Becoming who you are

If we feel we're broken and wrong, we'll try to fix ourself which is a long, exhausting and futile road. What if who we think we are is not actually who we are? Instead, our identity has been formed by a collection of different strategies and adaptations to an environment and people who weren't safe. If we feel safe, we don't have to strategise and become who we are not, we have the luxury of blossoming into who we really are.

But we can also claim this right to blossom, whatever age we are and whatever has happened to us. By becoming who we really are, we automatically shed who we are not. This process isn't easy and it certainly isn't painless but to tell the truth about anything, especially who we really are, is liberating, even if it's difficult.

I really like what Alaine Duncan says in her book, The Tao of Trauma:
1. People are not broken when they have a diagnosis of PTSD, they are simply awaiting reregulation
2. Trauma is dysregulated and disorganised qi (life energy)
3. The qi can’t be tainted
4. The overlay of dysregulation caused by traumatic stress is simply an overlay

I love how she describes trauma as an overlay. I see it as an overlay on our true self which remains untainted. Underneath it all, if we get quiet, we can sense and feel this self. It can pop up when we least expect it, but most need it.

Being who we are is living from the inside out, rather than the outside in. When our environment and the people in it are unsafe and chaotic, we don't have the luxury of living from our insides, it's too painful and overwhelming. We also don't have the luxury of resting in others and our environment, instead we have to become hypervigilant and second guess people just to survive. It might feel like your real self has withered away because it was never nourished or cherished, but it just didn't get the right conditions to grow and that is something you can do something about.

Learning to feel again

This is essentially what we do when we embark on our journey of healing trauma. It sounds too simple doesn't it? It is simple, but not easy.

We've all had experiences that we just couldn't experience because they were too painful, our survival was at stake, we were too developmentally immature to process them, they were too horrific and so on. But whatever caused our traumas, the end result is still the same: unexperienced experience.  We need to find a way to experience these experiences or life will find a way to get us to experience them.

Many times, we need to have a crisis in order to address what has gone unaddressed. It becomes too easy to ignore our pain, minimise it, distract from it, even with "good" stuff, until it becomes a mountain that is. Until the symptoms/conditions we have start to make our lives so uncomfortable that we're forced to deal with our hurt/unexperienced experiences. Let's start feeling again, slowly and gently.

Trauma: unexperienced experience ~ Ivor Browne

When the threat is inside

The internal threat that a lot of us face is the unfelt pain and hurt we are carrying. When our response to overwhelming experiences was too much for us to bear, especially when we were infants and children, we stored it away. The definition of overwhelm in this context is anything that short circuited our nervous system, and this is very much dependent on our developmental stage.

Psychiatrist Ivor Browne says: instead of a way of avoiding external danger, it [dissociation] is now utilised to deal with the threat of internal stabilisation; whenever we are faced with an overwhelming experience that we sense as potentially disintegrating, we have the ability to suspend it and "freeze" it in an unassimilated, inchoate form and maintain it in that state indefinitely, or for as long as necessary.

I believe these unassimilated experiences are what cause anxiety. They mount up because we're too afraid of feeling them. When a threat is internal, it can seem as if there is no escape. But there is, the way out is to befriend and feel our difficult emotions and sometimes dreadful physical sensations. It is simple, but not easy.

There are many different ways to help us do this, safely and gently. What is key, as Bruce Perry says, is a bottom up approach, in line with our neuroanatomy. In order to change a neural network he says, you have to activate that neural network. So in order to change our stress response, we have to activate it through somatosensory routes, i.e., running, breathing, walking, chanting, visuals, rhythm and so on. As Peter Levine says, this is like walking a tightrope, too little activation and nothing changes, too much and overwhelm results (which keeps the trauma loop going), just enough activation is the goal so we can make much needed changes.

Do we get or give love?

Do we get or give love? Maybe neither. Maybe we are love, but when we first arrive in this life as newborns, we need as clear a mirror as possible to show us just how good, lovable and valuable we are. This mirror doesn't have to be perfect because perfection doesn't exist. It just has to be good enough.

This is why attachment is so important, we cling to our 'rock' like barnacles, but that doesn't make us clingy. It makes us human with valid needs. Without our rock, we're like rudderless ships, at least for a while until find other rocks to remind us of who we really are. Can we ever know we are love/loved/lovable without others? I don't think so.

Synchronicity

Lately I've been noticing more synchronicity in my life. Or maybe I'm just seeing the signs more clearly and I'm actually following them rather than questioning and rubbishing them as unimportant or insignificant.

What I have found is that exactly what I need at the time shows up in these signs/coincidences/synchronicities.

A recent example of this synchronicity is a couple of years ago I heard Meggan Watterson being interviewed by Tami Simon of Sounds True and I found it interesting but thought no more of it until I got an email from the bookbub.com with a daily list of the special offers. I saw Meggan's book, Mary Magdalene Revealed for €1.99 and bought it on a whim.

I grew up catholic in Ireland but I am no longer catholic, if I ever was catholic in the true sense of the word (deliberate use of small case letters). I don't belong to any religion, but I do believe in God and I admire the person that Jesus was.

It's all the paraphernalia around the catholic church that I don't like, particularly the shocking misogyny, abuse, slave labour and child trafficking that went on in Ireland for years and years, with collusion from the state. I'm ashamed of it, even though I'm not responsible for it.

There's a quote that really resonates with me, but I'm often afraid and ashamed to share it in case people think I'm religious or God forbid, catholic. It's from the gospel of Thomas, in the Gnostic gospels. I even have an issue with the term gospel as it reminds me so much of being preached to and the hypocrisy of the catholic church on so many issues. But the quote feels very true to my experience.

I've learned from Meggan that the gnostic gospels are the mystical side of Christianity. That I can get on board with. Just as I can get on board with Rumi as a Sufi but not agree with a lot of the teachings in Islam, particularly about women. That is my issue with all religions actually, the way they treat women; one half of the human race.

One day I was reading about Meggan being in mom-mode and "cleaning up as if I had seven arms and calling out directives at my son as if we were suddenly under some sort of deadline to get everything organized in his room", and her son sang the line "I want to know what love is" because he was feeling ordered around and it immediately disarmed her. She says, "He has skillful means at such a young age. With one lyric, he snaps me out of the trance of who I don’t have to be".

I want to know what love is, is a song by Foreigner from the 80s and one I've always thought was cheesy and a bit soppy. Meggan talks about hearing that very song later that day in her yoga class, but this time it was sung by Krishna Das. I then looked up this song out of sheer curiosity to hear it sung as a chant and I was moved to tears. It made me hear the song and its lyrics in a whole new way. I was meant to hear that song and to learn about Krishna Das. It was exactly what I needed in so many ways and it will reverberate in my life for a long time to come. It was an answer to what Joan Borysenko calls "a simple prayer of the heart: help".

Tapping on grief

If going through grief weren't bad enough, we often find that the people in our lives just can't handle it. Many of us just weren't taught how to feel difficult emotions, so it is hard to be with ourselves and others when we or they are going through something difficult.

This can make grief not just heart breaking, but very isolating. It's important to reach out to others who can just listen and be with you. Watch this video by Megan Devine on this very subject.

It's tempting to rush towards a reframe or something "positive" when tapping, but when you're grieving, you need to stay where you are and move through it slowly. Karla McLaren has a lovely piece on grief in her book, The Language of Emotions and has talked about the importance of grief rituals. Megan Devine's book, It's OK That You're Not OK: Meeting Grief and Loss in a Culture That Doesn't Understand is an excellent read too.

Try tapping on the phrases below, customise them to suit you:

Even though this grief feels like it's going to swallow me whole, I accept how difficult this is for me right now

Even though I just can't feel this grief, it's just too much, I completely accept how I feel right now

Even though I don't think I'll ever be able to move through this grief, I love and accept myself anyway

Top of head: This grief
Eyebrow: It's too much
Side of eye: I can't feel it
Under eye: It's going to swallow me whole
Under nose: It's so difficult right now
Under chin: This grief feels …
Collar bone: I've no choice but to go slowly
Under the arm: And that's more than ok

Top of head: No one understands
Eyebrow: And that feels … (lonely, frightening, frustrating, isolating etc)
Side of eye: I could do with some support
Under eye: I didn't know how difficult it would be
Under nose: I feel alone in my grief
Under chin: I just want someone to sit with me
Collar bone; They don't have to change or fix anything
Under arm: I want the comfort of having someone understand

Top of head: And not try and talk me out of how I'm feeling
Eyebrow: Or try and make me feel better because they can't handle my grief
Side of eye: My grief is too much for others too
Under eye: I need to be as kind to myself as I can possibly be
Under nose: I need to take this moment by moment
Under chin: I can't think any further than that
Collar bone: And that's ok
Under arm: It'll have to be because it's how I truly feel

Continue to tap for as long as you need to, there is no time limit for grief.

Resistance or Protection?

You hear the word resistance a lot in therapy and it always refers to the client, not the therapist. For me, it has a negative connotation, even if we don't verbalise it. This is particularly the case if we label a client as resistant, rather than saying some resistance is present. We send a negative message to the client about themselves if we call/think of them resistant, we don't even have to voice it, the client picks up all our communication, as Paul Wachtel writes in his book Therapeutic Communication. What he calls the meta message, I like to call the true message.  We're constantly sending and receiving information, most of it non verbal.

Who do you think most clients will trust? The therapist, a so-called expert, or themselves? That's why it's so important that we, as practitioners, own our stuff and don't project/transfer it, and if we do, we don't beat ourselves up but we do take responsibility for working on it. And we make it crystal clear to the client that it is not about them.

Resistance is almost always, in my experience, a protective part that doesn't feel safe moving forward, having things change or doesn't feel safe accessing a hurt inner child (called an exile in Internal Family Systems). These are some of the most common reasons but there can be many. The label 'resistant' is too easy. We need to look under the hood and find out what's really going on.

We can't fake feeling safe, well we can, but we'll pay for it. It's much easier and less exhausting to be honest about how we truly feel. Lack of safety is almost always the reason for 'resistance'.

Are you clingy or needy?

Are there any more damning terms than being ‘clingy’ or ‘needy’? It says so much about us that these terms even exist in our lexicon.

We are born totally dependent and vulnerable and how our needs are met is crucially important for our development. We will always have needs until the day we die, we don’t grow out of needs and nor should we. So why do so many have such a problem with needs? Why are so many shamed for having needs? Why do we deny our needs?

I remember Carrie Bradshaw saying in Sex in the City that, “Once a need is met, you don’t need it anymore”. What I think this means is that we’re not hungry anymore when our needs are met. Our hunger is not just for food, but for love, warmth, safety, support, attunement, comfort, play and so on. We need these things, they are not optional and we can spend lifetimes looking for these valid needs to be met.

Talking about this reminds me of the term that Gabor Maté coined, “Hungry Ghosts” in the book of the same name. So many of us are hungry for what we didn’t get and this does not make us needy or clingy, it makes us human and innately vulnerable and interdependent.

What do you feel hungry for? Say, out loud, if you can: It’s ok for me to need … (fill in the blank) and listen out for any objections/tailenders and tap on them. If none arise, see how this sentence feels in your body, does it feel true? Do you feel worthy and deserving of having your needs met?

The ultimate prayer

Holistic psychiatrist Kelly Brogan shared a lovely video of Joan Borysenko a few weeks ago and Joan said something really beautiful. She said there is a very simple prayer of the heart and it's called: Help.

Ask for help and notice all the various ways it shows up, sometimes in the most unexpected ways. It really works, please try it.

You are what you digest, assimilate and eliminate

You probably know the saying ‘You are what you eat”. But lately I’ve been hearing “You are what you digest” from functional medicine practitioners. This is true for food, relationships, and everything in our environment. If we can’t digest it, it accumulates and stagnates in our system causing all sorts of health problems.

It’s not just what we digest though, it’s also what we assimilate and eliminate. What goes in, must go through and come out. If if doesn’t, we aren’t nourished by the things that are good for us and we can’t therefore eliminate what is no longer good for us.

If we don’t feel, we can’t experience. But feeling seems far too simple a solution for it to work. We think we need something more complicated and fancy, especially when our issues are complex.

So much has been written on this subject, but because it doesn’t seem quick and painless, it doesn’t get as much airtime as other so-called easier solutions, but the fact is that it works. The ability to handle difficult emotions increases our capacity and resilience and makes us more of who we really are. Who wouldn't want that?

Collectively, our emotional intelligence isn’t great. We aren’t very good at dealing with difficult emotions, people or experiences. Is it because we don’t place as much value on our emotional and social intelligence as we do academic intelligence? Watch/listen to this excellent podcast with Dr Joan Rosenberg talking about how our life changes for the better when we learn to feel and experience difficult emotions.

I can't digest ...

What do you find difficult to digest, feel, experience? Are you bursting at the seams because you have so much undigested stuff inside?

Go slowly and take at least 5 minutes to yourself every day, in silence, and feel a little bit of what you find hard to feel. I know that's difficult to do but the more urgency and desperation we feel to not feel certain emotions and sensations, the more we need to slow down and feel them, it sounds counter intuitive but it really does work.

The 'it' that Ivor Browne is talking about is dissociation, that is, avoiding, numbing, checking out, and we all do it to a greater or lesser degree to protect ourselves from pain.

Try tapping on:

I find it hard to digest ...
I find it hard to feel ...
I find it difficult to experience ...
I find it difficult to accept ...
It feels like my body is bursting at the seams with symptoms
The worst symptom is ...
It makes me feel ...
Does this feeling remind me of anything or anyone?
When did I first feel this feeling? Guess if you don't know
How does this emotion feel in my body? Be as descriptive and specific as you can be here
Is avoiding this feeling helping me in the long run?
What's worse, feeling this difficult feeling or suffering the consequences of pushing it away?
What if I felt 10% (2, 5, whatever number feels manageable) of this feeling every day?

Emotional flashbacks

13 Steps for Managing Flashbacks by psychotherapist, Pete Walker.

1 Say to yourself: "I am having a flashback". Flashbacks take us into a timeless part of the psyche that feels as helpless, hopeless and surrounded by danger as we were in childhood. The feelings and sensations you are experiencing are past memories that cannot hurt you now.

2 Remind yourself: "I feel afraid but I am not in danger! I am safe now, here in the present." Remember you are now in the safety of the present, far from the danger of the past.

3 Own your right/need to have boundaries. Remind yourself that you do not have to allow anyone to mistreat you; you are free to leave dangerous situations and protest unfair behavior.

4 Speak reassuringly to the Inner Child. The child needs to know that you love her unconditionally- that she can come to you for comfort and protection when she feels lost and scared.

5 Deconstruct eternity thinking: in childhood, fear and abandonment felt endless - a safer future was unimaginable. Remember the flashback will pass as it has many times before.

6 Remind yourself that you are in an adult body with allies, skills and resources to protect you that you never had as a child. [Feeling small and little is a sure sign of a flashback].

7 Ease back into your body. Fear launches us into 'heady' worrying, or numbing and spacing out:
[a] Gently ask your body to Relax: feel each of your major muscle groups and softly encourage them to relax. (Tightened musculature sends unnecessary danger signals to the brain).
[b] Breathe deeply and slowly. (Holding the breath also signals danger).
[c] Slow down: rushing presses the psyche's panic button.
[d] Find a safe place to unwind and soothe yourself: wrap yourself in a blanket, hold a stuffed animal, lie down in a closet or a bath, take a nap.
[e] Feel the fear in your body without reacting to it. Fear is just an energy in your body that cannot hurt you if you do not run from it or react self-destructively to it.

8 Resist the Inner Critic's Drasticizing and Catastrophizing:
[a] Use thought-stopping to halt its endless exaggeration of danger and constant planning to control the uncontrollable. Refuse to shame, hate or abandon yourself. Channel the anger of self-attack into saying NO to unfair self-criticism.
[b] Use thought-substitution to replace negative thinking with a memorized list of your qualities and accomplishments

9 Allow yourself to grieve. Flashbacks are opportunities to release old, unexpressed feelings of fear, hurt, and abandonment, and to validate - and then soothe - the child's past experience of helplessness and hopelessness. Healthy grieving can turn our tears into self-compassion and our anger into self-protection.

10 Cultivate safe relationships and seek support. Take time alone when you need it, but don't let shame isolate you. Feeling shame doesn't mean you are shameful. Educate your intimates about flashbacks and ask them to help you talk and feel your way through them.

11 Learn to identify the types of triggers that lead to flashbacks. Avoid unsafe people, places, activities and triggering mental processes. Practice preventive maintenance with these steps when triggering situations are unavoidable.

12 Figure out what you are flashing back to. Flashbacks are opportunities to discover, validate and heal our wounds from past abuse and abandonment. They also point to our still unmet developmental needs and can provide motivation to get them met.

13 Be patient with a slow recovery process: it takes time in the present to become un-adrenalized, and considerable time in the future to gradually decrease the intensity, duration and frequency of flashbacks. Real recovery is a gradually progressive process [often two steps forward, one step back], not an attained salvation fantasy. Don't beat yourself up for having a flashback.

Would you like to dissolve traumatic stress around your pregnancy and birth?

Please join me this Thursday, 23rd May at 5pm GMT (Dublin), to tap on clearing and dissolving any traumatic stress you experienced during pregnancy, birth and beyond. The class is online with zoom (free to download). I will be working with a volunteer and you can tap along and borrow benefits. The cost is €15 for a 90 minute class, you can book by emailing me to find out more or pay directly for the class here.

Human attunement

Attunement creates the safety needed to soothe our nervous system. It’s what Robert Stolorow calls a “relational home”. Attuned relationships with other humans (and animals) create a home for our true selves where we can develop a real sense of belonging.

Our brains, bodies and minds are formed according to our relationships, they are that important. I read a recent blog post by Mark Brady entitled “Are safe relationships all that really matter?” and I’m inclined to say yes to that.

If you study up on the polyvagal theory by Stephen Porges, you will see the crucial importance of our social engagement system. We don’t talk ourselves into this truth, our nervous system will do that for us. Our nervous system has evolved over millions of years and trying to override it gets us into all sorts of trouble.

Not having ‘relational homes’ sets up a real dilemma and catch 22 for those of us who haven’t had safe and nurturing relationships. We might try and convince ourselves that we can go it alone, though that rarely works out as we well know. Human connection is a valid need that there is absolutely no point in trying to bypass.

The good news is, our brain is plastic, we can get what’s called “earned secure attachment”, a phrase I’m not crazy about. What it essentially means is that we can learn to feel safe and good inside and have the relationships with others that help us thrive. It takes a lot of hard work, there’s no point in pretending otherwise, but it absolutely is attainable.

Tapping on the obvious

I’ve noticed that we don’t seem to tap on the obvious. We say the same things, have the same recurring dreams, see the same patterns repeating when we’re stressed, yet often we don’t tap on these things.

The most obvious things are hiding in plain sight, but because we’re so close to them, we often don’t see them as important to tap on. Or we discount them as too ordinary to tap on, after all, we’re looking for the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow aren’t we?

The holy grail or the root cause that will finally be the big breakthrough that we’ve been looking and pining for and maybe even believing that there’s something wrong with us because we haven’t had it yet.

But I think that most of us, have the smaller, less conspicuous breakthroughs that are incremental  and that we often don’t notice. When you see someone every day, you don’t notice the changes in them that someone who hasn’t seen them in a year will see and it’s the same with progress. We often don’t see or give ourselves credit for the things we’re doing differently, the stress we’ve dissolved, the internal conflicts that we’ve uncovered and the way we’ve grown.

I think we often want a short cut through our pain or an easier journey and that’s more than ok. None of us want to suffer. The truth is where we should all start and when you tap on the truth, mountains move.

Whatever you meet, you can go beyond

This very true sentence was written by Karen Brody in her book, Daring to Rest. Whatever we don’t meet, gets stuck on repeat. We’ll repeat it until we can meet it, digest it, experience it, complete it, finish it, accept it, even love it. There really is no way out except through.

It takes courage, support and resources to meet what we fear and in my experience what we fear and feel threatened by the most, are the sensations and emotions inside us that feel awful. The unfelt hurts and pain that we’re afraid will swamp and swallow us whole. But, as Joseph Campbell says: The cave you fear to enter, holds the treasure you seek.

The fear of pain and hurt often becomes greater than the hurt and pain. Struggling against the fear just doesn’t work. We need to ride the waves of difficult emotions and sensations instead of repeatedly crashing against them. When we have the experience of moving through something, our fear of it diminishes. We learn resilience, strength and the trust that we can handle what comes our way (with help and support).

Even though I’m afraid of meeting … I completely accept how I feel

Even though I can’t experience … I completely accept how I feel

Even though this … feels … I love and accept myself anyway

Repeat whatever words/phrases feel right on the tapping points.

Birth trauma class

The next EFT class will be on trauma during pregnancy, birth and postpartum. This is a really important time in everyone's life and the effects of trauma can last a lifetime (or many lifetimes as intergenerational trauma shows), if we don't resolve them.

The class will be held at 4pm GMT on Thursday April 25th by zoom (you can download it for free here). You can email me at my website: info[at]energyandintention[dot]com to attend/volunteer and I will send you an invitation to the class. The class costs €15 for 90 minutes.

I think many women are diagnosed with postpartum depression, among other things, when very often it is trauma they are suffering from.

Watch the beautiful video above to learn about the importance of safety to our nervous system. Safety, privacy and respect are all too rare in maternal "care" worldwide, unfortunately.

Tuning in

There are many different ways we can tune in to, and heal, what hurts. More and more research shows the benefits of art, theatre, exercise, dance, sound healing and so on in the healing of trauma. But indigenous cultures have known this for thousands of years, we so-called “civilised” people seem to have forgotten or lost trust in these ways.

We also know there are huge benefits to activating the vagus nerve for better physical and mental health. Using your own voice is a great way to improve the health* of the vagus nerve.

This song by Nirinjan Kaur uses chanting which, as Dr Bruce Perry points out, is rhythmic, patterned and repetitive. Sound healing (and other somatosensory methods) can touch parts of us that are hard to reach with talk therapy alone. The song is a kirtan kriya meditation, part of the kundalini yoga tradition, which holistic psychiatrist Kelly Brogan is an advocate of, she recommends this exercise for depression.

Here are the instructions for the kirtan kriya. I find following along with Nirinjan Kaur's version really powerful and moving.

* 4. Singing And Chanting – Humming, mantra chanting, hymn singing, and upbeat energetic singing all increase heart rate variability (HRV) in slightly different ways. Essentially, singing is like initiating a vagal pump sending out relaxing waves. Singing at the top of your lungs works the muscles in the back of the throat to activate the vagus. Singing in unison, which is often done in churches and synagogues, also increases HRV and vagus function. Singing has been found to increase oxytocin, also known as the love hormone because it makes people feel closer to one another". (Excerpt from article above).

Unfinished business

There is nothing inherently wrong with the flight, fight and freeze response. They are absolutely necessary and have ensured our survival and evolution as a species.

Problems arise when we can’t complete these responses in the face of threat and danger and they get stuck. The reasons why they become stuck are many.

Fleeing and fighting aren’t viable options for babies and neither for older children in many cases, especially if the threat/danger is coming from their caregivers. So their only option is to freeze (Most people use the term freeze to refer to immobilisation, but the official term is tonic immobility. This is important to note just in case of confusion because in many studies you will see up to six threat responses and the term freeze will begin the sequence, but it does not mean immobilisation as this usually comes later if the preceding responses of flight and fight cannot be completed). Read more here.

There is another possible response between fight and immobilisation and that is fawn, befriend and appease. Children often learn that appeasing is their best defence against adults who are neglectful and abusive, although it does not work with every adult and in every situation.

Shame is another big reason why these responses can get stuck. In abusive and neglectful situations children are shamed for having needs, not being perfect, and sometimes just for existing and a very common response will be to collapse in order to make themselves smaller which acts as some form of protection. We can also feel shame for not having done enough. These early adverse experiences are the root of developmental trauma which can predispose us to more trauma later in life.

We have the ability to shut down both physically and psychologically in order to minimise any emotional and physical pain. We cannot separate the mind from the body, though we continue to do so because of very strong conditioning. Dissociation therefore is both psychic and somatic.

We can see just how valuable it is to be able to immobilise in the face of threat. However, if this sense of threat is internalised or we continue to shut down when there is no clear and present danger, problems can result. We become frightened of our own responses, emotions and body sensations and what we fear, we can’t process. This unresolved traumatic stress results in our system becoming inflamed, and we all know that chronic inflammation is the root cause of chronic disease.

What makes you need/want to flee?
What makes you need/want to fight?
What makes you need/want to appease?
What makes you need/want to shutdown?

It is really helpful, when you can, to determine where you are in terms of these responses. You can then use that state and your answers to the above questions in your tapping, for example:

Even though I want to flee and that makes me feel … I accept how I feel 

Even though I’m stuck in fight, I feel the need to fight when … I completely accept my response at this time

Even though I freeze (immobilise) when faced with … I accept that’s the way I’ve adapted to feeling/being threatened

Even though I don’t like the way I respond to threat, I am open to finding ways that work for me so I can find resolution and peace

Repeat whatever words/phrases feel right on the points.

Is your body saying No?

If we're not honest about how we truly feel, our bodies will do our speaking for us. If we can't or won't say No, our body will say No. It will develop symptoms that will force us to say No.

When we muscle test, our muscles go weak when we don't tell the truth or lie. It's a diagnostic tool. Lying is exhausting, it weakens us and our physical and mental health. Start giving yourself permission to tell the truth, if only to yourself, by doing so, you’ll be taking the pressure off your body to speak your truth for you.

People often ask why do we affirm the "negative" in EFT, how we feel is not negative, it's the truth and the truth will set you free.

Watch this excellent video by Dr Gabor Maté, 21mins 26secs long.

Why does anxiety feel so bad?

I don’t think anxiety is an emotion, it is a state. A state which comes about when we haven’t been able to feel emotional pain, so it builds up, and we then become afraid of connecting with that mountain of pain and its sensations in the body.  As Deepak Chopra says in Ageless Body, Timeless Mind, hurt is the most basic negative [or uncomfortable] emotion we can feel. States like anxiety and depression are secondary formations once we learned not to feel or express our hurt in the moment.

It’s not as simple as that though. Not feeling pain, in the case of dissociation, is an automatic response from our autonomic nervous system. We do not have any control over it. Our system senses if an experience could be overwhelming and dissociation kicks in to protect us from the pain, as much as it can. Think about the times you’ve gone numb when something awful or overwhelming has happened. You didn’t make the choice to dissociate, it happened automatically.

We can also consciously avoid pain, this is sometimes called avoidance, emotional numbing and experiential avoidance. But what counts at the end of the day is the unfelt pain and how we go about feeling it safely and gently.

Anxiety is about the fear of going inside; where our pain is. Maybe that’s why anxiety can be difficult to work with, because to heal anxiety we need to learn a new way of being with all of our emotions, especially the uncomfortable ones, including, but not limited to, fear.

One of the most powerful techniques for feeling our pain is an exercise called pendulation from Peter Levine. It really works because instead of dissociating and avoiding, we learn to feel into the pain little by little (what Levine calls titration). Pendulation also gives us the experience that not all of our body feels horrible, there are also some parts that feel neutral, calm and good, whether it’s our elbow or little toe. Pendulating between a painful part and a calm part also gives us the experience of holding opposites which helps enlarge our container, or window of tolerance, for difficult emotions.

Try tapping on the sentences below, see what comes up and tap through the points with your answers.

Even though I’m afraid of going inside, I completely accept how I feel

Even though it all feels too big and overwhelming, I don’t know where to start, I can start where it feels safest to go

Even though this anxiety feels … I accept all of my feelings around this

Even though I want to rush things so I feel better, I know I’ve become overwhelmed in the past doing this, so I choose to take it slowly and gently

Tapping classes

I will be holding two tapping classes on Thursday, 21st February at 11am GMT and 5pm GMT, so depending on which part of the world you live in, you can hopefully join me. The class costs €15 for 90 minutes and the size will be kept small.

The format I’m experimenting with at the moment is having someone volunteer for the theme I’ve chosen for that month, I would also love any suggestions if you would like to send them to me. I’ve chosen being heard and seen for this month as it is a huge issue for many of us. For the volunteer it is like having a session with me and others can borrow benefits. Tapping in a group can be powerful, your system will draw parallels with the other person's issue, even if the issue you want to work on is different.

If you'd like to join either class you can send your payment here and I'll send you an invitation to the class (specify what time you'd like). I'll be using Zoom which you can download for free here.

You have the option of being anonymous during the class, when you enter the meeting you can use your own name, a pseudo name or you don't have to use any name, you can also turn your video and audio on or off. If you have any questions about the classes or any subjects you'd like to tap on, you can email me: info[at]energyandintention[dot]com.

Our internal family

I was reading a blog post by Carolyn Spring, who has Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID), the other day called ‘Learning to Control Switching’. She writes of her therapist: She bends in towards me, seeking me out, because I’m closing down connection with her by huddling into my body and staring at my feet. ‘Your parts don’t feel accepted by you,’ she says, gently. ‘They don’t feel that you’re on their side. You don’t collaborate with them most of the time. You ‘curtail’ them. So they hijack you.’

We all have parts, or sub personalities, every single one of us. There would be no such thing as internal conflict if we didn’t have parts, because our one self would always be in agreement or disagreement about whatever it is. There wouldn’t be one part wanting to give up smoking and another part anxious about how we’d cope, for example.

Richard Schwartz, who developed Internal Family Systems (IFS), believes that multiplicity of the mind is the norm as do many other clinicians and researchers. With DID, the parts are more fragmented because of the trauma they hold, and that's very disconcerting and upsetting for the sufferer because it can lead to things like dissociative amnesia.

When we get to know our parts and connect with them using a framework like IFS, we can resolve a lot of internal conflicts which has a ripple like effect in our lives. Like Carolyn, our parts hijack us when we’re not listening to them. In a way they have no choice, they need to get our attention. In IFS, this is called blending and our parts can take us over when we’re triggered. But the more we realise what’s happening, and the more integrated our parts become, the more we can stay in what Schwartz calls, the Self. There are eight qualities of the Self according to Schwartz: calmness, curiosity, clarity, compassion, confidence, creativity, courage, and connectedness.

We can all dissociate when we find an experience overwhelming. The only difference is to what degree we dissociate. Dissociation is a fantastic skill we all possess to cope with really painful experiences that just can't be fully felt at a certain moment in time. There is nothing pathological about dissociating. As Irish psychiatrist, Ivor Browne says: Instead of a way of avoiding external danger, it [dissociation] is now utilised to deal with the threat of internal destabilisation; whenever we are faced with an overwhelming experience that we sense as potentially disintegrating, we have the ability to suspend it and "freeze'' it in an unassimilated, inchoate form and maintain it in that state indefinitely, or for as long as necessary.

Normalising phenomena like dissociation and trauma is important, because to a greater or lesser degree, we've all experienced them. It's the human condition. The stigma, fear and misinformation around mental “disorders” is alive and kicking and education can help dispel a lot of the myths.

Keep it simple

I really need to keep things simple, when I don’t, I can get overwhelmed. One way we can show our self great kindness and respect is to stop doing things that overwhelm us. Whenever you can, take a break when you recognise your own unique signs of overwhelm coming on. The more you do this, the better you become at releasing stress (old and new) and then it doesn’t build up.

I love it when others keep things simple too. I see it as a sign of security in their experience, knowledge and self when they don’t feel the need to dazzle with lots of facts (which are always evolving anyway, the more we learn and know) or big words. As someone I know said, there are no experts, just people with expertise. People with expertise know they’re always learning and give themselves a break for not being perfect.

The Lafcadio Hearn Japanese Gardens, Tramore, Waterford, Ireland.

Keeping it as simple as we possibly can is particularly important when it comes to learning about trauma which can very easily feel overwhelming and like we’ll never heal because there’s too much to do. But, as Martin Luther King said “A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step”. We need to watch out for any signs of perfection or any sense of brokenness because we’re ‘not fixed yet’. These are the exact times when we need to muster up as much kindness as we can for our self, it can make all the difference in the world.

Four definitions of trauma

How do we define trauma? Is it how you experience an event or the event itself? I think it’s how we experience the event. Traumatic events do not necessarily lead to trauma. For trauma to occur we have to persistently dissociate from something we find too painful to feel.

1. Unexperienced experience ~ Ivor Browne
2. Dysregulated and disorganised qi (life energy) ~ Alaine Duncan
3. Disconnection from the self and the present moment ~ Gabor Maté
4. PTSD Criterion A: stressor (one required). The person was exposed to: death, threatened death, actual or threatened serious injury, or actual or threatened sexual violence, in the following way(s): Direct exposure; Witnessing the trauma; Learning that a relative or close friend was exposed to a trauma; Indirect exposure to aversive details of the trauma, usually in the course of professional duties (e.g., first responders, medics) ~ Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5).

Even though a PTSD diagnosis has become synonymous with trauma, trauma manifests itself in many different ways, it will be unique to you and your life experiences. You do not have to have experienced an event from Criterion A to be traumatised. Trauma can be insidious, repeated experiences that accumulate in your nervous systems over years, causing what is called a dysregulated nervous system. This is why I never use the terms big T or little t trauma. Trauma is trauma. Symptoms of unresolved trauma include: anxiety, depression, chronic fatigue syndrome, autoimmune issues, chronic unexplained medical symptoms, heart disease, addiction, bipolar disorder, insomnia and so on.

What does your heart long for?

Tara Brach asks this question in her brilliant book, True Refuge. The answer my heart gave me was that it wants to feel connected to myself and others.

Sometimes it’s hard to fully feel our longings and yearnings because we can descend into self blame and shame for why we don’t have something, or don’t have enough of it, in our lives. The tendrils of shame can entangle almost anything.

I don’t think many fully realise the absolutely devastating effects of early and developmental trauma, particularly when it is perpetrated by caregivers, what is termed betrayal trauma. If you’re a little girl who is sexually abused by your father and your mother is complicit, what does your heart long for?

How can that little girl have a relationship with her parents when she is finally able to get away? Do people realise what it’s like having no family in this world and how people are judged and shamed for that? I think the stigma of being abused and neglected is much greater when it is perpetrated by a family member rather than by a stranger. To say that I find that perplexing is an understatement. Rather than having our compassion, abused and neglected children are judged and stigmatised for not coming from what many of us call a so-called “good” family.

Tuning into our heart’s longing makes us vulnerable. It opens our heart which can feel sometimes like our heart is breaking and that scares us. I also think longing is often paired with grief. We don’t long for what we have but for what we don’t or didn’t have.

Mahon Falls, Comeragh Mountains, Waterford, Ireland

Asking this question isn’t easy because of all the pain it can bring up, but it’s an important question, one that will tug at us all our life until we answer it. As with anything that’s difficult and painful, we need to find the sweet spot of leaning in just enough, not too much all at once and not too little, because then nothing changes.

Asking what our heart longs for connects us to ourself on a profoundly intimate level. What feels like a dark night of the soul or a breakdown can become a break through, there is nothing pathological about it. If anything, being open to asking this question invites a deep inquiry which can throw us off kilter for a while, even a long while. Jeff Foster describes the pain of a breakdown beautifully in his lovely book, The Way of Rest: The raw pleasure and the pain of it, unfiltered, at last! No longer numb, you will be as softly vulnerable as you were in the beginning.

Vulnerability opens us up to hurt but, as Gabor Maté says, there’s no other way to grow if we don’t risk being vulnerable, we need to shed the shell that has become too small and constricting and grow a bigger one to house our bigger, truer self.

At the same time, if you feel unable to answer this question for whatever reason, trust yourself. As Rainer Maria Rilke says: I beg you, to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don’t search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.