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I can say that since i penned What exactly is the container, several things now seem much clearer and more resolved.

First among them is a significant firming of the notion that when it comes to practice, co-regulation is actually our primary limiting resource.

Because of this, I would love the practice community to better recognise the extent to which each of us brings some degree of regulatory shortfall to the practice. Gabor Mate in The Myth of Normal, talks about this as the fish in the water problem. One fish says to the other fish, "Hows the water today", to which the fish replies, "Water? What is water?". The way our nervous system was shaped is the water, its all we know, and the extent to which it was retuned, or even missing chunks, tends to be invisible to us.

As an adult i walk around unaware that my formative development has shaped my nervous system's capacity to regulate. In particular my capacity to enter and hold ventral head spaces, my ability to self-regulate, and to coregulate others, these are all finite, limited, and necessarily imperfect. And in many cases much more so than might generally be imagined.

This then is the, co-regulation is the primary limiting resource problem. And its a double problem, precisely because it's very nature is to remain invisible.

Regulatory gaps

In an ideal world, a child, which comes into the world utterly helpless and completely unable to self-regulate, receives enough co-regulation to enable the child to be able to develop it's own regulatory capacity. This secure attachment means they grow up with a capacity to both self-regulate themselves and to give, receive and share coregulation with others.

However, when things don't go according to plan (which has been much more often the norm in the last decades), i as this child now reach adulthood with a hole where my capacity to regulate ought to be. Not realising the regulatory gaps, because this state is all i have ever known, (existing as it does below the level of awareness), i now become quietly preoccupied by a restless quest for regulation. Looking for co-regulation in the 'perfect' partner or group, and looking for self-regulation in screens, food, alcohol, sex, shopping and other drugs.

This is the situation humanity is facing. Now, lets imagine what might happen when we bring a bunch of such people together as peer practitioners. This pool of incompletely functioning nervous systems,on a good day, brings enough regulation to function.

But given the harsh reality of post war parenting, more often than not, the sad truth is that the collective net capacity to regulate is not sufficient to support the collaborative relationship. When enough people carry this invisible deficit into relationship, there the overall is simply insufficiently resourced to sustain the relational field.

This explains exactly, why people are walking away from relationships in droves right now. And why most kinds of collaborative group work seems like it's had to be filed in the too hard basket.

If this sounds overblown to you, i invite you to read Jonathon Haidt's latest book The Anxious Generation. He reports on the rapid decline of health and well-being in our kids, the social media / smart phone generation. Worryingly, those metrics are all in rapid free-fall right now. I literally wept when i read it, such is their plight.

Now, the good news is that, i, as that adult who today is walking around with a development deficit AND now realises the problem, i can fix this simply by seeking the missing co-regulation. That's all it takes. Better late than never, this restores the nervous system to its rightful place, where it is again able to recruit ventral head space easily and naturally.

BUT. This leaves the, at first glance vexing, question of, who exactly is supposed to provide all this remedial co-regulation? And doesn't that make regulation now the scarce resource for our peer led group work?

Yes, now we are asking the right questions.

The expert shortage

Which brings us nicely to this Deb Dana interview, How To Manage Your Nervous System For Better Mental Health .

The interview much improved my understanding of the nervous system, giving me several major aha moments. However, as much as i love Dana's work, my overwhelming takeaway was the way her solution framing is so deeply and implicitly confined to the realms of self-regulation and therapy (and i truly get that dorsal has a hard road).

You can see this even more clearly in the likes of this podcast, How to Regulate Your Nervous System

Both have the same four step formula. One, introduce Polyvagal theory; two: offer the token 'assuming you have talked it over with a friend', three: here's a long list of ways to self-regulate, and the implied fourth: if that doesn't work (which of course it can't) then come see me.

In this respect, a couple of particular remarks from the Dana interview stood out. The interviewer asks Dana how we solve this problem of so many people lugging around under-developed ventral regulation. Dana notably hesitates before responding with the single word, therapy, but it came with a silent question mark attached. In response, the interviewer remarked that, yes it's a lot of work to get each person to the point where they can start to access ventral states again (read: repetition).

The unstated problem is glaringly obvious, that therapists are a finite resource. In the USA, for every 1,000 people, there are 0.8 therapists. That's an awful lot of co-regulation for 0.8 of a person to hold. This equally explains why large classroom sizes (and large AR zoom rooms) are failing us everywhere. I'm struck by how this is just another manifestation of the hero leader problem.

But, this is exciting because we finally now have a synthesis framing. One which surfaces the incredible opportunity that relational practice offers to fill the gaping hole left by the therapy (and coaching) industries.

A new theory of practice

Once i had these foundations under me, i didn't have to ponder long before constructing the following theory.

1. Adults which were, as a child, not adequately co-regulated, carry forward gaps in their ability to hold ventral nervous system states. This can not be self-regulated away with all the breath practices in the world. Only better late than never co-regulation restores the missing capacity.

2. Stephen Porges (informed by child development theorists Winnicot, Tronick, and Bowlby, "the good enough parent") points out that co-regulation only has to be good enough.

3. That, in practice spaces, much of the regulatory weight falls on the facilitator's shoulders. Baumeister and Tierney's view that it takes several grounded people to balance one dysregulated person, helps us little where sessions have a facilitator, and whose role is usually impractical to override.

4. That, maybe good enough regulatory support actually comes in the form of our practice structures and contexts. The structure itself is pro-regulatory, by way of: shepherding participants strongly away from dis-validating language, by installing reciprocity (timed turn taking), and resonance (reflection), by inviting appreciation, and hinting at engaged open attuned listening, upright posture, eye contact etc

5. That, these structures are adopted as cultural habits that don't take a lot of work to sustain (assuming our trainee facilitators get enough seat time to absorb them). There is not even a need to understand why they are pro-regulatory.

6. That, the session facilitator has a role as keeper of these structures. Without the facilitator none of these structures would exist. On balance, with audiences of unknown regulatory capacity, these structures offer more regulatory support than the unknown or variable regulatory capacity of the facilitator. This is also particularly relevant for facilitator training.

7. That, dyadic work is itself a supportive structure. Co-regulation in its impaired from is essentially dyadic in nature (infant caregiver).

8. That, in breakout work, the container provided by structure offers "good enough" regulatory weight. Sufficient to stand in support of, or in place of whatever regulatory capacity the practice partners each possess.

9. Later, when more developed regulatory ability lands in both facilitator and participants less structured practices can be recruited to raise both the floor and the ceiling.

This theory is essentially that the structures offered by the games format do much of the co-regulatory heavy lifting. Providing, of course, that the facilitator serves their role as keeper of the structures. The container itself is the co-regulator. If true, this is a significant insight.

This theory radically reframes what relational practice actually is. Instead of two people practicing skills in the presence of each other, it is two nervous systems held in an wisely designed field, doing together what neither could reliably do alone. The container compensates for the individual regulatory deficits without either party needing to have restored them first. It cleverly solves the problem of the missing expert, the missing healer. The absence of the developmentally whole super co-regulator.

I recently became aware of how much of the AR context i have unintentionally internalised from repeated practice work. No one ever taught this body of knowledge to me, i simply onboarded it, a thousand small pieces of a jigsaw that together, over time, added up to a single coherent context. Nor was it ever explained to me why these structures and context are important. Simply put, there IS no body of knowledge in the traditional sense, instead just a distributed body of practice wisdom. It seems that the movement figured these things out somatically, through trial and error, and they became embedded just because each piece 'seemed to help' or felt 'juicy'.

In this way the movement seems to have reverse-engineered a neurobiologically coherent healing container without ever explicitly understanding it's basis in science.

So now, the time has arrived to go back and figure out the WHY. Why those cultural practices and structures are the crux of this work. Why understanding the reasons beneath practices that worked without anyone knowing why, can instead build an explicit model of something that has only ever been transmitted in practice, modeled in practice, by our predecessors.

Wrap up

By knowing that relational practice works, and with a new understanding of why it works, are we not now even more called to treasure the practices that were handed down to us? Standing on the shoulders of giants.

That our individual capacity for co-regulation exists on a spectrum, and that most of us received less than we needed, does not speak to something pathological or broken, it is simply the nature of the human condition.

Lastly, we can now see that the container isn't just incidental to the practice. The container is the practice. This is what it means to be nervous system informed.