Music as Mirror: Dog Days are Over & the Flight Response
- Kadie Spinks
- Feb 11
- 6 min read
Updated: Feb 11
This is an ode to music. How the perfect song at the right time can carry us through. How it becomes a time-capsule into better understanding past versions of ourself. How it can make us feel less alone by holding up a mirror to whatever it is we’re going through, when maybe there isn’t a specific human we trust to do that for us, not now anyway or not just yet, or perhaps, the music can do it in a less explicit way? One that connects all the layers of our being and echoes through time-space in a vaster, almost timeless way? Because sometimes, some of our deepest wounds can start to feel timeless. “Was there ever a clear beginning to this ache? There doesn’t seem to be an end in sight…Is this just who I am?”
& all of this is pretty cliche, right? I’m not the first to say this, nor will I be the last. It’s something most of us all intuitively know – the power music has to move us.
But what has changed for me is this new lens I have now of understanding my autonomic nervous system (ANS). Depending on what state my ANS/body is operating in, my understanding of the world is colored in a certain way, and the songs I gravitate to become clues to that state.
Take for example, a young teenage Kadie in her first year of college. For context, this eighteen-year-old Kadie loved smoking pot, since about age seventeen, but now away from home the usage had ramped up to almost daily. If we backtrack to the month or two before she ever tried it (years before, really), Kadie was dealing with a lot of ANS & emotional overwhelm and unsure on how to cope with any of it. She felt curious about pot, thinking it might feel a bit fun and curious like the movie Alice in Wonderland. The first time she smoked pot, it mellowed out her entire body and opened up her mind to see her current life situation from a different perspective. It felt like a much needed break from tension. Fast forward back to eighteen-year-old Kadie riding her bike around Denton, TX where the sky is just right, she is high and listening to “Dog Days are Over” by Florence + the Machine. She knows nothing about the nervous system. She doesn’t know the word dissociation. She doesn’t think she’s numbing away from the reality of her inner-experience as much as she’s moving towards what feels good. (In this way, weed really can be a medicine for many people & this is why I feel comfortable in being honest about my past experiences, because all of us are always managing our experience the best way we know how with whatever resources we have, and wanting to feel good is a beautiful, natural thing within us all.)
What she does know is that these lyrics feel deeply true to her in an illogical way:
Breaking it down, it’s easy to see how “the dog days are over, the dog days are done” could feel good to hear for anyone caught up in inexplicable suffering. It speaks to a feeling of freedom. Combine that with Florence’s voice, those drums, a delicious temperature of air on your skin as you coast through small-town sunset by bicycle, the softening effects of weed, and you’re in a world of your own where all is well.
What strikes me now, though, with the nervous system lens, is how much I resonated with all the subsequent lyrics – the running. “Run fast for your mother, run fast for your father [...] you can’t carry it with you if you want to survive.”
Enter the polyvagal ladder:
Our nervous systems work like this ladder because these are our evolutionary survival responses to stress, just like any animal has.
Let’s start with the most recent evolutionary response to stress or threat: to seek connection, to communicate, to co-regulate, to help each other. If this doesn’t work or it’s not appropriate given the situation, the next response is to fight back or to run away. These are our first lines of defense when in danger. If these aren’t working, our nervous system will go, “okay let’s freeze,” which you can see plain as day in animals in the wild. Freeze is like playing dead and it can actually save animals lives. Sometimes it saves us humans from continued emotional conflict when connection, fighting or fleeing aren’t options. The thing is with freeze, though, it may appear very still but there is intense activation underneath it. Imagine having both feet on the brake and gas pedal simultaneously. Like that. The good thing for most animals is, their bodies intuitively know how to discharge that activation once they survive. They literally shake it off, their bodies will tremble, and so it doesn’t get stored as trauma; they carry on with their day feeling all the wiser for what they had just survived and triumphed over. Unfortunately for a lot of us humans, this natural process of discharging pent-up survival energy has been conditioned out of us. You know, *enter staunch british accent* because in proper society that would look like you don’t have it together, *back to my voice* or something like that. Let’s say though, the threat is persistent and the animal is staying in freeze for a longer time now. Like animals, our bodies can only maintain that freeze response for so long until the next line of defense in our evolutionary survival responses takes over: collapse. The collapse state can feel pretty lifeless. As human beings, we add on all these extra layers of shame to it, like “lazy” or “unmotivated.” It can be likened to depression. If for whatever reason, the threat feels persistent, invasive or intense enough, our ANS might resort to more out-of-body coping strategies, such as dissociation, derealization or depersonalization, all of which are fancy words for pointing out that the majority of our energy is further away from where our actual physical body is in space and that particular environment. Super cool, right? & so intelligent, every last one of these strategies. AND while it may feel unfamiliar to let the body move and tremble its way back up the ladder, our human bodies are animal bodies and they know how.
But, looking back with this new lens to stoner teenage me, I can see clearly how much survival energy, specifically the flight response, was looping, undigested, in my body, layered with dissociation. On a somatic-subconscious level (because the body, in a way, is the subconscious), this song was a mirror that helped my emotional body and this survival energy feel seen, even if it didn’t help resolve it.
Now, this isn’t even including the familial attachment layers of the lyrics. Because she’s not just saying to run – but to run for your family. That you have to leave your love behind. You can’t carry it with you if you want to survive, she sings. I felt that.
It gave me a (false) sense of strength. “Leave it behind like a lone wolf, at least I’m wild and free, got a bike, got some weed” was probably my line of thinking with a tear or two falling down my cheek regularly.
And all of that is to say how our unprocessed, looping survival energy can be tied up with some of our closest relationships. Ruptures awaiting repair for years. So, until that support and intentional presence arrives (like a BCST session that helps us process some of this survival energy and integrate it into wisdom, that aids us in having a greater physiological-emotional capacity, which eventually leads to the ability, spaciousness and possibility for repairs with the original human of which the original wounding happened with) – thank goodness for the mirror that is music. 💗
P.S. If you want to listen to the song, I suggest watching this delightfully whimsical choreography with it:
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