On my journey as an adoptive mother, I have had the honor of being challenged beyond my own limiting beliefs, values, and attitudes about myself and my world. In the absolute joy that comes with parenting, I have also met my edges where strategies and knowledge made zero difference. Those precious moments showed up in the most chaotic, heart-wrenching, fearful moments, which lit a fire in my own nervous system and shone a bright light on everything that had been programmed in me. The strategies from my adoption training only took me so far until exhaustion set in. In my attempt to meet my daughter’s unique needs, I had to discover that I didn’t know what I didn’t know. With a strong intention to support my child and impulses that led me to new information, I was able to start the process of shifting from my current trauma-informed behaviour lens into a nervous system lens that was more neuroaffirming. I intuitively knew so much; however, I often doubted myself and experienced the people around us pulling us into a direction that we both knew was not aligned with who we authentically were. I was in uncharted territory, unsure of where we were going to end up.
When I was introduced to the Alliance Against Seclusion and Restraint (AASR), I started feeling a sense of relief. The education I was being introduced to reflected what I instinctively knew deep inside me, even as the experts around us told me I was wrong. I felt like I had finally found professionals who could keep me moving in the direction that felt right for us. During that time, I was also exploring the WEL-Systems® body of knowledge. It was the huge invitation for me to start getting curious about what lived in my own neurology, what was being lit up in moments of triggers with my daughter, and how to engage it all in ways that created experiences of integration and wholeness. It aligned with what I was learning from AASR in so many ways, and this was a pathway into the most important part of it all, myself. As her mother, I learned to rewire my own nervous system in triggered moments and became the most powerful co-regulator for my daughter, so that she would also rewire her nervous system with more pathways of safety.
In my attempts to help my child, I was missing the most important part of the puzzle. She needed my nervous system to grow and to coregulate with.
The WEL-Systems® model was profound for me as I considered my experiences with my daughter while trying to shift myself out of compliance-based conditioning programmed into me by all the systems I had experienced, which ignited in my nervous system as stress because it was stored there from my own childhood. It doesn’t matter how much we know with our intellects; when we are in moments of intensity, our nervous systems become activated, and we learn what lives in us and can work with our bodies to free it. What we resist will persist; even if it shows up in a different situation, it will always want to be seen and freed.
Signals Dancing™ shows what is happening during a tough moment and reminds me that a couple of things are happening at once, as illustrated in this model. In the moment when I feel a sensation instead of focusing on trying to solve a problem, and before I engage with my child, I can pause, bring my attention into my own body deep at the base of my spine, intentionally open into the resistance, and use breath to create space so that the information wanting to integrate in that moment will have a chance to actually move. This often brings a lot of discomfort initially, and the idea is to invite and allow all of it to move while creating safety with breath and attention deep inside your body. You become the safe crucible to hold it all in safety. In this process, the signals that are not who you authentically are start to be digested and diluted. You might feel different sensations inside your body, and as you stay with each layer, you continue to invite and allow. Your body will start to stabilize once the information that was triggered is complete. When I started to play with this process in my own life, I noticed a lot of changes in my relationship with my daughter. When I engaged with her after she was able to hear me differently, her reactions were more in flow. My signal (4) was clearer, and it didn’t trigger her signals (2 and 3) to the degree it had before. Over time, I learned to trust my discomfort, knowing that a process of different signals was dancing and I could engage it in ways that helped us both rewire as we lived our lives and essentially allowed us both to emerge in our authentic selves in and through those experiences.
Because there is always more, we get to expand in and through every trigger when it presents. Our triggered moments look a lot different now.
Safety is maintained, and attachment grows. She gets to learn how to engage her own signals through me modeling this process, and we both become more of our authentic selves in every challenge. Sometimes we get stuck and big moments happen, that is ok too. We continue to stay with each layer as it presents, and often end up leaping forward in many ways.
If you are curious about the WEL-Systems TM paradigm, I invite you to visit the website of The WEL-Systems® Institute.
