Legal exemptions for not wearing face masks in Ireland

Please watch this video by barrister, Tracey O'Mahony, on reasonable excuses you can legally avail of not to wear a mask in Ireland. You can download the forms she provides, under the video. You will not get this information from gov.ie, though they do give reasons why some people don't have to wear a mask. I'm sharing this because I believe that it can be very traumatic for some people to have to wear masks and also because I am an advocate for bodily sovereignty and medical freedom in all cases.

We can't hold our pain on our own

We can't hold our pain on our own. We need attunement, not just as babies, but all throughout our life. That need never goes away, nor should it.

Peter Levine says that trauma is what we hold inside in the absence of an empathetic witness. Maybe this is what really hurts us, having no one to hold us, no one who believes us, validates us and our experiences, nowhere to rest and be our self.

Self-regulation (the ability to soothe our self) is a myth, says Bonnie Badenoch and I agree with her. We always need co-regulation, even when we're on our own, we're drawing from a well of having been supported throughout our life and the warmth of knowing we have someone now. Hopefully we all have the fortune to have people in our life that can hold our emotional experiences with us, and if not we can work towards that. 

Robert Stolorow calls this a 'relational home'. He says, "Emotional experience is inseparable from the contexts of attunement and malattunement in which it is felt. Painful emotional experiences become enduringly traumatic in the absence of a relational home or context of human understanding within which they can be held and integrated".

Don't go it alone, reach out.

Where do you spend most of your time?

When we're living with unresolved trauma, we spend a lot of time around the middle and bottom part of the polyvagal ladder. We do this by necessity because there are internal threat(s) and/or external threat(s) which we need to avoid.

Internal threats usually involve us fighting difficult emotions, physical sensations. Not wanting to feel or go inside because it is too painful, and mobilising against our self as if we were the enemy. Being stuck in fight and flight takes a huge personal toll on our physical and mental health. When fighting or fleeing get too much for us, or they are not possible, we'll dissociate and check out.

We can circle in and out of flight, fight and shutdown for years if our traumatic experiences aren't healed. External threats are more difficult to resolve, there is something we can do about internalised threats, but we often have little control or agency over external threats such as oppression, sexism, racism, tyranny, police states, poverty, war and so on.

Ideally we'd all be living most, or all, of our life in the ventral vagal state; feeling safe, social, connected and engaged. We'd only need to flee, fight, or dissociate in extrenuous circumstances and with support and community, we'd return to feeling safe, supported and loved. It is crucially important for us to exercise agency over what we can in order to improve our health and resolve trauma. This involves learning to trust our self and finding what works for us.

To find out more about the polyvagal ladder, check out Deb Dana's website.

When you lose your body, you lose your self

Chapter 6 in the book, The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel van der Kolk is called: Losing Your Body, Losing Your Self. The excerpt below is from this chapter and illustrates the importance of our interoceptive sense and befriending our body.

"What is your brain doing when you have nothing on in particular on your mind? It turns out that you pay attention to yourself. The default state activates the brain areas that work together to create your sense of "self".

When Ruth [Lanius] looked at the scans of her normal subjects, she found activation of default state network (DSN) regions that previous researchers had described. I like to call this the Mohawk of self-awareness, the midline structures of the brain, starting out right above our eyes, running through the center of the brain all the way to the back. All these midline structures are involved in our sense of self. The largest bright region at the back of the brain is the posterior cingulate, which gives us a physical sense of where we are—our internal GPS. It is strongly connected to the medial prefrontal cortex (MPFC), the watchtower. It is also connected with brain areas that register sensations coming from the rest of the body: the insula, which relays messages from the viscera to the emotional centers; the parietal lobes, which integrate sensory information; and the anterior cingulate, which coordinates emotions and thinking. All of these areas contribute to consciousness.

The contrast with the scans of the eighteen chronic PTSD patients with severe early-life trauma was startling. There was almost no activation of any of the self-sensing areas of the brain … There could be only one explanation for such results. In response to the trauma itself, and in coping with the dread that persisted long afterward, these patients had learned to shut down the brain areas that transmit the visceral feelings and emotions that accompany and define terror. Yet in everyday life, those same brain areas are responsible for registering the entire range of emotions and sensations that form the foundation of our self-awareness, our sense of who we are. What we witnessed here was a tragic adaptation: In an effort to shut off terrifying sensations, they also deadened their capacity to feel fully alive".

How do I create safety?

I was asked the other day how I create safety in a session. And it was hard to answer off the cuff but it's a crucially important question and it got me thinking. Some of the obvious answers are being present, attuned, active listening and taking someone's experiences seriously. You would think that these therapeutic ingredients would be a given, but they are not.  As a client I have had many experiences with therapists/practitioners who didn't listen, were anything but attuned and even gave me a different treatment than what I had asked for and then acted like I shouldn't have complained! Needless to say, the foundations are essential.

But there are some intangibles to creating safety and feeling safe that I think are ineffable. Safety is felt, it isn't explained, we can't talk someone into feeling safe, we create the right conditions and ingredients and it is a continuous process. It's like a good parent, they use actions as well as soft soothing words to meet the needs of their baby and the baby then learns they can trust them and as a result they feel safe. They have 'evidence' for knowing they can feel safe and a client needs evidence too. You'll know whether you feel safe or not (or the possibility of growing safer), it is a case of trusting the answers your body gives you.

I think using intuition can create quantum leaps in therapeutic work, which again is about trust; this can also create more safety, as a client can feel more heard when you intuit what's going on or how they're feeling. The best container that I know of is an attuned relationship, and healthy containment helps us feel safe. I am not a fan of container exercises as the bodymind will do what it does and get triggered etc. between sessions. It can't "obey" instructions to keep difficult stuff in, that stuff wants to be heard and seen. Learning to be the container for difficult emotions and sensations, rather than looking outside for containers, that often don't work in my experience and can make someone feel inadequate or that they're doing it wrong, is much more empowering.

Attachment "disorders"

How is it that a baby who wanted and needed to attach ends up with a diagnosis of attachment "disorder" as an adult? We really need to stop describing trauma as a disorder and a mental illness.

Babies are not ambivalent, avoidant, insecure or disorganised by nature, it is lack of nurture that causes them to develop this way.

A baby can't attach to a moving, neglectful or abusive target. By moving I mean someone who isn't emotionally available. Emotional abuse and neglect doesn't get half the credence and weight they deserve. In addition, there is always emotional abuse alongside physical and sexual abuse.

However, there are always exceptions to every rule. There are some parents who, despite their own traumas, have made some sense of them, they might still have some unresolved issues (don't we all?), but they own them and take responsibility for working on them. They are not projecting their unlived life onto their child.

I don't believe the saying that you can't give what you never got, you can. You can break the cycle and love your baby the way you weren't loved.

We are not survival of the fittest. We are survival of the nurtured ~ Louis Cozolino

Walk your own path

This place where you are right now, God circled on a map for you ~ Hafiz

Some beautiful paths can't be discovered without getting lost ~ Erol Ozan

Does the walker choose the path, or the path the walker ~ Garth Nix

I honour every woman who has strength  enough to step out of the beaten path when she feels that her walk lies in another ~ Harriet Hosmer

Pursue some path, however narrow and crooked, in which you can walk with love and reverence ~ Henry David Thoreau

Traveller, there is no path. Paths are made by walking ~ Antonio Machado

Far better to live your own path imperfectly than to live another's perfectly ~ Bhagavad Gita

Tapping on implicit memories

If an implicit memory is triggered, the cause isn't always obvious because nothing might have happened to upset us. It can feel like these feelings and body sensations are coming out of the blue and this what we can find very frightening and confusing, because there is no obvious explanation for them.

This is because implicit memories are very early memories. Big feelings and body sensations can feel extremely frightening to a baby and child and when these feelings come up later we're left wondering what is happening. I often use a combination of EFT and pendulation which is from somatic experiencing, developed by Peter Levine. They work seamlessly together. Try tapping on:

Even though it feels like this memory came out of nowhere, I accept how I feel

Even though I don't understand where this is coming from, I accept how I feel

Even though this feeling/body sensations feels … I honour my feelings

Top of the head: I feel frightened
Eyebrow: Of ...
Side of eye: I don't understand where this ... is coming from
Under eye: I'll tap
Under nose: And breathe
Under chin: This is a really early feeling
Collar bone: That I just couldn't feel
Under arm: It was too big for me

Top of the head: Maybe I can feel some it now
Eyebrow: 10% (feel in to what feels right for you)
Side of eye: That feels ...
Under eye: That must have been so frightening for me
Under nose: No wonder it short circuited my nervous system
Under chin: Maybe it's coming up now so I can feel it
Collar bone: And calm and soothe little me
Under arm: S/he needs me

Top of the head: I can be there for me
Eyebrow: Slowly but surely
Side of eye: It's ok if I feel afraid too
Under eye: We understand how each other is feeling
Under nose: If I feel overwhelmed
Under chin: I can stop
Collar bone: Or find another place in my body that feels ok
Under arm: And move my attention

Top of the head: Between the two places
Eyebrow: 30 seconds with my knee
Side of eye: And 10 seconds with this awful feeling
Under eye: Back to my knee which feels neutral
Under nose: And I'll keep tapping
Under chin: And breathing
Collar bone: Until I feel calmer
Under arm: That feels ...