Your Inner Landscape: How Understanding Your Nervous System Can Help You Find Your Way

As an extremely analytical being, I’ve always understood emotions from a cause-and effect lens but not really from a felt-sense understanding. I have never been able to think of my emotions as part of me, but more like a foreign landscape that I am thrust into against my will. Towering mountains of activation, flowing rivers of chaos, deep pits of sadness, molten volcanos of roiling rage, and tranquil forests of peace. Each emotional landscape has its unique characteristics and challenges. 

After 13 years of practice as a therapist (at the time of writing this), I’m coming to understand that even though it feels like emotions are happening TO ME they really exist within me and I’m an active participant in experiencing and shaping them. And I still find the terrain metaphor to be extremely helpful as I work to analyze what I’m feeling and how to take care of myself.  

In part, I love this metaphor because I’m a reluctant traveler. I’m sensory avoidant and prone to profound overwhelm and collapse. I don’t want to go on the adventure, thank you very much. I just want to cocoon inside my hobbit hole with my nice cozy things and my sweet little crafts and my tiny innocent creature. I was an extremely indoorsy child and I persist in being an extremely indoorsy goblin adult human. 

Just like I have been timid and avoidant of the outside world, I have been timid and avoidant of my inside world as well. The only safe place being that of my intellect and imagination.

What I’ve come to realize in my work with my clients, as well as my own journey, is that avoidance of the terrain does not make it go away and leaves me unskilled and fumbling against the challenges that are going to happen to me whether I like it or not. So, instead of feeling like I have knowledge and resources to problem solve what I’m feeling and how to take care of myself,  I’m just running myself into walls with repeated patterns that are not helping me. Even though I’m a so-called “expert” in this topic, I still struggle with this every day. It’s way easier for me to intellectualize about this and identify what you need and how to regulate you than it is for me to explore my own inner experience and learn those skills in my own body and mind. 

Finding the bravery to explore a physical landscape can lead to breathtaking discoveries. And exploring your inner landscape can unlock profound insights about yourself and your emotional patterns. By understanding your nervous system's responses to different emotional triggers, you can learn to navigate these landscapes with greater ease and resilience.

Mapping Emotions .   Nervous System States.  Energy.

So emotions are actually pretty challenging - and more challenging if you don’t understand the basics. Emotions are actually super complex - and I’m not going to attempt to explain them in toto presently. But I will say that one of the most fundamental building blocks of emotions are body sensations. As a neurodivergent rebel, my interoception is kind of fucked, so body sensations are not always easily accessible to me. But I can almost always gauge energy. So energy is my first inroad to practicing interoception skills toward emotional identification and self regulation. 

I imagine emotions as points on a map. By connecting these points, you can create a visual representation of your emotional landscape. Stay tuned for the release of my version of this map as a handy beginner’s guide starting point in this process. This map can reveal patterns and connections, helping you understand how all kinds of stuff influences your nervous system response - both helpfully and unhelpfully.

For example, you might notice that certain emotions tend to cluster together, or that specific triggers consistently lead to particular emotional states. By recognizing these patterns, you can begin to identify the underlying needs and vulnerabilities that drive your emotional responses.

I’ll be releasing a starter map of the nervous system as I understand it through a combination of Psychoanalytic Development and Polyvagal Theory for those who would like to use it in beginning their journey inwards.

Navigating Your Inner Terrain:
Regulating Your Emotions and Finding Emotional Well-Being

What the fuck even is “Regulating” - If you’re like me - and I assume if you’re reading this and have gotten this far, chances are good that you’re organized pretty similarly - you navigate the world intellect first. Looking for the analytically correct answer before taking a step. So you may think of regulating as controlling and containing for the sake of performing correctly. Let me say this loud and clear: THIS. IS. NOT. REGULATION. Regulation is not a THING that you do, it’s a practice of skill and outcome. For example - you do not force yourself through exertion and intentional control to move from one state to another, from one part of the map to the other. Instead, it’s more like playing a card, or series of cards, and seeing how the terrain RESPONDS to the offer you’ve given it. I spend a lot of time helping people understand and experience this difference in relationship to the concept of regulation in sessions. 

So if you can’t move yourself or change your state through direct control but instead you give an offering (play a card) and see how that offering is received by the way the terrain responds around you navigation becomes an entirely different game. It is through this set of rules that you can actually have a real influence on your state. You begin to understand how the terrain responds to different offerings and can develop a plethora of options to offer.

Once you have a clearer understanding of your emotional landscape, you can start to develop strategies for the practice of regulating your emotions more effectively. This might involve learning to recognize the early warning signs of emotional dysregulation and offering your body-mind system some time under a weighted blanket with a mug of warm soothing beverage. It might look like going for a run or going to the gym. No one can tell you the “correct” sequence or strategy to play to regulate your system because it’s highly individual. And frankly, peskily nuanced. 

The Healing Journey

Understanding your nervous system and its role in your emotional experiences is a key step on the path to healing and well-being. By learning to navigate your inner landscape with greater awareness and compassion, you can cultivate a deeper sense of self-acceptance and emotional resilience.

In upcoming posts, I'll delve deeper into the different types of emotional landscapes and share practical tips for mapping and navigating your own inner terrain. Stay tuned for more guidance on your journey toward emotional well-being

May the Force be with you,
Leanna