The Polyvagal Perils of Plumbing

Last month I decided it was time to replace our 28-year-old dishwasher. I’ve probably installed 30 or more dishwashers over my 25 year career as a building and remodeling contractor. Removal and reinstallation is intended to be a pretty simple operation. Step One: Turn off the hot water faucet and disconnect the supply line; Step Two: Loosen the clamp and remove the drain line; Step Three: shut off the electric power and remove the protective metal panel and undo the electrical connections. Pull out the old dishwasher. To install the new dishwasher simply reverse those three steps. Piece of cake. Right?

Well, as a longtime student of Polyvagal Theory and of my own nervous system, and as someone who knows all too well that where plumbing and electric are concerned, if something CAN go wrong it very likely WILL go wrong, I decided I needed to take preemptive precautions. I would phone a friend, someone to help me regulate my nervous system when the inevitable sympathetic, hyper-adrenal response(s) came to call. Because I know that a dysregulated nervous system inevitably begins generating poopy stories that limit creative problem-solving and invariably make a difficult job even harder. Coincidentally, Frank had just bought and installed this very same dishwasher at his own house two months ago!

Step One

In order to get a bit of a head start, I thought I’d begin the process of removing the old dishwasher before Frank arrived. I closed the hot water shut off and began undoing the supply line to the dishwasher. Residual water in the line began leaking, of course, or so I thought. As I continued loosening the connection nut, the water pressure didn’t drop. Suddenly the nut popped off and water began spraying a high-pressure stream all over the sink cabinet. The shutoff valve didn’t work at all! I put my thumb over the spigot to try and stem the flow, but the pressure was too high and the water quickly became too hot to keep touching. Water began running out of the cabinet, all across the kitchen floor. I could feel the dread and helpless feeling of elevated stress hormones immediately coursing through my body. The only option left to me was to resign myself to letting the kitchen flood while I ran out to the well house and shut down the main water line. Then I called Frank and told him not to bother coming over. The kitchen would need a few days to be cleaned up and dry out. So much for Step One.

Step Two and Three

Before I could get to Step Two and Three I needed to get my stress levels back to the left, Allostasis side of the stress Bell curve. Good things rarely happen when we’re caught up on the right Allostatic Load side of the curve.

One thing that helped was my wife mopping and drying the floor and assuring me that the new plank flooring I’d just installed the week before wasn’t damaged. Another thing that helped was taking a long, brisk mindful walk in the woods with our Bernese Mountain Dog, Emma. Suitably stress-reduced, I was once again ready for Frank to come over and help with the new dishwasher installation the next day.

Disconnecting the drain and the electric from the old dishwasher went off without a hitch. But when we went to install the new machine, we discovered that the overhang of the countertop was too low by a quarter of an inch. Of course. We thought of taking the feet off the machine, but elected instead to cut the overhang out of the counter, since it will be replaced once the new base cabinets on order arrived.

The Home Stretch

Next up: connecting the electric. We pushed the new machine into its space, only to discover it was blocked by something preventing us from going the last two inches. After several attempts just pushing harder, we pulled the machine out and finally realized that the electrical wire coming up through the floor to the old machine, was hitting a protective panel on the bottom of the new machine.

Instantly, I could feel my stress hormone levels rising once again because I immediately got the implications: I was going to have to crawl down under the house and feed a wire up in a new location that allowed the machine to fully seat. Earlier that month I had been in that crawl space for the first time in several years, only to discover that rats had dug a hole under the foundation and were now nested all through the underfloor insulation. As you might expect, the prospect of returning to a dark, confined, cramped space filled with rat poop and urine and hungry rats, began to activate my threat-detection circuitry.

What to do? The only thing I could do: bite the bullet. I donned protective mask, gloves, kneepads and goggles and under the house I went, exhaling mindfully as I crawled. With Frank drilling a new hole topside, I was soon able to relocate the wire and exit the crawlspace as quickly as possible. Big outbreath as I exited the access door. From there, the remainder of the installation actually WAS a piece of cake. 🙂

What’s the takeaway here? There are at least three. First is, as I age, I’m discovering that my adrenal glands seem to secrete stress hormones with much more ease and in greater abundance than they did when I was younger. Two is, it’s important to have ways and means to skillfully manage those stress hormone levels. Three is, other skillful, kind, knowledgeable people can help co-regulate us in times of dire distress. As we can also do for them at different times. All for one and one for all nervous systems regulation.