I often say lizard as well, I know they're not mammals, but find something that you love. I'm going to slow down and I'm going to read from the script because there's so much I want to include, I don't normally use a script. But basically we humans have very similar nervous systems to cats and by thinking in terms of cat coaching or Cattitude or Feline Better Every Day, it hopefully takes some of the jargon away and makes it less scary. Because all of this is common sense.Stephen Porges has done a phenomenal work and Deb Dana is making it more accessible and so many other people are taking Polyvagal Theory and running with it. But the reminder is that you deserve the care, kindness, curiosity, tenderness and compassion that you'd give a beloved cat, kitten, toddler, puppy, etc. So you can find out more at selfcarecoaching.net/feline.For now, just imagine cutting yourself some slack and think about something that is a stressor in your life, whatever it is you're feeling. All of us can benefit from paying more attention to our nervous systems and instead of trying to suppress all that wisdom, instead of trying to override it to really pay attention. Especially for people with trauma histories or ADHD with more sensitive nervous systems, we've grown up often being told we're too sensitive, there's something wrong with us, why are we so dramatic? I still get it now. I'm 49 and loved ones mean well, but they will tell me to not get sad about things but I've learnt to honour my nervous system. And that's absolutely fine. But growing up, it can be really confusing. And when you're younger, so it's really remembering as adults, or at any age, if you're younger watching this, you have a right to honour your nervous system.And there's no need to be talked out of knowing what you're feeling. And you're not too much no matter what you're feeling. So this practice is adapted from the lovely Deb Dana book, Polyvagal Exercises for Safety and Connection.It's the Befriending the Hierarchy exercise. But I'm using Feline Better Every Day terminology, Cattitude terminology, to help you think more easily than thinking in terms of ventral vagal wellness, or sympathetic nervous system, or a lot of the things I talk about a lot, but for this, or dorsal vagal. So Deb Dana is wonderful.Stephen Porges's Polyvagal Theory changed my life. And I used to have anxiety dreams about the terminology. But it is so gorgeous.If you are interested, and you go to that Feline Better Every Day page on my website, I'm linking some resources there for you as well. Check out Deb Dana's work as well. And also there are many interviews with the fantabulous Stephen Porges online.You don't need to freak yourself out with heaviness but it's such a beneficial framework. And I'm hoping that the inspiration from my rescue cats will help you.Even after all these years, more than two decades of integrating different therapies, and a decade of using more than a decade of using Rainbow Magnificat to support some clients as well as myself. And I love it when clients and I mean, I used to have Rainbow as part of my branding, so I do probably have a disproportionate number of clients and supervisees who love cats, but you can use any kind of creature. And I love seeing people's faces change as they embody that sense of care for themselves that they've already been giving to their cats or dogs or toddlers or others they love.I love seeing the way people light up. And I love that kind of eventual recognition that of course, they deserve of course, you deserve the same compassion and tenderness and care. It's a transformative I know for me, I've had years of therapy as part of my training.I'd had coaching, I'd been doing all these things on myself. But it was when I started working with Rainbow's nervous system, when I brought her back from the shelter, and she was terrified. And me softening my tone of voice for her using Polyvagal Theory knowledge to keep me doing it.And it softened my own tone of voice towards myself. So even now, if I like drop something and break it, like thinking, ‘Oh, I love this glass, I've had it for 20 years’ CRASH. In the past, it would mean like, ‘Oh,’ I'm giving myself a hard time. Whereas now it's just like, ‘It's OK, Evei Cat’ cleaning it up and just honouring the disappointment, but not making it worse by my reaction to it.You might want to paws this recording as you think about something in your life that is challenging for you right now. Whatever it is, large, small, I'm not going to stress you out by having you pick something at a certain level, just an issue that you're ready to transform, and get that paper and pen. So draw a line through the paper length ways.Through the middle. And then write the issue you want to improve. I haven't written an issue, but on that middle bit there, if you're watching this rather than listening to it, and then draw three columns going down and another column at the top.So you've got Purr! Hiss! and Freeze. So Purr is the first one, and that corresponds to the ventral state that we're going for. That real sense of embodied wellbeing. That ventral vagal wellness. And I'm not going to go too much into that right now.Just write down Purr! at the top, write down Hiss! in the middle, and that's for the stress, sympathetic activation, but not only the excited, energised, motivated, sympathetic like we need all of it. We need that motivation. We need sympathetic activation for the nervous system.There's a lot about encouraging more parasympathetic activity, which is great in this 24-7 society we live in, but sympathetic activation definitely has its place. All of these ways of being have their place. There's no right or wrong.It's just helping you befriend your nervous system and get to know your hierarchy. And I hope that this helps. In the third column, write Freeze. That's the dorsal vagal. So it's the hybrid of the parasympathetic and sympathetic, because there has to be some sympathetic activity in order to not be completely collapsed, some vagal tone. But at the same time, there's an enormous sense of overwhelm. And it's not the most pleasant, and especially with...