In this episode, we are going to explore pendulation.

Is it always a conscious effort or do some people just do it naturally?

And what does that mean for those who are in a stuck state?

Hey, I'm Justin Sincere.

I'm a therapist and coach who helps you live with more calm

confidence and connection without psychobabble or woo woo.

Welcome to Stuck Not Broken.

This podcast is of course not therapy.

Nor should you be using it as therapy.

Uh, I got a question from an Unstuck Academy student.

She asked, Does pendulation naturally occur for people

who have never been stuck?

And for those who are stuck, can pendulation occur naturally

after learning and practicing it?

A really, really good question.

And before I go into it, uh, let's clarify what we mean by pendulation

and what we mean by stuck.

Pendulation is the skill of mindfully and intentionally shifting between

safety and defensive activation.

On a deep body-based level, it looks like connecting with safety activation,

like a, a feeling of, of warmth in your chest from joy, uh, and also connecting

with defensive activation, like an empty void in your belly from depression.

As you permit these states and shift your focus between the two, the intensity

of the depression experience softens.

Pendulation can also open the capacity, the potential for self-regulation and

of actually releasing stuck defense.

Not just softening it, but maybe releasing it or ladder climbing-

polyvagal ladder climbing.

The safety half of pendulation keeps the defensive half contained or at

a minimum, but it also helps you connect with that defense mindfully.

And once you're connected with defense, as long as the safety state holds,

the stuck defense can start to shift.

Stuck means one is chronically in defensive activation, like stuck

in shutdown, which would show up as the depression emotion, and

like that, that void in the belly.

This person has less access to their safety state.

Their state is less developed, their safety state, and therefore

they're not able to self-regulate that safety state can't contain or

utilize the defensive activation.

So defense is too dominant.

So in order to self-regulate, they would need a strong enough safety state,

something that's called, uh, the vagal break in the polyvagal world terminology.

So my answer to these two questions is yes.

Yes, pendulation will naturally occur for someone who's not stuck, sort of.

And pendulation will naturally occur as someone gets less stuck after learning

and practicing pendulation sort of.

Let's, uh, start with an analogy that I think really helps to clarify this.

You know, those carnival games where you, like, you punch a bag

or you slam on a mallet and you try to get the meter to reach the top.

Think of that top as the maximum capacity of, uh, your nervous system.

It's the upper limit of what your system can handle, uh, before it goes

into a full blown defensive state.

People with strong enough self-regulation, those who might say they've never been

stuck in the same way that a traumatized person has, their top is much higher.

Their nervous system has a broader window of tolerance- a greater

capacity for what it can handle.

Their vagal break is stronger.

The strength of their safety state, that is, it's stronger, in large part, I would

assume, due to good enough parenting and good enough co-regulation and safe enough

environments with safe enough others.

So when they encounter a potential trigger, which would be a punch to

the bag or the mallet hitting the, whatever, the level of dysregulation that

meter doesn't reach the highest point.

It doesn't reach their top.

It might go up like a bit and they would feel some discomfort, but

it doesn't push them into like a prolonged defensive state that they

can't recover from relatively quickly.

For this person with healthy regulation, a conscious deliberate pendulation

skill isn't necessary because their system has enough inherent capacity

to process and to return to ventral vagal safety without that intentional,

explicit effort, they can handle the trigger and recover from it quickly.

So they don't need to recall the pendulation scale

and go through the steps.

Their body can simply tolerate and recover from that potential trigger.

Uh, for example, they'll feel activation when someone cuts them off on the road,

but that's kind of the extent of it.

They'll recover and they'll move on with life.

So does natural pendulation occur for this person?

Yeah, it does, but it's not always the same kind of back and forth

between an activated defensive state and a consciously anchored

safety state that we teach.

When someone is stuck like, like I do in the UN Stucking Academy or in

something like somatic experiencing, think about, um, grieving, for example.

When someone's experiencing loss and they're grieving,

they will naturally enter.

Defensive activation, uh, various defensive states.

They might cry intensely.

They might feel anger or experience deep sadness, but then without really

conscious effort, they'll shift.

They might remember a specific funny moment with a person that they lost

and spontaneously laugh or feel like a wave of warmth from a shared memory as

they maybe grieve with a family member.

Then they'll dip back into tears or anger.

So this crying and laughter duality, this vacillation between defense and safety

is a very natural pendulation process.

The key here is that even in their grief, they have a strong enough

underlying safety state, enough ventral vagal capacity that their

system can access these, uh, moments of connection and regulation, even

though they have a lot of pain.

And so the body naturally pendulates and carries them

through, uh, the grieving process.

Let's pause here and discuss, uh, stuckness again, if you

don't mind the quick detour.

Everyone is stuck on some level.

Literally, nobody had perfect parenting.

Literally nobody had a perfectly safe environment to grow up in.

The rich, privileged stranger kid that you think had it all their, their

parents didn't pay attention to them.

They're filled with emptiness.

They drink to feel better, and they lack, uh, real friendships.

Your friend in school who seemed to have it together, they, they

didn't, uh, they were going through some horrible stuff in secret.

How about your favorite politician that you think cares deeply

about you and the community?

They don't.

It's all a mask they put on focusing on fulfilling their insatiable egos so

that they can ignore the pains inside.

Everyone has some level of stuckness.

It's a spectrum.

At one end is the perfectly regulated person who can roll with everything that

fortune gives or takes away from them.

This person does not exist.

It's not me.

It's not the spiritual guru that you're going to listen to or read next.

Okay?

This person does not exist.

At the other end of the spectrum is the extremely dysregulated person.

This person is filled with rage, uh, panic, fear, at

maybe even hardly functional.

This person does exist.

This person does exist.

I assume and I hope that most people receive good enough parenting and

live in safe enough environments, but that hope maybe and probably is

very unfounded on a global level.

I assume most people fall into the category of having some self-regulation,

like not in a constant state of overwhelm, uh, but not truly thriving either.

Most people are getting by, often operating on the fringes of their

capacity of what their nervous system can handle, perhaps constantly on the

edge of dysregulation, like they're always there, but not quite there.

Many people have moments of dysregulation, like a panic attack

here and there, but they can function.

They have enough regulation.

But everyone has some level of stuckness.

Everyone can benefit from learning new self-regulation skills, I believe.

Literally everyone, even the person who wouldn't say they have trauma, I promise

you, based on the 17 plus years of therapy and a few years of coaching people,

one-on-one, even if someone doesn't have PTSD, they can still or C PTSD, they can

still benefit from the pendulation skill.

I think many people have enough safety in their system to learn new

self-regulation skills like pendulation.

And I think they would be absolutely shocked to see how much pain, resentment,

stress, hurt, and otherwise malcontent that they're actually holding onto.

Maybe they don't know how to pendulate, but they can be walked through it like

during a, a workshop or a meditation.

And through successfully pendulating, this person can increase that

top on their carnival game meter.

With consistent practice, this conscious pendulation.

Of learning the skill and implementing it as a series of steps can

eventually become subconscious.

Um, just like learning a, learning how to drive a car or play an instrument.

Initially, it requires focus and deliberate action.

It might involve remembering, uh, and following a skill sequence

like on the Unstucking pathway in the Unstucking Academy initially.

On the pathway, students learn the skill and then follow along with one

or more of my guided meditations, but eventually I challenge them

to enact the skill on their own.

By that time, it requires less conscious effort and it could become second nature.

So as the, in general, as the neural pathways strengthen and the nervous

system learns this new way of being, it becomes more automatic, more.

More integrated.

Your system learns that it can move in and out of discomfort safely, and that

it can return to a state of regulation.

It builds, um, a new higher top on that meter for its capacity, uh,

making those deep stuck defensive states less frequent and less intense.

Someone who is stuck but not traumatized, but has okay regulation, which I think

is the majority of the world, they can learn pendulation and go from

just getting by to genuinely expanding their nervous system's capacity for

calm and confidence and connection.

I don't know if it's the majority of the world, but I, I think

a lot of people are like that.

It's about, um, transforming that conscious effort into an embodied

automatic practice over time, much like those who've always had that

strong enough baseline regulation.

For others who are more chronically dysregulated and fit the typical

P-T-S-D-C-P-T-S-D traumatized mold, they need to establish a

strong enough safety baseline.

And this in and of itself may be a challenge with a lot of

benefit, but it's a challenge.

They need to get accustomed to what safety feels like and again,

that's quite a challenge for many.

This person with a higher level of chronic dysregulation typically

lacked effective co-regulation in childhood, um, and or safe enough

environments then, or even now.

So asking this person to pendulate is too big an ask.

Instead, we need to focus on safety, uh, recognizing safety, practicing how

to access safety, building it, and then gyp- gently tiptoeing into defensive

activation to eventually pendulate.

Can this person learn, practice and be so successful with a skill like

pendulation that it becomes second nature?

Yeah, I think so, generally.

Um, but it's work and it would take a lot of patience.

But I think it's possible so.

To recap for those with already high nervous system or high enough nervous

system capacity, conscious pendulation as we teach it isn't always necessary

because their system manages activation differently, more effectively.

Natural pendulation does occur, seen like in the process of, uh, something

like grieving, where a strong safety state allows for more fluid movement

between defensive and safety.

And, and yeah, for those of us who have felt stuck or have been getting by,

consciously learning and practicing Pendulation is how we build that capacity,

expand our window of tolerance, or raise the level of that top on the meter, and

ultimately move towards a place where Pendulation can become a more subconscious

integrated part of our daily lives.

For those in a more traumatized state with a higher level of dysregulation,

yes, pendulation is a possibility, eventually, after working on safety

and slowly working toward defense.

This journey from conscious effort to embodied ease is precisely what, uh,

I provide in the Unstucking Academy.

So if you're ready to take your next steps in understanding your nervous system, I

invite you to check out my free Your Next Steps course is designed to help guide

you through the Polyvagal Theory using a curated list of podcast episodes and

other resources, and help you to build that foundational understanding that is so

important to all this Untucking process.

You can find it through the link in the description.

Otherwise, thank you so much for joining me on Stuck Not Broken.

Bye.