On deep cleaning and the physiology behind why you might feel worse when you're safe
Nervous system health nugget + how I manage my OCD + come to solstice event! :: ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED on DECEMBER 18th 2022
Whenever I am wanting a new beginning and to truly release something - I start to deep clean my house.
Now, it is important to acknowledge that I was diagnosed with OCD as a child and that cleaning for me was a way to feel in control and at ease in the world as an overly sensitive and neurotic child.
Cleaning and me have often had a very dangerous relationship. It is definitely sad that as a kid, I had these huge rules around not having fun UNTIL I had picked up all the dog hair and wiped the landline telephones free of my dad’s after shave and slight oily complexion residue that I also inherited, and that it haunted me while I was at school and I believed everyone I loved would die UNTIL I would perform these cleaning rituals. And so with my history, when I start to deep clean, it is worth asking me, hey are you feeling okay and knowing that I am absolutely lying to myself and to you if I say yes.
When I get the urge to deep clean it is to discharge something. When I am overcome with fear, or grief, or stress, I start to think, you know what would make me feel better? Organizing EVERY CUPBOARD IN MY HOUSE!
CLEANING BEHIND EVERY LARGE APPLIANCE!
DUSTING EVERY SURFACE INCLUDING THE WALLS!
DISINFECTING ALL COUNTERTOPS AT ONCE.
A little bit of nervous system health education:
Our stress responses are actually great news for our existence. Stress energy and stress responses allows us to mobilize toward something. If you live in Canada like me, you probably just mobilized to go shovel the snow off your patios, stairs, and cars, after the storm we just had a few days ago. This is stress energy. It goes: there is a problem, and I will use my capacity to solve it.
Did you know the main issue happens when we cannot, or we are prevented, from using our stress response and it has to settle in our fascia, muscles and organs because we cannot “complete the stress cycle”?
This is ultimately what leads to dysregulation. Dysregulation at its most basic expression is un-used and repressed stress responses that did not make their way through the system, that did not get discharged, so now - this activation - is stuck in the system, and sending signals throughout the ANS at the wrong time for the wrong things - think when you’re trying to go to sleep, the ANS should be going into parasympathetic low dorsal, but when you’re extremely dysregulated, it throws signals to start going into sympathetic dominance at bed time.
If someone or something prevents us from using our capacity to solve the issue (the stressor), or if it is not in our capacity to solve the issue (let’s say we are a child and we are being abused and we have no agency), this is when we start to be considered traumatized. We can live trauma, but not be traumatized, and we can have lived trauma and be traumatized. So what makes the difference for people? People who ID as traumatized or show signs of trauma, are dealing with dysregulation whereas those who truly have lived through trauma but have had good after care let’s say, tend to have less dysregulation - meaning, they got to discharge their stress responses and come back into window of tolerance. What so many of us had to go through is no opportunity, or tools, or understanding of how to discharge our stress response after trauma and we never came back to window of tolerance (or we did but only after trauma resolution work!).
So we’re in the present now. Sometimes, a trigger, like a loved one’s birthday comes up, or an anniversary of something and your body starts to be like I WANNA DISCHARGE SOMETHING. From the past.
Now, people get really freaked out until they have the education about this because when something from the past comes up, and by comes up, I mean, unthaws and is ready to leave your body, it very much feels like a response that is coming from right now.
And sometimes people look around and they’re like, well gee Emily, I have no idea why I am so upset.
What is seemingly mysterious, but not at all that, is that whenever we experience more safety in our life, we experience more unthawing (my term for the freeze response starting to move), and we can discharge more old stuff.
And it’s like, well this is your body having cultivated enough safety saying I am ready to let go of another layer of what I couldn’t process and discharge all at once when the trauma was happening.
So when this surge of energy comes… we will tend to feel either anxious (flight energy coming up and wanting out) or we will tend to feel angry (fight energy coming up and wanting out).
*There are variations of this and this is a nuanced topic and you should definitely work with your body with the help of an extremely competent practitioner because I definitely can’t give out any super helpful insight on a newsletter that will fit everyone’s history and profiles, so don’t take it as such, but this is a general idea of the physiology behind how it works in your nervous system. You can also take evergreen classes I have on sale on my site to learn more about nervous system health. *
ANYWAY. When something old is ready to come out for me, I go back to the old faithful: cleaning.
Whenever I am safe and I feel safe (objectively and subjectively), but I feel intense fear (a flight response wanting to come out), or anger and rage (a fight response wanting to discharge) and I can pin point that this isn’t an active thing, but rather it’s an old thing ready to be released, I just wanna MOP.
And so that’s what I do. I move the fridge and the stove and I start to make all these strategic plans to go step by step (taught to me mainly by moms on youtube over the years) on how to deep clean my house and then for a few days, all I do is discharge by scrubbing and wiping, and organizing and vacuuming and mopping.
And after, I do actually feel better.
I go to bed completely wiped out, unable to think about who I am mad at, and why they did that thing, and I usually don’t dream of people chasing me or trying to hurt me those nights. It’s just… quiet. Because I got it all out.
I binge listen to someone that I am really keen on learning from on podcasts as I do so, and then my house is clean and I have given somewhere for my emotions to go other than in bubbling distressing panic attacks or meltdowns.
The trick though is to not let my OCD take over and actually just focus on the helpful part of cleaning for me, and why I have always been pulled to do it since I was a child when I felt unsafe, and that is to discharge my excess sympathetic charge.
I run around with a lot of excess sympathetic charge, partly because I am highly sensitive so life affects me very severely, also because I have an ACE score of 7, and also because I have an abnormal amount of empathy (my doctor says I have too much of it) so I really deeply feel the distress of myself, of people I love, and also, no big deal, but of the world.
I can always tell how I am truly doing from a mental health perspective by how I engage with cleaning - if I can be happy with a good enough job done, then I am actually doing pretty good. If I end up sobbing on the floor because there will always be dust SOMEWHERE that is not perfectly cleaned up, and that will start to accumulate AGAIN even if it did get perfectly swept up by my swifter that reaches in hard places, and my cloths.
I would say this December deep clean, the end of the year deep clean, as I like to refer to it officially, went well for being such an important one as it is the deep clean that ‘gets rid of the year’ in my beautiful organized odd brain. I was able to clean and use it for its purpose - to have a cozy and clean environment to rest in and to discharge, instead of losing my goddamn mind. So we will call that a win folks.
The holidays for me are rarely fun as mentioned previously in a post I wrote on thanksgiving.
HOWEVER… I enjoy new’s years very much, but not for drinking and going outside in -10 weather to watch fireworks when it’s already been dark for 9 hours, but because of the ritual.
I love the idea of a blank slate. I love the feeling of a blank slate.
I have many new year rituals, and I would love to share them with you THIS WEDNESDAY at my solstice event.
Listen, if 2022 was hard for you, please come. If the holidays are hard for you, please come. You’re not alone and it feels so good to vision and open ourselves up to new beginnings.
Sign up to hang out, write, and regulate your nervous system on Wednesday here
WHAT I LOVED THIS WEEK (ISH):
TV SHOWS: other than this thing I went through:
I have also watched follow up seasons of shows I have liked that I may have already shared on here before: firefly lane, sex lives of college girls, and even the L word Gen Q even though I think they are wasting an opportunity for great queer representation by making all the characters reductive stereotypes who are absolutely annoying with little to no self-growth lacking interesting or complex plot lines!! Except maybe Finley post rehab, but that could be my desire to pair bond with Jacqueline Toboni speaking so do not trust me on that commentary fully.
I also watched Wednesday and I thought it completely lived up to the hype.
PODCASTS: I listened to these two absolutely STUNNING episodes with Liz Gilbert on We Can Do Hard Things. I feel like I went to therapy for a few years just having listened to her stories on those episodes. As always, a true HEALER.
READ: I laugh out loud very spontaneously and frequently (like actually) to this newsletter by Nancy -