Tapping on insomnia

One of the most debilitating symptoms of undischarged traumatic stress is insomnia. When you can’t fall sleep, sleep only a few hours a night or you wake up constantly during the night, you just can’t function properly. Lack of sleep brings us to our knees, literally and metaphorically.

Insomnia is not a symptom you can easily ignore. If it goes on for longer than a few months, sleep becomes an obsession. It’s akin to being afraid of having a panic attack: you become more and more afraid of not sleeping and your entire life starts to revolve around getting as much sleep as you can, however you can. You will try anything to get a few hours sleep so you don’t go through your day like a zombie.

When you’re suffering from insomnia, your nervous system is in sympathetic mode, that is, flight or fight. Insomnia is usually the result of years and years worth of thwarted flight and fight responses that you couldn’t complete because of survival and safety issues. You might have been a good sleeper at one time, and something that might have seemed harmless was the straw that broke the camel’s back.

You might also have spent years in freeze mode. Sometimes it feels better to be numb than to feel anything. We can also oscillate between being shutdown and being overwhelmed. However, as time goes by things have a way of melting and erupting, whether we want them to or not. We become triggered more easily because our barrels only have so much space. Something has got to give if nothing is being emptied.

Insomnia is one of those issues you just have to get to the root of. If you don’t, you might sleep well some nights and then go back to either waking through the night or not being able to fall asleep: two steps forward, 6 steps back.

Your quality of sleep is a strong litmus test for your stress levels, so lowering your stress levels on a daily basis is really important. But so is getting to the root of why we’re stressed. Sometimes we don’t have any control over some of our stressors because of circumstances, but start where you are and do the best you can. A journey of a thousand miles begins with one step as Martin Luther King said.

Don’t wait until bedtime to relax, take every opportunity during the day to observe your breath, where you might be pushing through, when you’re not listening to your body, when you clench or brace and so on. Learning to sleep well again involves changes in how you live your life. What was once adaptive isn’t serving you anymore so you need to learn a new way of being in the world that is more true to who you really are.

Fill in the blanks to these statements and tap on your answers. Trust what comes up.

When I think of going to bed at night I feel …

Sleeping feels …

Not sleeping feels ...

A part of me doesn’t feel safe to sleep deeply ...

A part of my body feels … which keeps me awake (or does it feel like the whole of your body, be specific about where you feel stress/tightness/constriction) and that feels ...

My thoughts become distorted when I’m stressed and it’s hard not to believe them ...

Not sleeping and how it feels reminds me of ...

Pin the tail on the right target

I have just finished reading Kathy Brous’ new book, Don’t Try This Alone: The Silent Epidemic of Attachment Disorder. I laughed and I cried throughout, and most of all I felt hopeful after finishing it. Her tenacity and willingness to reach out for help and to keep going is amazing.

One of the gems I got from the book was to pin the tail, or tale, on the right person or situation, or you’ll never get true relief. Now I’ve heard that said a millions times before in different words, but the way she explained it really struck a chord with me. I really really got it. Maybe we need things said a thousand different ways over many years to really download it into our cells.

She would repeat “Move the tale, move the tale” throughout the book when she was recounting incidents/people where she felt triggered. And what she meant by that was to go back to when you first felt that same way. That is, the first person or situation that triggered that feeling or sensation in you.

Oftentimes, it’s our parents or another important figure in our early life who is the initiator but we often find it easier to project our wounds onto others and this is why we don’t find complete relief. Or maybe we’ve forgotten, or suppressed where the real pain came from just because it’s too painful. We pay attention to current woes not linking them to our past when they first happened.

In hypnotherapy, this is called the initiating event and everything else that happens after that is a trigger; an echo or reminder of the original experience. Because we’re so good at dissociating from pain, especially early pain, the initiating experience might not trigger us until we’re in our 20s or at 50 as in Kathy’s case. Dissociation is a brilliant survival mechanism until it becomes chronic and persistent.

In EFT, an important question is “What/Who does that remind you of?”. And I’ve asked this question of myself and others hundred of times, but “Move the tale” really makes the initial pain become laser sharp and crystal clear. When I watched Gabor Maté do a few sessions in Cork with some people, he got to the root straight away by the types of questions he asked and it only took him a few minutes because his focus was where it was supposed to be: the root. You could see the look of relief and hope on people’s faces as they realised where their pain really came from.