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.

You belong here

Read full poem here

You belong here. Even if you don’t believe you do. Even if you don’t feel worthy or deserving of belonging, you do belong. Even if you think you are a mistake or were told you are. It is not true. You belong here simply because you are here. Life wanted you here. The truth that you belong might take a while to sink into your cells. It’s your birthright as Andy Harkin says in the video below.

Tap on whatever point(s) feel right and say whatever you feel in response to belonging. Some suggestions below are:

I belong here
This is my home (your body, the earth, whatever feels right)
I stand upon the earth, which is my home
I feel my feet on the ground
Connecting me to my home
I feel my body standing firmly on the earth
I am coming home to my body too
Life wants me here
I belong
My body belongs to me
I belong to my body
Which is my home in this life
My home standing upon a bigger home
Which houses all of us
We all belong here

"Here I stand, on this earth, I belong here".