End Stress By Learning to Self-Regulate Your Nervous System with Mental Strength Coach Siamon Emery

Ari: Awesome. Let’s do it. First of all, I would love to start off with your personal story and have you talk about how you got into doing the work that you now do because you have a very unique personal background that led you into doing this work. Let’s start there.

Siamon: Okay. 1976, in an inner city suburb of Sydney, I was born into a family of a heroin-addicted mother and father. I was born into a very dysregulated place, unable to really even just provide basic necessities and basic services like food and clothing and to that level. For five years, we were living in a constant state of change and a constant state of not safe. When I say “not safe,” I mean more to the point of like it was never a regular.

Nothing about my life was regular. It was all full of constant change. My ability to actually regulate my own nervous system in that place was severely, severely undermined because of the inability for my parents to help me to co-regulate through their ability to regulate their own nervous systems. They were using substances. The ups and downs of that life meant that when they had the substance, everybody was very happy and very calm.

When we didn’t have the substance, it was a completely out of control, not safe. I’ll keep saying “safe” because that’s how I’m identifying with it. Not a safe place to be as a child at all. That really played out until I was about five or six. Then my mother decided at that age that she’d had enough of that lifestyle and decided to try out. She did that by leaving the country. She left and went to India and Pakistan to do some soul-searching of her own.

Ari: Not only leaving the country, but leaving you, leaving her kids.

Siamon: That’s exactly right. I have a vivid memory. Actually, it was an Air India flight. I still have the Taj Mahal on the sides of the windows. I had little Taj Mahals painted on there and I can still remember that as a 47-year-old man now. I vividly remember the distress of even her leaving. Not only was it inconsistent in the love, it was also unreliable. Then my father having inability at all to have any kind of ability to actually just be an adult in any way, shape, or form. He was just purely driven by his addiction.

Then I was sent to live with my grandparents and my father lived with them as well. It was my father and my grandparents in the same house. Over time, he became more and more deeper into his addiction. My grandparents were becoming more and more distressed of his inability to actually perform any basic tasks. He then ended up actually starting to steal from family and from friends and from them. As a way for them to try and help their son to do the right thing, they used to stick me with him.

When I was a six and seven-year-old boy, when he would go out of the house on the weekends when I wasn’t at school, they used to tell him to take me with him. All that really invariably ended up doing was I was in a space where we were going to steal something. Then from that stealing, we were going to go to the pawn brokers at the pawn shop to get money so he could buy the drugs. That was the whole week, the whole life of the weekend. Then from that space, he was basically using, then we’d find a place to use the drugs. Then I would have to hold him as a five and six-year-old little boy to try and get him home and get him onto the train and take care of his own, just to take care of him.

It was highly distressing at all times. Not only then, because not only was I just disregarded by my mother, I was also used as a pawn in my father’s family to try and keep him on some form of level thinking or taking some kind of responsibility, which he never did. It all come to a head when I was 10 and the grandmother died, my grandmother, his mother died, and then my grandfather realizing that he couldn’t take care of this whole situation. Then I had to leave. That’s when I finally moved back into my mother’s place. My mother took me back in and we moved to the coast. We moved to the beach when I was 10 years old.

Ari: Was she still addicted to heroin or–

Siamon: No, so she’d come back. She’d been back. She left for two years. She’d been back for three years. She was in and out of my life still. She was still working things out and still just being quite pretty dysfunctional and not nothing really sustainably regular. I had to live with her because she obviously hadn’t prepared for me to come with her. She had no ability to actually be a decent parent either. The only one good thing she did do is we actually moved to the beach. At 10 years of age, I took up surfing. She saw the love. It was actually where you are right now in Byron Bay where I vividly remember my first wave.

Ari: Wow.

Siamon: As a 10-year-old boy, I still absolutely have every memory of it in this space. For me at that place, then I found something that was consistent in my life that I could control, that I didn’t need anybody else to take me to. I didn’t need anybody else’s permission. This could be all me. I didn’t have to involve anybody else in it because everybody else in my life up until that moment were totally unreliable and didn’t follow through any promises that they had said. I could hold on to this space.

Going down that same thought process, by the time I turned 15, we were still living together. It would become so untenable because I’d become so angry as a young man as we do as teenagers. She had really no ability still at that time to actually care for me properly that she chose to ask me to leave the house. At 15 years of age, I moved into an emergency youth hostel, which, again, luckily, was near the beach.

For me, for that whole time, the beach was always my regulated space where I could go and feel safe and where I could take care of what I needed to in that moment. Finally, understanding at that time that I was actually on my own and nobody really cared for me at that moment and sitting in this house full of these delinquent teenagers that I never actually saw myself as one. I always thought, “This is not who I am,” and just fundamentally having a breakdown and going, “I don’t know what to do.”

I’ve done everything I can as a young man being brought into this world. I don’t know my next move. From this point on is where the story really changes. It changed to the point where my uncle comes to the emergency youth hostel where I’m at. He receives me and takes me. He takes me in and he becomes the first true role model, male role model, strong male role model in my life. That was when really everything started to shift and change.

Then I went back to school because he gave me the stability actually to be regular and be a normal person, which was really amazing for the first time. Then I went back to school and I finished my schooling and then I decided that, “You know what? I actually just want to surf.” Directly after finishing school, I went surfing. I bought a nice van. I tricked it out with all the racks and stuff for all my surfboards. I decided that I was going to go surfing for the next three years and see if I can make this as an actual profession because this was my first true love.

This is what I really desired to do. Whilst I never really did make it as a professional, what I did do was give myself just the space, just to be me, and just to explore everything without anybody else, without any other external influences on me. Just to travel all throughout Australia and surfing and going to different towns and really just being free from anybody else’s ability to dysregulate me or to control whatever I needed to express in that moment. Then I realized at some point that just living in a van and traveling around Australia wasn’t really going to cut it as a career.

[laughter]

Siamon: I looked around at all of my contemporaries and went, “Well, what are all these guys doing?” “He’s a contractor. He’s a trade and this guy’s a carpenter.” I’m like, “Well, why don’t I just do carpentry?” All the guys that I’d surfed with, when the waves were good, nobody worked in the trade space. I was like, “Okay, cool.” I ended up taking on a trade and it took me five years to finish that trade, which was actually a blessing in disguise. Because what had happened over the years obviously of having non-stable primary parenting figures in my life was that inability to regulate myself was still so present, but it was below cognition. I couldn’t understand why.

I would take a job on. I would stay there for eight or nine months and then I would just start not to feel safe. Then I would shut down and then I would self-sabotage in that space. Then I’d get fired from that job. Then I would go to another job for years. I’d have three months off and go surfing and come back into regulation and go, “Oh, crap, I need to go and get some money again. Okay, cool. Why don’t we just find another job?” Because being in a trade and having a carpentry trade was really easy.

I could get a job anywhere in Australia, so then I would just pick up work again for the next six or eight months and then get to the point at the same going, “Oh, these guys are idiots, so I have nothing in common with these people. I hate this stuff. I’m out of here. You guys are out,” so I’d leave or get fired. That was pretty much a recurring theme for 10 years from the age of about 20 to 30 until I decided that it was their problem and everybody else’s problem why I couldn’t find a decent-enough position.

I’m going to start my own company. I’m going to do the business thing and get what we call a principal contractor’s license or the builder’s license and be the guy who makes all the decisions. Because then if I make all the decisions, I won’t have to listen to anybody else. As you can imagine, after two or three failed attempts at becoming a builder because I wasn’t able to listen to anybody else and I was fully driven by my survival drive, I decided that, actually, it was me.

Something was definitely severely wrong. I needed to acknowledge the childhood that I had, the adolescence that I had, and the young man that I’d grown into. I’d realized that all the diversionary tactics that I’d put into, which was surfing was one obviously as well, but it was a really healthy one. There’s also some really unhealthy ones there with the substance abuses. Not that I ever used anything that was anywhere near to the level of what my parents did, but alcohol, I never used marijuana.

I think I used amphetamines once or twice, but it was mainly alcohol. It was that deadening down of the nervous system, getting that dopamine, and then just getting that whole nervous system regulation from the alcohol. Understanding that all of those coping mechanisms and all of that story was really creating the man that I was looking back in the mirror every time I looked into the mirror. It was not a good look and I didn’t like what I saw.

Ari: I remember the first time you told me your story. My initial reaction was, “Geez, I’m never going to complain about my childhood ever again.” I have absolutely nothing to complain about because it just does not compare to the severity of what you went through as a child. Just hearing your story was, in a way, helpful and healing for me to deal with whatever little gripes I had about my childhood and my parents because I was like, “Wow, I had it really good.” It’s amazing that humans can even survive and be functional adults, having a childhood like the kind of what you went through.

Now, you’re an adult. You’ve gone through work. You’ve gone through exploring a potential as a professional surfer, getting jobs, failing at jobs, starting your own business. How does this story transition? You’ve now talked about this personal reckoning that you had to do to go through to recognize that it was you. It was your own psychology, your own way of being in the world that was at the root cause of what you were experiencing. How does this story shift to doing the work that you now do?

Siamon: Well, it really shifted with two things actually. It shifted with a significant relationship breakdown was the first episode. That followed pretty quickly with a business breakdown as well. Not that we went bankrupt, but the business just made no money. Then all of a sudden, I was just in my mid-to-late 30s. This was a person who I thought I was going to marry and we were going to have a future together.

We bought a block of land and we were building and then had a company that I thought was pretty solid. Within a space of six months, it all just disappeared. Then we’re going into a really, really deeply depressed state and not really recognizing from that state how I’d gotten there. It was like I’d played the game as far as I was concerned. As far as everybody else was concerned, I’d gotten the job. I have a career. I have this beautiful person who I think is going to be staying with me in the rest of this life.

Then within the space of a very short amount of time, it all just disappears. Then I look, honestly, at the whole situation and go, “What’s the common denominator in this situation?” Well, it’s me. Okay. Well, if it’s me, let’s really start to delve into what that means. Basically, it started first off with just a lot of talk therapy. I started just going to a normal therapist, a normal psychologist twice a week just for 12 weeks just to talk out what was going on for me in that moment.

Not really shifting any internal space, but really it was actually quite good just to have somebody to talk to, just to sit there and listen to the whole story for the first time. The first time I told the whole story right from beginning to end like I just told you. Just having the ability to express it was great. Noting that there was no real progress from it, I was still very depressed. I was still really not having not much direction about which way I wanted to go and what I wanted to do.

Then through my own personal understanding and just through reading and just through coming across, I started down the process of, “Okay, what about some breath work and some ice bathing and see if we can get some trauma?” We started to look into more trauma-informed practices because I realized that I had capital-T trauma, not little t, but capital-T trauma. Then I started talking about that and going to the different understandings of how that was treated.

Ice baths, saunas, breath work, sound baths, EMDR also with the eye movement. Then it moved on to EFT, so emotional freedom tapping. Neuro-linguistic programming, the NLP stuff. Anything that I could see that would going to be, actually, a functional benefit to me, I was feet first in. Because by that stage, you’ve got to understand, I had such an appetite to heal because I realized how much power punch pain had been in my childhood and in my adolescence and in my young adult life that I was really ready to let go of that story.

I knew internally that there was a space that this story didn’t belong to me. There was another story to be told, but I was focusing too much on this story because this is what was happening in my life in this moment. This is where I could only have the focus. I was conscious about like, I just need to get to a space where I can hold space for that bit of trauma. Then I can start really developing into this man that I want to be.

Then that also looked like the psychedelic range as well. Using ayahuasca, psilocybin, and 5-MeO-DMT. Again, having profound insights in the moment, but none of it really sticking, just going, “Wow, that was amazing.” When I’m on it, I feel good. Well, that’s really wild experience. Then within a short period of time, the deficient feeling it always had because of my experiences came back pretty hard with a vengeance.

Then I sunk into a really deep depression again at 40, 41. I’m just not understanding that I’m more– sorry, not that I understand, but understanding that I didn’t know where to turn. I thought in my mind, “I’d done everything.” This was also whilst I was running triathlons, running, cycling, swimming, doing multiple surfing lots, keeping my diet healthy, doing all the things that we would classically deem to be living a healthy lifestyle, which promoting good health and good mental health.

None of it still actually being of any kind of benefits still. You would get small gains, but nothing was ever long-lasting. As soon as I felt like I was getting into that depressed state again, I’d jump on my bike and do 120, 100-mile ride, or I’d swim for 3 kilometers or I’d do a 6-mile run. That was the way. It was just another coping strategy. It was still just another avoidance tactic. I could see that happening.

I realized that this was not something that was either going to be able to support me in the long term because, at some point, I’m not going to be able to run anymore. At some point, I’m not going to be able to ride my bike. At some point in the future, I’m going to have to sit with this. Then that’s when I came across, basically, Dr. Bessel van der Kolk, Dr. Peter Levine, Dr. Gabor Maté, and Dr. Stephen Porges.

That was the most life-changing– I remember listening to my very first podcast from Dr. Gabor Maté talking about how pain expresses in the body and how it shows up in different areas and different responses. It was just a light bulb moment and then listen to Peter Levine with a felt sense of safety and understanding how the body creates safety much more. It was a bottom-up approach much more than a top-down where I was working top-down.

Then having it all reaffirmed and then finally reading Stephen Porges’ polyvagal theory and then understanding to the full extent of what I was working with and then finally putting all of those systems together in my own practice. For the first time in 40-odd years, I was completely still, completely safe in my own body that I could ever remember. Everything just shut down, everything. Nothing was up here and nothing was outside of me. Everything was inside of me and I had control over all of it.

It almost brings a tear to my eye now because you’ve got to understand, Ari, 40 years of dysregulation, 40 years of believing that you’re not enough, 40 years of believing that you’re deficient in some way, shape, or form because your parents chose to do something else other than take care of their number one priority. I was angry as well. Then finally just getting to that space of safety with nothing else other than my own ability to regulate. Nothing external to me. No money, no women, no relationship. No money, no cars, nothing external to me. It was all developed internally from my own self. It was the best day of my life.