Samantha Graham is the founder of Vegas Nerve Theatre. She has two plays on at the Edinburgh Fringe. She is my first ever chatty chat here on Substack (she has yet to post, but on here she is
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In my first stab at a poddy pod, chatty Cathy, audio wellness ramble I discuss her first, Adaptation: Enough Already, which must be the first play ever to take the vagus nerve and polyvagal theory as subject matter. The play explores the damage done to women by not speaking their true feelings, their true orthenick selves, their “truth” if you must. Stay with me, I won’t be going all Queen Meg here…Graham’s a serious woman.
Her play follows the midlife meltdown of Tilda played by Kathy Owen and uses dramatisation as a way to unpack the real health consequences of women’s stress burden and that feminine learned polite well-behaved silence.
Hands up, I don’t really understand the polyvagal theory (but this wellness blogger dude explains it well). I think it’s about the adaptive behaviours we pick up in order to survive. Graham’s play is about the way women assuage and fawn in order to control stress and other people’s threatening behaviour.
Some people like to think of fight and flight, but this fawning and assuaging is just as much our body responding to perceived threat, be it a shitty text, an angry husband, an overwhelming workload, or any number of things that make us feel fearful. This is our body instinctively protecting us from danger when we don’t feel safe. Think about the asshole boss, you don’t fight, you don’t flight, you often just start fawning and appeasing, repressing feelings of anger and injustice.
Graham was inspired after reading chapter 23 of Gabor Mate’s The Myth of Normal. Graham and Mate believe this response is the cause of autoimmune disease being disproportionately high in women: lupus, IBS, rheumatoid arthritis, MS, MND, fibromyalgia…
Always being in the sympathetic nervous system, of being chronically in fight and flight (or fawn and freeze) is unbelievably bad for us, as we all know so well. So, Grahams play aims to educate us on causes and solutions very specific to how women deal with this shit.
Our stress response machinery (sympathetic nervous system) is in the spinal chord. The vagus nerve is so hot right now, it’s the huge one that travels round the body and is responsible for the lovely relaxing and restoring benefits of the parasympathetic nervous system. Getting a nice bit of vagal nerve action is highly recommended kids. Hey, and please never use this substack for actual scientific reference all I do here is roughly get it right for wellnessy purposes.
At the end I asked her for a few hacks to reactivate the lovely vagus nerve that brings us so much health and happiness. She suggested singing, humming and cold showers. I echo the humming one. I highly recommend a yoga breath called Humming Bee. I am going to do five rounds right now, just for the crazy stressbusting chillaxing hell of it and instead of going to the fridge for a stare.
Thanks, let me know what you think of my hectic interviewing techniques. I was terrified the Zoom was going to run out before we were done - too mean to pay for pro!
KEEP IT AMATEUR BABY! Better buzz off now and set about doing some actual paid work.
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