A resolution for emotional health

Many people talk about improving their health at the start of the year. It’s a way of wiping the slate clean and starting afresh. But how many extend that attitude towards improving their emotional health? Our emotional health is just as important and has a huge impact on our physical health. We often underestimate just how important it is, it might not always be the sole cause of physical illness but it is definitely one of the most important contributors to ill health. Whether stress has caused a physical illness, or an illness has led to subsequent stress, looking after our emotional health can significantly decrease our stress levels, which can only spell good fortune for our overall health.

People don’t often think about improving their emotional health until they encounter a crisis.  But we can learn to be more emotionally healthy before we run into serious trouble.  I’ve heard countless “experts” talk about anger, fear, shame, guilt and the like as “negative”, “destructive” and “unhealthy” emotions. I absolutely cringe when I read/hear that because it is just not true. The issue is not the emotions themselves, but in how we handle them. And many of us just don’t handle anger or fear very well. I think people have huge issues with anger and fear in particular. Many people are described as “angry people” or “fearful people”, as if those terms described a person in absolute terms. I believe the people who have the real issues are the ones who label others like this. If we haven’t made friends with our own difficult emotions, we’ll shun and shame them in others.

There are such things as healthy anger, healthy fear and healthy shame. Polarising our emotions into positive and negative does not make us emotionally literate or intelligent, it has the exact opposite effect in fact. When we disown, deny, bury, suppress or repress our emotions, we’re not using them for what they were intended to be used for; action requiring neurological programmes, according to neuroscientist, Antonio Damasio.

Emotions are not meant to remain stagnant, they are meant to move. In human terms that means we need to feel our emotions, they come and they go when we see every one of them as healthy and necessary when the need arises. If your boundaries are being transgressed for example, anger will arise, in order for you to define your boundaries properly so you are protected.  If you’ve been taught that it’s “bad” for you to feel and/or express anger, it will be hard for you to define healthy boundaries, so you’ll often feel picked on or put upon. Ironically the person you’ll feel most angry with in this situation is yourself. You pay a high price for not being who you truly are. Even if the world has tried to change us, or has even succeeded to a certain degree, we’ll always feel the call to be true to ourselves. Living a lie is far worse than losing some people who weren’t ready for who we really are.

Following your breath

There are lots of breathing exercises for helping with anxiety. That’s because focusing on our breath brings us into our body, where our anxiety is. If we’re not in our bodies, we can’t relieve our anxiety. That can be a catch 22 as I’ve spoken about in other posts. We don’t want to be in our bodies because that’s where the anxiety is, but it’s where we need to be to resolve the anxiety. Most of the time we’re in our heads trying to control things with endless thoughts. Sitting comfortably in our bodies doesn’t just relieve anxiety though, it also makes us feel at home, and at peace with ourselves.

I find following my breath to be very effective in relieving anxiety. I don't make my breath do anything, I follow its rhythms and I nearly always find that my breathing naturally becomes deeper and slower. I do pay attention to expanding my rib cage though. Making our breath “do” something can make us even more anxious and sometimes, deep breathing exercises can cause hyperventilation. This is when the constricted breathing technique from EFT can come in very handy.

When we’re stressed our breathing is affected, so doing something about our breathing can help relieve our stress and anxiety, and vice versa. The constricted breathing technique is very good for working on your own with EFT, it can be difficult working on our own issues, we often can’t see the woods for the trees, so going in the physical door, as Gary Craig calls it, is often simpler then trying to figure things out psychologically.

Even more on anxiety

When we’re suffering with extreme anxiety, we nearly always have a fear of going inside our bodies. It is after all where we feel our pain. When we don’t feel our pain because we are frightened of it, our unfelt pain becomes anxiety. The longer this goes on, the worse our anxiety becomes.

So anxiety is also a sign for us to stop avoiding our pain. Avoiding and dissociating work brilliantly in the short term, they are fantastic survival mechanisms, but life requires that we face our pain and our true selves at some stage. Whether we like it or not. Indigestion, whether physical or mental, is unsustainable in the long run. We need to digest what happens in our lives. Anxiety strongly encourages, i.e. forces, us to heal or pain, the more pain we feel the more we want to heal that pain (or make it go away, which again, does not work, it’s just another avoidance tactic). Pain is a fact of life, what we need are more skills to deal with pain so it doesn’t fester and become illness, physical or mental.

Try tapping on some of the following phrases:

Even though my body is humming with this anxiety and it feels … I honour these feelings, they are trying to tell me something

Even though it’s excruciating to listen to anxiety’s messages, I just wish it would go away, I completely accept how I feel

Even though this pain feels like a mountain I can never climb, I’m willing to take a small step, I don’t have to do it all in one go

Even though this pain feels painful, I love and accept myself anyway

Use whatever reminder phrase feels right on the points, or just tap without saying anything, if you’re feeling anxious, you’re already tuned in and EFT works best when you are tuned in. Being tuned in means feeling anxious or being triggered by something. Stop what you’re doing and tap and you’ll feel some, if not all, of your intensity reducing. Resolving anxiety does take some persistence, so don’t give up hope!

What constitutes trauma?

I've seen a few articles recently that state that emotional abuse may be as damaging as physical or sexual abuse. It's the use of the word may that bothers me. I think the best person to ask is the person who has been emotionally abused, don't you? In addition to that, every person who is physically and/or sexually abused is also emotionally abused, one cannot happen without the other.

There have also been studies about whether neglect is as bad as abuse. Maybe in some ways it's worse, because if someone is neglecting you, they don't care. Is that the ultimate rejection? But why do we even ask these questions? Comparisons really are odious. If you are showing the signs of trauma, whatever they result from, you are traumatised.

A diagnosis of PTSD is not the only way you can display the symptoms of trauma and if you don't fit all of the criteria (or any) it does not mean you are not suffering from trauma. In fact, if you don't nominate criterion A1*, you won't even be assessed for the other PTSD criteria, that is how much a diagnosis of trauma hinges on an event and not an experience. It is a symptom of the so-called objective world we live in, which many mistakenly believe is more "scientific". But human experiences are not objective, they are subjective and until we take people's experiences seriously, many people will not get the help that they need.

* The person was exposed to: death, threatened death, actual or threatened injury, or actual or threatened sexual violence (American Psychiatric Association, 2013).

The messages in panic and terror

A book I can't recommend highly enough is Karla McLaren's The Language of Emotions. It helps us learn how to deal with emotions intelligently rather than simplistically categorising them into so-called 'positive' and 'negative' emotions. EFT is great for discharging blocked and trapped emotions, but we need to go further with emotions. We need to unlearn habits/patterns that don't serve us anymore. Every emotion has a message and gift for us and I'd like share an excerpt on panic and terror, two emotions that might very well be labelled as negative, or even worse. Further information can be found on concepts such as grounding and setting our boundaries in her book.

When your terror and panic are activated in response to trauma, they move forward to increase your adrenaline in case you have the chance to fight or flee at any time during your ordeal; to help you freeze; to release heightened amounts of painkilling endorphins so you’ll be more likely to survive any injury; and to help you dissociate if necessary. All this preparation takes a great deal of energy, which panic certainly contains. After the trauma has passed, your panic will retreat, but it won’t disappear completely. Like fear, panic will stay activated in order to give you the energy you need to reintegrate yourself, shake and tremble all over, and replay your trauma in any number of ways. If you don’t take advantage of this cool down period, you’ll remain in a hyper activated state, and your panic will have to remain activated because the trauma won’t truly be over. This hyper activation often cycles you into panic attacks, which also contain a great deal of energy. This energy doesn’t exist to torment you, but to help you navigate through your flashbacks and reintegrate yourself. Panic attacks don’t occur without reason; they arise to help you confront your trauma (“What has been frozen in time?”), move through your replays any number of times, access new and different instincts and responses each time (“What healing action must be taken?”), and activate your body, your mind, your emotions, and your vision in service to your healing. It takes a great deal of energy to do this; panic and terror carry that much energy. 

When panic attacks or flashbacks arise, your psyche is signaling very clearly that it’s time to move to stage three [resolution of trauma], to replay the situation that separated you from the everyday world, to explore the stimuli that brought your terror forward, and to move through your traumatic memories in instinctive and empowering ways. But it’s hard to move at all—let alone move to stage three—when your terror and panic compel you to freeze and dissociate. It’s like being on fire and being trapped in a block of ice at the very same time. This kind of panic fills you with heat and energy, yet it forces you into completely frozen immobility, which doesn’t make any sense intellectually. However, when you can bring your fully resourced awareness to the situation, you can use your skills to honor both sides of panic. You can honor the enforced stillness by focusing yourself and sitting quietly, and you can honor the hyperactivated state by brightening your boundary intensely, grounding yourself strongly, and channeling the panic out of your body and into your vibrant and protected personal space.

Panic and terror bring forward enough energy to help you reintegrate after trauma. If you can stay grounded and shoot the rapids with their assistance, panic and terror will help you renegotiate your trauma, restore your instincts, and come back to life. But make no mistake—it’s an intense process. Panic can feel boiling hot and freezing cold, pains can come and go, screams can bubble up, and you may need to kick and yell or run around the room. When you come back from a deathlike experience and reintegrate yourself, you’ll need to tremble, shake, jerk, swear, kick, and fight—just like the animals in my childhood practice did when they returned to their bodies after being hit by cars or mauled by dogs. But then, when you’re back in one piece, your panic and terror will subside naturally—as they’re meant to—and you’ll have your life back. When you’re integrated, you’ll once again be able to move, think, dream, sleep, feel, laugh, and love—not because you’re perfect and unblemished, nor because you’ve erased all traces of trauma from your soul, but because you’re fully resourced and whole again.

Somatic experiencing: using interoception and proprioception as core elements of trauma therapy

The balance between associating with a traumatic experience, and thereby resolving it, and being flooded or overwhelmed by it, is so delicate. It needs to be done slowly and safely. Peter Levine uses the mythology of Medusa as an example of how to approach trauma safely. You never look her directly in the eye or she can turn you to stone (i.e. immobilise you), and the same goes for trauma, it does need to be 'faced', but safely. If we don't approach trauma safely, we run the risk of retraumatising ourselves and the proverbial black hole becomes bigger and more frightening.

I'd like to share an excerpt from an excellent article from Peter Payne, Peter Levine and Mardi Crane-Godreau below. As the article says "Yet Simon is correct: the trauma around the accident cannot and should not be avoided indefinitely". If we don't face our trauma, we also run the risk of being constantly triggered (and overwhelmed) which often, if not always, results in retraumatisation. Here is an excerpt of the article:

Despite my attempt to keep things slow, Simon slipped into the “trauma vortex”; the memory of getting into the car triggered an intense recollection of the accident accompanied by strong activation of the ANS and the rest of the CRN, and I had to act quickly to bring him back to the present so that his nervous system could regain its balance. In SE [somatic experiencing] one is walking the tightrope between not enough activation, in which case there is no discharge because there is no activation to discharge; and full-blown reactivation of the trauma memory, in which aspects of the trauma are relived and the person again experiences overwhelm. This can actually be harmful, and can compound the original trauma. Such a “dive” into the black hole, the “vortex of trauma,” involves a self-reinforcing positive feedback loop, in which the proprioceptive and interoceptive feedback (somatic markers Damasio et al., 1991, 1996) from the neurally encoded memory trace (engram), becomes a trigger for further activation (Liu et al., 2012); a runaway loop which can lead to extreme simultaneous activation of both sympathetic and parasympathetic (dorsal vagal) bringing about a dissociated state within seconds; see Figure 6. One of the tasks of SE is to interrupt this destructive loop. To this end, SE uses concurrent evocation of positive interoceptive experiences, which may help alter the valence of the disturbing memories (Quirin et al., 2011); this process has been demonstrated in rats (Redondo, 2014). Other aspects of the mechanism whereby SE prevents the traumatic positive feedback loop are discussed below as “biological completion.” Continue reading the article for free 

The myth of negative emotions

I'd like to share this post from Karla McLaren's blog. I think her work on emotions is crucially important because the more emotionally literate we are, the better the quality of our life and relationships. Being able to feel all of our emotions is true emotional freedom.

The Myth of Negative Emotions is of course related to the Myth of Positive Emotions 

In my work with emotions, I focus on the intelligence, gifts, and skills that every emotion brings to you. I don’t leave any emotions out, and I don’t treat any emotion as better or worse than any other. This unified and ecological approach to emotions treats all emotions as vital, irreplaceable aspects of your neurology, your cognition, your social skills, and your awareness.

I’ve discovered over the last four decades of study, research, and practice that emotions are central to everything we do, everything we think, everything we learn, and everything we are. 

Emotions evolved over millions of years to help us become socially successful primates, and every single one of them is vital to our functioning. We can’t leave any of them out if we want to live whole lives with all of our skills and all of our intelligence intact.

But sadly, leaving some emotions out and focusing too much attention on others is the essence of the emotional education most of us receive. Instead of learning how to work with the genius inside all of our emotions, we’re taught to suppress or run from the allegedly negative ones, and to overemphasize or attempt to imprison the allegedly positive ones. Read on

Being frozen in time

Being frozen in time is essentially what being traumatised means, regardless of what caused the trauma. It is absolutely useless to say to someone, get over it, the past is the past and all the other clichés that are bandied about which essentially just serve to shame a traumatised person that they haven't been able to 'get over it'. As Bessel van der Kolk says "trauma is not an issue of cognition, it's an issue of disordered biological systems". It is why talk therapy, by itself, just doesn't work as well as body based therapies (which include talking as one of their tools). Any effective trauma therapy needs to include the body, it's just ludicrous to leave the body out of the healing equation and mainstream psychiatry and psychology have done exactly that.

This is also why trauma is a uniquely personal and subjective experience. While there are horrific things that go on in this life, comparisons are odious and only serve to minimise and shame some people's experience if they haven't experienced what is supposedly an objective traumatic event, as defined by criterion A1 in the DSM's PTSD criteria (the only diagnosis for someone who has been traumatised, but a PTSD diagnosis does not go anywhere near covering the entire gamut of symptoms traumatised people experience, read more here).

Unfreezing what is frozen is how we resolve our traumas and there are many modalities that can do that. We just need to find the one that feels right for us, and that can change from time to time.