If you haven’t read one of my plural blog-posts before and aren’t sure who these people are, feel free to check out my Plural Selves zine, and my previous post about plurality. But hopefully you don’t need to get that part in order to find the content here useful.

James: Hey again Ara.

Ara: Hey James. So good to talk with you again so soon.

James: I thought about writing this as a regular post, but I realised I could really do with somebody to bounce off: to ask me questions to help me clarify my thoughts.

Ara: I’d love to do that. I’m aware that in our last post together you asked me a lot of questions. It feels good to balance that dynamic by doing it the other way around.

James: Mm like you are more of the expert around feelings and embodiment, but perhaps I have the expertise on this more intellectual piece: weaving the various theories together.

Ara: I like that.

James: I also feel like I need you as a kind of anchor. I feel so excited about the puzzle pieces that seem to be slotting together here. I want to zoom off in a hundred different directions at once.

Ara: How can I help to ground you?

James: Remind me to breathe, to slow down, I don’t have to do it all at once. You could ask me questions to lead me through one step at a time. Are you up for that?

Ara: Absolutely. Want to breathe before we start?

James: Sure *laughs* *breathes*

Overview

Ara: Okay. Can you start by giving us an overview of the terrain you want to cover in this piece? If the terms we use here are unfamiliar to people, we’ll define them in the next section.

James: Absolutely. It’s something I’ve been building to ever since I did that Bowlby Centre event last month which I wrote up here, about attachment theory. My sense is that perhaps everyone contains all of the different attachment styles – or at least the capacity for them – within themselves. Rather than aiming at some kind of static secure attachment, perhaps there’s more value in getting to know all our different attachment potentials very well. Maybe that even is the way that we get to ‘earned secure attachment’.

Ara: A kind of paradox? We’ve tried to get to ‘secure attachment’ by getting away from ‘insecure’ attachment styles, but perhaps the way to get there is through them, not away from them?

James: Precisely. And there’s this sense that it also maps onto emotions and the ‘window of tolerance’. The only way to expand the window of tolerance and get to a place where you can be with all emotional states is through experiencing (tough) emotions, not by trying to avoid them or get away from them.

Ara: So that’s attachment and emotion, what about plural parts work?

James: We’ve reached these conclusions by getting to know all of the parts of us deeply. I’m suggesting that we can do this work by befriending the three parts of us who map on to the three ‘insecure’ attachment styles, and the emotions that they hold. That’s the way to both earned secure attachment and an expanded window of tolerance.

Ara: Wonderful. So you can explain to us how we now understand our parts having operated together in the ‘old’ system, that we had our whole life. And you can describe how we’re working with them now to reconfigure the system towards more secure attachments in our inner and outer relationships, and towards an expanded window of tolerance. How am I doing?

James: This is really helpful, thankyou Ara. 

Ara: Another breath before we continue?

James: Mm. *breathes*

The faux window of tolerance, faux secure attachment, and faux parts

Ara: So one thing that we read which helped you click together on all of this was the concept of the faux window of tolerance in Kathy L. Kain and Stephen J. Terrell’s book ‘Nurturing Resilience’. Do you want to explain that, and how it relates to attachment?

James: That’s a great place to start, yes. So Kathy and Stephen explain that many, if not most, people develop a ‘faux window of tolerance’ when they’re growing up, in order to handle intense emotions. The window of tolerance is Daniel Siegal’s term for the space in which we can be present with – and regulate – our emotions, rather than being overwhelmed by them. 

Growing up if our caregivers and others can meet us in various emotional states and help us to know that they are okay, understandable, and manageable, then we will develop that window of tolerance. We’ll learn in those early relationships that those feelings are okay, and we’ll learn from experience with others what we can do to soothe ourselves when feelings are really intense. We’ll end up with a nice wide space in which we can welcome a variety of different feelings at different intensities.

Ara: So that’s how it relates to secure attachment? The window of tolerance is developed within secure relationships?

James: Right, a secure attachment refers to that kind of nurturing relationship where we have a ‘secure base’ or ‘safe haven’ to return to when emotions are unfamiliar or overwhelming. As a child, if we learn that we can return there and be welcomed, understood, soothed, have our needs met, then we’ll be more and more able to extend out from that base to explore our world with openness, curiosity, and creativity. We‘ll have more of a sense that we can tolerate any tough experiences and regulate our own emotions, as well as a strong sense of trust in that base we can return to if it gets too hard.

Later in life that would translate into building strong, secure relationships with other people in our lives – friends, partners, mentors, communities, etc. – so that we still have a place to return where people can help us coregulate around the tough feelings, where we can express our needs and have them met, and so on.

Ara: So what’s the ‘faux window of tolerance’.

James: Most of us carry some degree of developmental trauma: a sense of key relationships not being very secure and of not all emotions – or all intensities of emotion – being tolerated and regulated by those around us. Kathy and Stephen suggest that what therapists call ‘defences’ are what we develop in order to have a ‘faux window of tolerance’: the impression that we are tolerating our emotional states, but really we’re defending against them.

Ara: That resonated for us.

James: So much. This last year or two we’ve often wondered how we’ve done so seemingly okay in life despite clearly carrying so much developmental trauma, such that we’ve been plunged into intense trauma periods and overwhelming emotion several times over the years. The idea of a ‘faux window of tolerance’ makes so much sense. It might have looked like we were handling difficult experiences and the emotions they brought up pretty well, but really it was more that we were adept at various defences, or survival strategies, to avoid or sidestep them.

Ara: I think that fits well with what we discussed last time about emotions James. The sense that we thought we were pretty good at ‘staying with feelings’ but have lately realised that there were several vital emotions that we were barely feeling at all.

James: Exactly. So what we were generally doing was repressing feelings, or reacting out of survival strategies in ways which made the difficult experience and/or feelings go away. Part of why the last year or two have been so intense is that we’ve finally been feeling many of the feelings – and the experiences they resulted from – which we hadn’t allowed ourselves to feel along the way.

Ara: And you think it may be useful to conceptualise this as a ‘faux secure attachment’ as well as a ‘faux window of tolerance’?

James: I do. We – and I suspect many, many people – were able to do a pretty good impression of functioning in the world, and relating with ourselves and others, for much of the time because we’d developed pretty remarkable defences and survival strategies. However, the ‘faux-ness’ became apparent any time something retraumatising happened – beyond the capacity of the defences and survival strategies to cope with – which put us into periods of intense PTSD where the feelings were terrifying and overwhelming and we couldn’t function. 

The ‘faux-ness’ was also revealed in most of our close relationships because eventually it became apparent that we – and the other person – weren’t really securely attached – in ourselves or with each other – and the relationship ended. Maybe they became more insecure and needy over time and we had to get away, or vice versa, or the level of conflict became unbearable to us. Often it was revealed how much we’d been shaping ourselves to fit that person, and how much we’d lost ourselves in the process, and we finally began to struggle with that.

Ara: I notice that I feel some resistance to the word ‘faux’ here.

James: Me too. It does feel rather harsh and judgemental, and there’s also a sense in it of having been a ‘false self’ covering up a ‘real self’ which is something that I would question.

Ara: Being seven selves all of whom are a work in progress definitely raises questions around any sense of a real ‘authentic’ self!

James: It does indeed.

Faux selves?

Ara: Do you want to say how all this relates to plurality?

James: Well, if we were to use those terms, we would say that we developed a ‘faux part’ – Max – who was to the fore for most of our life. She was the one who formed that ‘faux window of tolerance’ and who formed those ‘faux secure attachments’. She would likely have looked pretty happy and successful from the outside, except for the few times – when traumatic things happened and/or relationships ended – when it became very hard for her to maintain that facade.

Ara: We find it so interesting that we chose the name ‘Max’ for her, given that it sounds a lot like ‘mask’, which is kind of what she was.

James: And her survival strategies were to dissociate a lot, not that she realised that at the time. Throwing herself into work, and into helping others, both enabled her to keep our own intense feelings, and traumatised parts, very disowned and buried. Busy-ness and distraction was her main ‘faux window of tolerance’. Focusing on becoming something for others – rather than bringing herself openly and vulnerably to relationships – was her main ‘faux secure attachment’.

Ara: And this is why we don’t love ‘faux’ for her, although it is accurate in a way, because these survivor parts – in all of us – are something we should be deeply grateful for, and celebrate, not dismiss as ‘false’ or flawed.

James: Agreed. We simply wouldn’t be here now were it not for Max. She protected the other parts of us through some truly horrific early – and later – experiences. And she kept searching for answers to all of the tough stuff that we encountered with our mental health, and in our relationships, and that she saw others around us struggling with too. Ironically if she hadn’t had the survival strategies of workaholism, and trying to help others, we would not now have this huge foundation of knowledge and writing to build upon. 

Ara: We can feel deep gratitude to Max, and huge grief for what she had to go through. One image of her is of the ‘parentified child’: an inner child or teenager who has to act like an inner parent in order to survive and look after the other parts of the inner system who are even more vulnerable. It’s rather like the way a big sibling might have to look after the other kids in a family where parents are struggling, or unable to handle tough experiences and emotions.

James: How it feels at the moment is that we have finally freed Max of that burden and she is off walking in the hills alone somewhere.

Ara: Mm I always think of her when I read the Mary Oliver poem, The Journey. By finding/developing our own inner parents – you and me James – and by working with our three traumatised child parts directly, we have liberated Max.

James: Which brings us on to those parts and how they function in terms of attachment.

Insecurely attached parts under the faux secure attachment

Ara: Go for it James.

James: Right, so this is the idea that all of us have all of the attachment styles present within us. Parts work gives us a nice easy way of working with this. Our experience is that we literally have members of our plural system who map on to each of the forms of insecure attachment.

Ara: I sense a table coming on!

James: How did you guess?

Ara: A lot to unpack there James. How about getting a drink before we start?

James: Hot chocolate?

Ara: You read my mind.

James: I was going to say that’s not so hard when it’s the same mind, but given how poorly parts of us knew each other in the past perhaps I can’t say that.

Ara: We’re getting to know each other better and better now thankfully. Also I feel like we both do and don’t share the same bodymind, given how differently each of us think, feel, and inhabit our body, but perhaps that’s one for another blog post!

…

James: Okay then. So to explain the table. We’ve introduced these four ‘traumatised parts’ before in various places, although our understanding of them – and how they fit together – has definitely clarified over the past year. Mapping onto attachment theory we’d now say that Tony was our anxious-preoccupied part: needy, clingy and desperate for connection. Morgan – who we used to call Beastie – is dismissive avoidant: struggling to trust others and pushing them away. And Jonathan is fearful avoidant: terrified of that other people will hurt or shame him.

Ara: And the ‘okay’ bit of the table?

James: Transactional analysis is another therapeutic approach which seems to map fairly well onto attachment theory. The anxious-preoccupied part – Tony – believes that other people are okay, but he’s not, so he craves others’ love, approval, and attention, and he fears their disapproval, dismissal, and disgust. The dismissive avoidant part believes that she is okay but other people are not, so she tends to blame others and push them away. And the fearful avoidant part believes that he isn’t okay and neither are other people, hence Jonathan’s fear/shame trauma response: other people are dangerous and he is wrong and unacceptable.

Ara: But most of our life these three parts have been disowned?

James: Precisely, which does not mean they haven’t had an impact. Now we understand it that Max was constantly responding to others’ demands inside and out. On the inside she was constantly getting, often rather desperate, messages from Tony, Morgan and Jonathan, about what they needed. She tried her best to balance and meet those needs. On the outside she was very tuned into what other people wanted of her and tried to balance and meet those demands. No wonder she’s off in the hills these days taking a well-earned break!

Ara: So dismantling Max’s defences and setting her free, as we did last year, left us with a much clearer sense of the other three traumatised parts. They have been gradually revealing themselves more and more as they’ve come to trust us. They’re gradually feeling more securely attached to us, and to other people, and they’re gradually sensing that their feelings have a more expanded window of tolerance to be held in.

James: Nicely put. What just clicked with me this morning is that not only did Max have her set of defences – or survival strategies – that covered over the others, but each of the ‘insecure’ parts also have a set of defences that we need to get underneath in order for them to show themselves fully and to feel all their feelings.

Ara: This is so exciting, and it makes so much sense. Do you want to take me through it?

James: Please. The thing that struck me was about Tony initially. He didn’t seem to make sense. On the one hand we experience him as this cocky, hot, humorous part of us: very extrovert and craving connection with others. On the other hand we know that he holds the Deep Yearning of the Soul (). When he does feel his feelings they are often feelings of unquenchable thirst, desperate need, and longing. So how can this seemingly confident part also be the part who feels that he isn’t okay and will be abandoned by others?

But with this sense of defences it all makes sense. If Tony is driven by not wanting to feel the traumatic level of neediness and loneliness that he holds then it makes all kinds of sense that he would fling himself into connections by coming over as charming, sexy, funny and so on.

Ara: Mm yes. As he and I recently discussed, tragically that often fetches him up with just the kind of rejection and loss of belonging that he deeply fears. But it does make all kinds of sense as a defence, just like Max dissociating from recognising just how trapped she’s been in work and relationships. What about Morgan?

James: Again initially confusing. The part of us who holds anger, even hatred, towards others has manifested our whole life as the inner critic, turning that anger and hatred inwards. But if you look at it from the defence perspective that, like Tony, Morgan was disowned all our life, then it makes sense.

Ara: So growing up we learnt that we must never be needy and desperate as Tony can be, or rageful and resentful at others, as Morgan can be. So both of them defended by becoming the opposite – when they were allowed out at all. 

James: Tony faked confidence and made light of his pain, Morgan turned anger in against us rather than ever allowing herself to feel it towards others.

Ara: And our chalkboard boy Jonathan did something similar.

James: I think so. Deep down he holds that incredibly vulnerable fear and shame, and it wasn’t acceptable to admit to those things. So he became the people pleaser who pretended to be fine – in order to keep others happy – and who hypervigilantly figured out what others wanted from him and tried to give it to them.

Ara: Expanding out from our particular experience, do you think there’s something for other people in all this?

James: I suspect so. It probably manifests very differently for different people, but it would be worth everyone exploring what their ‘faux secure’ part looks like, and whether they also have all three ‘insecure’ parts in them somewhere. How do those three influence the whole system? How do they impact how they relate with other people? How repressed or available are they?  What are their defensive behaviours and what are those covering up?

Ara: You’ve done a great job at overviewing the theory, and how it applies to us, here James. I’m wondering if we might dig into practice a little more now?

James: I’d love to. What did you have in mind?

Ara: I’d like to reflect more on how we’re working with this internally and externally. How are we building that ‘earned secure attachment’ with each of the ‘insecure’ parts, and how are we bringing awareness of the three different ‘insecure’ styles into our current relationships? 

We’ve had this radical sense lately that strong relationships are not ones in which we’re just securely attached, but rather the ones in which we can honestly and kindly recognise all the different attachments in play.

James: Yes! 

Ara: A little stretch first?

James: Also yes.

…

Working with insecure parts internally

Ara: We covered some of this territory in our last post James, about how we’re working to help each part to expand their window of tolerance and feel their feelings safely enough, which is also how we’re building our earned secure attachment with each of them.

James: You’re doing the big space ‘drop the storyline and feel the feeling’ work with them, and I’m trying to hold them close, love them and hear them when they’re struggling. We’re also checking in with the ‘insecure three’ at least twice a day to see where they’re at with everything. Because they’re so used to hiding themselves and their feeling, it’s important to keep encouraging them to deliberately tune in and share where they’re at.

Ara: So what else do we need to say here?

James: I guess the new piece is recognising those defences that each of those three holds. Perhaps it feels obvious to go to Tony when we feel yearning, Morgan when we feel anger, and Jonathan when we feel fear, to help them really feel it and be held and heard in it. But there’s now this extra piece of recognising that we need to go to them at least as much if Tony is pinning that yearning onto somebody else or falling into over-excited connection or fantasy, if Morgan is going into inner critic anger-inward type noise, or if Jonathan is chalkboarding.

Ara: Those experiences often feel more dissociated – now that we understand what that means. It often doesn’t feel so apparent that there is a feeling present. There may not be clarity around which part of us is doing their thing, or what has triggered them. There’s just a general sense of unease, confusion, or of being a bit scattered or vague.

James: That’s right. I think we got it first with Jonathan because we clearly identified him with hypervigilance and chalkboarding. Last year whenever we found our brain going over and over things in that familiar way, I would go to Jonathan and encourage him to go closer to the ‘traumado’ of fear/shame feelings instead of desperately trying to solve impossible equations. It had to be very slow and gradual, but eventually we could sit together in the eye of the storm and let it swirl around us, finding a way to settle him there instead of trying to figure everything out which usually made it worse and worse.

Ara: And lately we’ve taken any – even fleeting – ‘noisy’ anger in/out thoughts as an opportunity to go to Morgan and encourage her to sit with her feelings of anger. Tony can be very dissociated, but again we’ve been noticing the kind of thing that’s likely to make him feel rejected or lonely when it happens, and encouraging him to drop down into the yearning feeling, with one of us holding him through it.

James: From a trauma-informed perspective it has to be gradual doesn’t it? Feeling the feelings in the times when it feels possible to do so, gradually expanding the window of tolerance so more and more of it is possible to feel. Slowly these parts can drop the defences more and more, creating a ‘secure base’ of more gentle time with us every day to return to. And very gradually they can share those feelings with trusted others too.

Ara: More on that in a moment. Anything else to say on the inner work?

James: One thing is how each part’s go-to fantasies helped us to understand their resistance, as well as the feelings they covered up. There’s a lot more to write about how we us our erotic imagination for such exploration. We sketched out some of it in this zine with Justin. 

Lately we noticed that Jonathan, Tony, and Morgan kept going towards a fantasy where they were welcomed into a home with me. But the way that fantasy played out was very different for each of them. With Jonathan it was about being in a terrifying situation, rescued by me, and taken somewhere safe where he had a lot of time to recover before having to do anything else. With Tony it was about coming to live with me but being convinced that he would mess up and be sent away. He kept acting out until he could admit those feelings and believe my reassurance. With Morgan she came to me very reluctantly. She kept wanting to fight me and walk away, struggling to trust me to really be up for being with her rage.

Ara: So fascinating how those fantasies – and many of the dreams we’ve had too – echo the processes we’re going through in our outer life. Anything else?

James: I guess that the process feels reciprocal. The more the ‘insecure’ parts learn to trust us, the more of the previously disowned ‘unacceptable’ feelings they can bring. And the more they bring those feelings, the more trust is built. Welcoming them in those feelings seems to help all of them to become more real, more fully fleshed out. That is partly why Morgan wanted a ‘real name’ rather than being called ‘Beastie’ which felt like a caricature. 

But on the way towards that more ‘secure’ attachment with us they often balk at it. They try to resist those feelings, like they can’t really believe it’s really okay to say that they hate somebody – or us (Morgan), or to beg not to be left (Tony).

Ara: Mm which is perhaps why they have to practise in fantasy before they’re able to do that in reality. We’ve described it as encouraging them to bring the whole palette of feelings, not just the not palatable elements of themselves.

James: We like a bit of word play don’t we? 

We also find it useful to notice which old experiences keep returning to our mind, and which current ones. With old experiences we can ask where each part of us is at with those. Often it seems that one of them needs to return to that memory and to complete it somehow – by really feeling it, or by saying how they wish they’d been able to respond, for example, if they’d been more available back then. You and I can hold and hear them through that process, instead of our old pattern of despairing that we kept churning round and round old memories. 

With current experiences it’s similarly important for all of them – or the one who is particularly struggling – to be heard and heeded. For example recently we deeply listened to Morgan’s angry response to how someone treated us and found a response that sat well with her. After that she felt a lot more welcome and ‘at home’ in us.

Ara: It’s not about directly reacting to any ‘insecure’ impulse they might have, as Max might once have done. Rather it’s about engaging in conversation, taking them very seriously, and thinking together how we might respond – giving ourselves a lot of time around it.

James: Right, so instead of Tony leaping into a connection with someone the minute he feels drawn to them, we can notice that feeling and consider how we might move cautiously towards that connection, or whether it’s really speaking to a general desire for more contact, or to be looked after internally. Instead of Morgan deciding never to engage with somebody again we can investigate what she’s responding to negatively in them, and what might be a safe-enough, boundaried way of relating with that person, given what they bring up in her.

Ara: I’m thinking that all these ways of being with them are about demonstrating how loved and respected they are.

James: Which is very easy to do. It’s when parts or feelings are hidden that they feel murky or threatening or hard to love. Brought to the surface and into the light they become far easier to love and understand.

Ara: Which brings us onto the final part because I suspect the same is true in relationships with others. When parts of us – and their feelings – are hidden and murky, others may well respond to us with aversion, or by trying to grasp onto the more appealing defensive versions of us. When it’s all available – and clear – to ourselves and others, we stand a better chance of having mutually nourishing, open, relationships.

James: Right. But so hard for the parts of us who have survived for years by employing those defences to believe that.

Bringing all our parts into relationships

Ara: So let’s explore this. How is it useful to bring the ‘insecure’ parts into relationship with others? I can imagine people thinking that doesn’t make much sense. Surely the last thing we want to do is to relate with others in an insecure way?

James: Mm well part of it is that Pete Walker bit we find so useful: reparenting ourselves and reparenting by committee. We can’t do all this work alone because humans are relational, interconnected and interdependent. There’s only so far we can get as an individual (albeit an individual who is also seven people!)

Ara: There’s only so far our inner relationships can take us.

James: Right. I’m thinking that therapy is like an in-between between the inner work and the work of relating to the people in our life. We can gradually bring our ‘insecure’ parts into the therapeutic relationship in order to notice how they relate with another person, and to experience a different response to the damaging ones they’ve received in the past.

Ara: It often feels like that doesn’t it? That me, you or Fox is taking Morgan, Jonathan or Tony to therapy to give them an hour of practicing doing this with another person.

James: Right, they practise with us at home, and with our therapist in that room. Doing similar things. Like the therapist will point out their defences and encourage them to drop into their body, communicate how they’re feeling, etc. They can practise revealing the things that they assume other people will reject in them – because that’s what’s happened in the past – and experience somebody just being okay with them.

Ara: Maybe a couple of examples?

James: Well like whenever Morgan allows herself to talk about what she’d really like to say to somebody who has treated us badly, our therapist clearly enjoys her energy and her capacity to see through people’s bullshit and protect us. And Tony is gradually feeling safe enough that if he shows up in therapy with the energy that he’s scared will be ‘too much’ for people, she’ll help him to stay grounded. She’ll be up for seeing the vulnerability he’s covering over, while encouraging him to go slowly instead of revealing ‘too far too fast’ as he has in the past.

Ara: And you’re thinking that this kind of therapy is a bridge to bringing those parts into more open relation with others?

James: I think that’s where discernment comes in perhaps. Who is it safe enough to openly engage with from those parts? Who might we be able to speak about these parts with, without actually bringing them out? What situations might we want to be cautious around, perhaps only bringing you or me to Ara, at least while this is all so new?

Ara: I’m thinking that maps nicely onto what Tony and I wrote about Dunbar’s number too. Discerning where a relationship is at, in our life, and what that means in terms of how open and vulnerable we’re able to be in it.

James: Heh our computer just told us it was ‘establishing secure connection’. I thought, ‘you and me both mate’!

Ara: *laughs*

James: What were we saying? Oh yeah. So we’re finding it hugely useful to recognise that Morgan, Tony, and Jonathan are already engaged in all our relationships – of course. And now we continually check in where they’re at with them. There’s a sense that, instead of denying that we feel any anger, yearning, or fear towards the people in our life, perhaps it’s more useful to assume that we will feel all of those things – to some extent – in all our relationships, and to name that – to ourselves, and even with that person.

Ara: Absolutely. There’s this paradoxical sense that the more we can allow all of that, the better we’ll be able  to love that person.

James: The more we know how we hate them, fear them, and want something from them, the better the relationship will be! It is surprising indeed, but it’s true. We’ve navigated recent potentially tricky moments in relationships much better, I think, being able to name to ourselves what those attachments – or potential attachments – are with that person.

Ara: Again an example?

James: Well with one friend we noticed how Tony wanted to fling himself into closer relationship with them, while Morgan had flickers of anger that perhaps they weren’t being mindful enough of how vulnerable we are. With another we noticed Tony wishing for more time with them, and Morgan wanting to dismiss them for not making more time for us. 

Those two things happened with friends who we talk about this stuff with all the time so we could name it, and they could reciprocate naming the multiple different parts of them in play. It makes it much easier to be able to say ‘this part of me feels…’ because there’s no blame in it. Not ‘you’re treating us badly’ but ‘I notice that part of me longs for more time with you and another part of me wants to distance from you because we’re not getting it. Can we talk about how we might do time together in future so those parts can have a bit more clarity about where we’re at?’ 

Ara: Mm that’s a good example because it turned out that it wasn’t that we really wanted lots more from them, or to reject them, we just wanted to understand where they were at more clearly, and what we could expect from them.

James: Discernment is important in knowing who will be up for those kinds of conversations and who won’t. Sometimes it’s more of an implicit sense – once we’ve named it all to ourselves – that we need to pull back a bit from this person, or to have a different kind of conversation, perhaps just from one of us Ara.

Ara: Yes, in the deepest relationships we might encourage Tony, Jonathan or Morgan to have the conversation directly, in order to experience that part of us being met well. In less close ones we could report on where our parts are at. In even less close relationships – like a professional exchange – we would talk from one of us as if we were a unified ‘I’, once we’d come up with our boundary, or request, or whatever it was. It feels important to have at least some relationships where all parts of us are welcome, just as we welcome them within ourselves.

James: I think we’re nearly there with this piece Ara.

Ara: One more breath to feel whether there’s anything more to add?

James: *breathes* Okay yes I want to say that it’s important to give these processes a lot of time. That’s why slow, spacious relationships are so essential for us at the moment. Often we need time to notice that an exchange with somebody has brought some of those ‘insecure’ feelings up in us, to find the part – or multiple parts – in us who are triggered, to fully drop into what they are feeling, and then to consider together what kind of response, if any, is necessary. We tend to keep ongoing notes on our phone about each of the current situations in play, and keep returning to them over days, or even weeks, until we have a clear sense of the appropriate response.

Ara: Mm right, and not jumping too quickly to that last stage is so important. As we’ve said, it might be that the feeling just needs to be held and heard inwardly, or that some kind of communication or clarification is important, or that we need the relationship to shift in some way. We often can’t tell which it is till we’ve had time to go through the whole process. And the more we do this – giving it time, and asking that other people give us time – the more those parts of us relax into the process instead of freaking out and trying to solve it immediately.

James: Criticism and conflict are a particular challenge of course. Morgan, Jonathan, and Tony would reactively go into a blame, shame, or tame response – respectively.

Ara: I like that. Blame the other, collapse in shame, or tame the situation by glossing over it or making it okay for the other person without attending to our needs. But taking time, as a team, helps us find more of an ‘I’m okay, you’re okay’ response, where we value ourselves and the others involved equally.

James: This whole thing also helps us to see much more clearly when we’re on the receiving end of other peoples’ reactivity: when they are foregrounding their equivalent of Morgan, Tony, or Jonathan – or their Max cover up. We’re not there yet of course, but there’s a strong sense of building compassion for others – even when they do react against us – because we’re so familiar with those parts of ourselves, and we know the incredibly tough feelings – and the painful experiences – that they come from. On the way to that compassion, though, we need to fully feel our attractions and aversions to those things in other people.

Ara: The sense I’m left with is that ‘earned secure attachment’ requires us to hold – and even share – all of our ‘insecure attachments’. Without that it would just be ‘faux secure attachment’ again.

James: Which meshes nicely with Bonnie Badenoch’s ‘radical inclusivity’, Janina Fisher’s ‘no part gets left behind’ and Richard Schwartz’s ‘no bad parts’. The answer is never to try to eradicate any part, or the less palatable elements of any part. The answer is to welcome them all fully, reach an inner secure attachment with them, and bring them all to all of our experiences in a safe-enough, secure-enough way.

Ara: Nicely put James.

James: Thank-you. And thank-you for doing this Ara. I’ve loved it, and your reminders to pause have definitely helped me both to enjoy the process throughout, and to not stray into the unwieldy lengths of some of our blog posts.

Ara: Mm there’s definitely more to be said about applying this same approach to our relationship with work James, but not for now. Let’s keep it a succinct little piece (for us!) at under 7000 words. Time for a walk *smiles*

More on this:

For more exploration of these themes check out our recent pieces on attachment, slow relating, and big feels and the other work on trauma and plurality on this website.

Patreon link: If you enjoyed this please feel free to support my free writing on Patreon.

Plural tag: This post was by James and Ara.

The post Attachment, emotion and plural parts work appeared first on Rewriting The Rules.

If you haven’t read one of my plural blog-posts before and aren’t sure who these people are, feel free to check out my Plural Selves zine, and my previous post about plurality. But hopefully you don’t need to get that part in order to find the content here useful.

Staying with the Big Feels Theory

James: Hey Ara, a first time for us I think.

Ara: The inner parents blogging together at last.

James: That’s one way to see us. I’m increasingly preferring ‘containing parts’ to ‘parents’ though. For one, we have three such parts rather than two, and for another I’m pretty sure Beastie would question a hierarchical parent/child model, or a normative internal nuclear family model, as a useful basis for anything.

Ara: I imagine she would. In your previous posts with her she pointed out that all parts of us are capable of containing others at times, and all parts struggle at times. That’s important. However there is a sense in us that we have four parts who hold a lot of trauma from our past, and who have been running the show for much of our life – whether more foregrounded or more in the background. That’s Max, Tony, Beastie and Jonathan. Now we also have access to three parts – you, me and Fox – who feel less impacted by the past, and more able to care for, and protect, the others in the present.

James: I think that you and I are still finding our way too: to who we can be in our inner and outer world. Perhaps that’s another blog post. In this one we want to focus on staying with intense emotions.

Ara: We wanted to write this one together because we have been the parts who have done most of the work of containing the other parts through such feelings over the last six months or so – since we last wrote the previous plural blog posts.

James: This is an update on what’s happened during that period, in a way.

Ara: What we’ve learnt during that time. 

All The Feels

James: Let’s start with what happened last August: it feels pivotal.

Ara: Good plan.

James: It amuses us now – when we can take a big perspective on it – that we wrote that Staying with Feelings zine back in 2016. Back then we thought we had a pretty good handle on being up for feeling our difficult emotions – and some great practices for doing so – which we shared in that zine. We had no idea what was coming!

Ara: Everything that we put in that zine still holds though. I don’t want to dismiss how well that version of us back then – mostly Max – was doing: finding ways to stay with feelings at all. And in many ways what we’ve done this past few months builds on the basic ideas in that zine.

1. The evidence is clear that people do best – in terms of mental and physical health – when they can tune into their bodies and feel their feelings, and live their lives on the basis of that self-awareness: expressing their needs, desires, boundaries, and so on.
2. Most of us struggle to do this because our culture discourages any experience or expression of emotions, particularly ‘negative feelings’, and because traumatic experiences growing up give us the message that such feelings are unsafe to express, or even to feel.
3. In order to address this, we can learn practices – like focusing and forms of meditation – which explicitly involve tuning into our feelings, welcoming them, and learning what they have to tell us.

James: This hits very personally for us. Pretty much everybody receives the message  – from the world around them, and in close relationships – that certain feelings aren’t acceptable. But for us – growing up in the 70s – we received specific behavioural training from teachers and caregivers to try to condition us out of crying. There was a strong sense that it was vital to control your emotions and to disallow the ‘difficult’ ones. The message that sadness, fear, and anger, in particular, were unacceptable was very strong. We wrote about that in the emotions chapter of Life Isn’t Binary.

Ara: That’s why we ‘re so grateful for the Pixar movie Inside Out. It shows vividly what happens to a person when there’s an attempt to eradicate any of their core emotions. They become unbalanced when only certain emotions run the show, and eventually end up numb and grey with little access to feelings at all. 

There’s a sense of an inauthentic version of yourself operating in order to survive in a world where it doesn’t feel safe to show how you really feel; to the point that you don’t even know that there is more to you than that, or that those emotions still exist inside you somewhere.

James: We still can’t handle the scene when goofball island collapses.

Ara: In many ways you could see our process in the last few years as one of welcoming back in those core feelings – and the parts who hold them – and beginning to reshape our inner landscape with all present, and working together as a team.

James: Return to goofball island!

Ara: We feel that sometimes for sure. But we were going to start with last August…

James: Right, so I think that prior to that we had thought that we were pretty good at staying with the feelings. But in 2019 things fell apart for us – bringing us back up against a lot of the most painful times of our life which I think we hadn’t really felt at the time. Pandemic saw us locked in with all of those memories, and gradually the really big feels returned.

Ara: I see it in two ways simultaneously James. 

James: Of course you do, you’re all about the non-binary thinking *smiles*

Ara: We can tell the trauma story where we went through a series of events so confronting that we finally had to feel all of the times in our life which those events re-awoke in us. We can also tell a healing story where we were on a journey – for the last few years up till now – towards greater self awareness, more embodied practices, and sharing more vulnerably in relationships. 

It feels like it was both simultaneously. Deliberately opening up space enabled us to feel what happened to us more deeply. Feeling it so deeply enabled us to finally make those connections through the events of our life and to learn how to welcome the various parts of us – and their feelings – more fully.

James: It’s like our experience of the lockdown, that bothness. Was pandemic the final retraumatising experience that cracked the whole thing open, or was it the situation which gave us the space and solitude we needed to finally do this work? Probably both.

Ara: So to August.

James: In August we found ourselves in the grip of one of our regular bouts of post-viral chronic fatigue. It was one of the hottest weeks of the year and we were experiencing pain throughout our body, exhaustion, fever, vertigo… Somehow it felt like the final straw and suddenly all four traumatised parts of us were feeling their feelings turned up to eleven, as if our whole life finally caught up with them. It was a lot to hold. It honestly felt like we were two parents – also with sick bodies! – trying to juggle four sick screaming children during a heatwave.

Ara: And again with the bothness. Before that point we had not had a consistent sense of our presence had we James: you and me I mean?

James: Since then there hasn’t been a single time where we haven’t been accessible to the rest of them when they’ve needed us, and we are a lot more present in our everyday life. Like much of the day it feels like one of us is around, generally with one of the others either getting on with life, or caring for them.

Ara: It’s as if that week demanded us to come forward more fully because the need was finally clear. Or was it that we’d finally brought us forward enough that all parts of us finally felt able to express those long-hidden feelings? 

James: Mm I hadn’t seen it that way before.

Separating out the feels

Ara: Shall we talk about separating out the feelings next?

James: Sure, because one reason that week was so challenging was that they were feeling the feelings of our various parts all mixed together. It was really confusing. Back then we weren’t completely clear on who felt what, so we were working with a huge tangled mass of emotion, and it was loud!

Ara: This is one reason that parts work is so valuable. The more fully that we can get to know the individual parts of us, the more quickly we can locate a feeling in the part who is feeling it and work with it, perhaps at the flicker stage rather than it becoming a fire. Or even if it kicks off as a full blaze, we know who is blazing, and the kind of thing that generally helps them when they’re struggling like that. 

As Janina Fisher says, for everybody it can be more helpful to say ‘a part of me feels…’ than ‘I feel…’ because that enables it to be held rather than taking over. Also it allows for contradictory feelings to be present, rather than the common view that it’s not okay – even crazy – to have both desire for something and fear of it, or both anger at someone and yearning for them, for example. 

Even if people don’t experience themselves as vividly plural, as we did, they could use the Inside Out metaphor of imagining the different emotions as different characters in their bodymind.

James: That separating out the feelings is one of the biggest shifts I’ve noticed since last summer Ara. That sense of more clarity. ‘Oh that feeling is around, that belongs to Jonathan, let’s go check out how he’s doing before we do anything else.’

Ara: Absolutely. I would say that identifying feelings where they reside, and a radically inclusive commitment to welcoming all of them, are the two biggest shifts we’ve made. We may not always know what parts need, and we may still feel that resistance in them to bringing their feelings forward. But we generally have that clarity about whose feelings they are, and we have a pervading understanding that everything is welcome: However we feel is okay, not a problem to be fixed.

James: How does all of this relate to trauma?

Ara: Mm we’ve been thinking about plurality and trauma even more. There’s an idea in some of the literature that being vividly plural is a result of trauma. We’ve written before about the need for caution with that idea. For one thing, few people escape trauma in our non-consensual culture. For another, the sense of yourself as one coherent self is very culturally specific, and could even be the result of trauma where you’ve internalised that strong message that only a certain version of you is acceptable. Many therapies and spiritual practices deliberately help people sense their plural parts as part of healing.

James: It seems that where trauma comes in is in splitting different parts off from one another so thoroughly that they can’t communicate with each other. For some this is to the extent that they have little memory for one part when they are in another. For others there’s complete disavowal that the disowned parts of them exist.

Ara: How would you say it was for us James?

James: There was a strong sense that parts of us split off to hold those feelings which felt both unacceptable to others and unbearable to us.

Ara: Mm well put, and perhaps those go together. When you’ve been taught young that certain parts of yourself – or the feelings they express – are unacceptable then those feelings do become utterly overwhelming and intolerable. You become used to being punished by others when those feelings are around, or to being alone with the huge weight of them because you know it’s not okay to share them. For kids that kind of punishment is felt as annihilation, and that kind of aloneness as abandonment. Both can be felt like the danger of death, because a small child can’t survive if they are unacceptable to those around them and/or left alone.

James: *exhales* a lot of the early memories we’ve been with these last months have been like that. A young part of us alone in bed completely destroyed by the waves of this terrifying feeling crashing over them.

Ara: You’ve done such a good job at holding them through that James, giving them some sense of safety at those times.

James: Thank-you. I love doing it, and I hate them being there.

Ara: You asked about trauma. My sense is that the impact of trauma on us was that splitting off – not the dividing into different parts, but splitting off to the extent that those parts – and their feelings – were hidden to us. It was as if they’d all gone to different rooms in our bodymind in order to hold those feelings: to keep the part of us who was carrying on with life safe from feeling them.

James: But that meant that we weren’t able to get the important things that humans need from those hidden feelings. We were operating in life without a lot of key information about ourselves and the world. And when the feelings did leak in or break through, they often did so in damaging ways.

Ara: Let’s take those two pieces one at a time James…

Why are the feelings so vital?

James: So the big feels that surprised us in August were these ones:

• Max (flight): Trapped fear and deep grief.
• Jonathan (fawn/freeze): Terror of dangerous others and of being plunged into shame.
• Beastie (fight): Furious rage.
• Tony (fasten/attach): Desperate yearning for love/connection.

So I guess we’re saying that, previously in our life, we hadn’t really allowed feelings of fear, sadness, shame, anger, and loneliness. We tried to avoid those feelings, or at least some aspects of them. Like maybe we’d allow sadness in ‘appropriate’ situations, but not inexplicable waves of grief. We’d let ourselves be – often very – angry with ourselves, but not with others. That kind of thing. To be honest I think our story of ourselves was that we barely ever felt angry feelings, or any of those yearning feelings like loneliness or jealousy.

Ara: And that maps onto the sense of those feelings being held by our most disowned parts: Tony and Beastie. A bit like when feelings are cast out of the control room in Inside Out. We were more familiar with Max and Jonathan. Max was our foregrounded ‘getting on with life’ part who tried to work hard and be ‘good’ in order to protect Jonathan from ever having to feel that deep fear and shame that he holds. But even Jonathan was split off because Max wasn’t aware that she was protecting him, just that she had to be good and keep busy. 

A lot of Max’s grief now is the realisation that she was dissociated a lot of the time – whether in the busyness of work, or going into a kind of ‘faking through it’ mode when dangerous things happened. There’s a sense of her as a kind of puppet performing through everything, hence her horror of being trapped now.

James: How would you say the hidden feelings are valuable Ara?

Ara: Well putting it simply it’s something like this:

• Fear enables us to know when a situation or relationship is risky for us.
• Anger enables us to protect ourselves from non-consensual or unsafe behaviour.
• Loneliness, longing and related feelings move us in the direction of connection with others, which is a vital human need.
• Sadness and grief help us to process the painful things that happen to us so that we can move through them rather than holding onto them tightly forever.
• Shame – when we are able to feel it as regret, rather than collapsing in the unbearable sense that there is something fundamentally wrong with us – enables us to look at our potentially harmful behaviour and make changes to act with more integrity and compassion.

The first two feelings are vital for protection. Without fear and anger we are at great risk of continually placing ourselves in harm’s way, because we find it so hard to discern when things are unsafe, and so hard to protect ourselves when they are. 

Yearning and sorrow are vital for connection: without them we won’t relate with other people and can’t handle the loss of those relationships. 

And if shame can’t be felt safely – without the sense it will destroy us – then both connection and protection are very hard because other people feel dangerous (they might see that we’re fundamentally not okay) and we don’t feel deserving of protection (because we believe that we’re fundamentally not okay).

James: Ah that makes sense of our feeling that shame is at the heart of everything. We had to work on shame for a long time before it felt possible to welcome in anger and yearning particularly.

Ara: The trauma literature is really helpful for understanding the terrible impact that not feeling the feelings – and therefore not being able to connect and protect – has on mental and physical health. But I’d love to get onto the process of how we actually go about welcoming the feelings James. I feel like we’ve learnt so much about that during this period. 

First though can we briefly touch on the other reasons why it’s so important?

Leaking out and breaking through

James: What you said about how otherwise those feelings can leak out or break through?

Ara: Right. Now that we know our parts – and the feelings they hold – so much better, we can see that they didn’t stay completely split off throughout our life. Rather they leaked out in ways we didn’t recognise, and occasionally broke through in ways that were extremely confusing and destructive.

James: Tony’s yearning leaked out by propelling us towards connection in ways that weren’t very conscious or considered, to say the least. Beastie’s rage – unable to be known or expressed – reflected back on us in the form of a vicious inner critic, and occasionally leaked out in the form of a desire to ‘tell the truth’ about things, which got us in trouble more than once. And Jonathan’s terror of shame meant that we’d often act in hypervigilant and people pleasing ways which were exhausting for us, and probably felt as inauthentic by others.

Ara: Again I’d emphasise how valuable all of those parts and feelings are. Even in their hidden/leaking forms it has been wonderful that we’ve been so driven to connect with others through our life and work. That truth-telling impulse has been behind much of what we’ve written about the problems with cultural norms and oppressive systems, which has been helpful to other people as well. And the care and compassion for others inherent in our little people pleaser is a beautiful thing.

James: The sense is that the more we can welcome them – all of them, and all their feelings – the more we may be able to connect, to create, and to care, without getting ourselves in the kinds of trouble that come with doing those things unconsciously.

Ara: Our other past experience with those feelings was that they could come crashing in in ways that were disorienting and overwhelming for us and for others. I expect it’s a common experience when you hide these things that they break through in situations when your guard is down, or where something intense enough happens that you can no longer hold them at bay.

James: Right. So common ones for us were that when we really let another person in close – or spent a lot of time with them – generally a partner, we would start to have melt-downs where those huge intense feelings suddenly spilled out.

Ara: It was terrifying when we had no understanding of it, like a sudden plummet into overwhelming fear, rage, shame, and/or yearning. That’s why it felt so hard for us to be around another person 24/7: the horror that they might see that, and that we might hurt them with those feelings.

James: It’s been incredibly hard to finally be living alone and to experience those kinds of plummets by ourselves, without much access to support. But it also feels like a vital part of the process of finally learning how to be with those moments, rather than desperately wanting somebody else to make it better, at the same time as being deeply ashamed that they saw us that way, and terrified that they’ll abandon us – or harm us – because of it.

Ara: There you go, right there is a great example of why it’s so helpful to separate out the feelings and to feel them in the various parts of us. All those times we did plummet with another person we were also having all those contradictory feelings about it at once: Tony clinging and desperate for them to prove we were loveable in spite of it, Max full of shame at being seen that way, Jonathan fearing attack, Beastie expecting abandonment.

James: Ah yes, I hadn’t seen that. No wonder it felt like such an impossible spiral of emotion to be stuck in. 

Ara: When parts and their feelings are very disowned, the other impact is that any situation that triggers old trauma can bring them up very vividly. 

James: And that would be what we experienced as periods of post traumatic stress in our life: times when something so terrifying and shame-inducing happened that we couldn’t hold those feelings at bay and they crashed in for a while, making everyday life incredibly hard. Basically we’ve just been going through the fourth period like that that we’ve had in our life, but this time with the gradually increasing capacity to tease out the different parts and to hold them through it.

But even now it is incredibly disorienting, because we know that we are this person with all our experience, knowledge, and support to draw on, but – because the parts are still to some extent split off – we can quickly drop into feeling like the terrified child again, for example. It’s very hard to navigate life at such times, or to plan for the future. Hard to know whether to ask people to treat us as they always do, or to treat us as an extremely vulnerable person.

Ara: Because we are all of that, trying to learn how to hold all of that! Onto how we’ve been trying to do it…

Staying with the Big Feels Practice

How to feel the feels

Ara: Okay so that’s the theory – and how it works for us. Shall we get to the practice?

James: Let’s. Usual caveat that different things work for different people at different times. This is what we’ve found useful during this period, but other people will need to find their own path through it I’m sure.

Ara: That’s vital. So easy for hearing somebody else’s experience to become yet more fodder for the inner critic – like somehow we should be doing everything that everyone else suggests. We’ve found that it’s vital to adapt suggestions to work for us, to reject those that don’t work right now, and to trust our inner wisdom to guide us on our path, which will be different to everyone else’s.

Where would you like to start James?

James: I’d love you to help me think through some paradoxes that are really confusing to me in all of this.

Ara: I’m so up for that.

Big space and close up work

James: Okay so a major one for me is that you and I seem to approach being with the big feelings in very different ways, and I’m wondering how they can both be ‘right’.

Ara: Go on.

James: The way it’s shaken down between us is that you’re ‘in charge’ of holding our parts – and their feelings – in the big space, or the gap. I’m ‘in charge’ of what we think of as ‘close up work’: holding and hearing the parts in their feelings, exploring them in that more ‘focusing’ or therapeutic kind of way.

Ara: Both approaches involve ensuring that whatever part we’re in – and whatever feelings they experience – they are now accompanied, which is the vital piece I think. But you’re right that my approach and yours towards accompaniment feel very different James. 

James: Do you want to say a bit more about what you do, and I’ll do the same?

Ara: Certainly. So it seems that I’m around when we meditate – which is something we’ve come back to, having struggled with it in the past. In an average session what that feels like to me is that I’m sitting in this wide open space, and then one of our parts will surface and I can observe them, and notice the feelings they are having and how they’re responding to those. The whole thing is infused with the sense that anything that arises is welcome, and that we can simply notice it together and come back to the present moment – perhaps the sunlight on the roofs opposite, or a bird flying past.

When a much more intense feeling is around, my big space approach is to take the part who is feeling it on a walk, maybe sit up in the hills, and we keep noticing how they go into big spirals of tough thoughts and feelings, and how it’s possible to recognise that they’ve been swept up in that, and return to right now.

James: I remember you doing that with Jonathan one time and it was eventually even possible for him to get quite excited at the next spiral: seeing it as an opportunity to practice this new superpower of getting swept up and coming back to ground.

Ara: Several nights with him we sat looking out at the night and just focused in on one small lit up window and the way the telephone wire moved across it. Somehow we could return to that in brief moments throughout the tumultuous mass of traumatic feelings.

Do you want to describe your approach James?

James: Sure. So when I feel any part of us having strong feelings I engage in conversation with them. If they’re feeling bad I often lie down – so it feels like I’m lying holding them, even with a hand on their belly, or stroking their arm. Hm I notice that this feels way more vulnerable to describe than your practices Ara.

Ara: Interesting. We’re not encouraged to love ourselves in such close, tender ways are we? Talking with ourselves or giving ourselves nurturing touch? Meditation is somehow more culturally palatable. What kinds of conversations do you have? 

James: I guess it’s something like focusing – which we described in the feelings zine – or the ‘befriending questions’ that Janina Fisher uses. I try to tune into what that particular part needs on that occasion. So I might ask them to describe the feeling, to tell me where it is in their body, to do a stream of consciousness about what comes up with them around it in terms of images or memories. Sometimes it stays in the present, exploring what fears are going on for them, and reassuring them, or reminding them how we’ve got through such things in the past. Sometimes we go back in time remembering all the times we’ve felt this feeling before. Occasionally we’ve zeroed in on an earlier time and gone over that memory in our mind, maybe bringing you or me in to act it out differently in our imagination – what it would have been like if we’d been there to hear and hold them back then. We got that from Sarah Peyton’s work.

Ara: Maybe we can say a bit more about how we use some of these tools later James. For now d’you want to say what you’re aiming for with your approach?

James: It’s what some authors call regulation, but we’ve preferred to call attunement. There’s often a click moment with ‘close up work’ where the struggling part feels really held and heard in their distress. We’ve heard people compare it to the ‘attunement bliss’ or ‘coregulation’ that can happen between a parent and child, or between therapist and client, or close people when they feel really understood by each other. It can happen, for example, if the part finally feels able to express their feelings and I hold them as they cry. Or it can happen if we get to an understanding of what happened that has eluded us before. Or it can happen if we remember that we’ve been here before and what got us through.

Ara: Going back to our earlier understanding of the big feels residing in split off parts, each moment like that seems like welcoming that part home, even more, and demonstrating to them that nothing that they bring with them will be rejected or unwelcome – quite the opposite. Some call it a kind of ‘soul retrieval’: fragmented off parts of us being brought back into the whole. We think it’s also what can give us that ‘earned secure attachment’ over time: welcoming all those parts back into us fully and sharing them with safe enough others in our life.

James: And it seems to be a gradual process. We know all of our parts now (unless we’re in for another big surprise!), but it seems like each of them is slowly bringing more and more of the feelings they’ve been keeping to themselves, perhaps as they trust more than those feelings can be held and heard here.

Ara: We often feel an initial resistance. They are so used to having to repress those feelings, and so scared that they will ‘ruin’ things for us by bringing them. But the more you encourage those conversations, and the more they end in that ‘reward’ of attunement, the more it feels safe – even good – for those parts to bring their feelings.

Which approach to take?

James: I’m still confused though Ara. Our approaches seem so opposite to one another. Is it better to hold feelings in the big space and watch them bubble up and drift away, or is it better to go towards them and explore them in the way that I do? I guess I worry that my approach encourages our parts to be in these incredibly tough feelings more, when they could just have let them go if they’d gone to you.

Ara: Mm, my strong sense is that both approaches are necessary and that they work very well alongside each other, whereas one without the other might be risky.

James: Say more.

Ara: Can we touch on the theory behind them first? I guess my approach is rooted in the Buddhist / mindfulness theory that suffering happens when we struggle against what’s happening: either our outer circumstances or our inner experiences. The big space is about welcoming all of it, and noticing how pain of any kind passes if we don’t escalate it with storylines about how bad it is, or with our struggles to escape it.

James: Whereas my approach is rooted in the therapeutic understanding that we lock trauma in our bodies when painful things happen which are not regulated – or heard and held – at the time. I’m ensuring that they are heard and held now – both present pain, and the past pain that underlies it.

Ara: So I think the risk of my approach without your approach is a kind of spiritual bypassing James. We could take every tough feeling to the big space that way, but perhaps we would then never have fully felt it, understood where it comes from, shown it that it is welcome now – that we can hold it and hear it. I can imagine a me-centric version of us who got attached to spiritual practice but still struggled to be back in the world with other people, where these things got triggered, because they hadn’t really been dealt with.

James: I’m trying to think what the equivalent is for me. What does a James-centric version of us look like?! I’m thinking that, in recent times, parts have got edgy when a flicker of a tough feeling has come up – like it means that they’re due another two hours on the couch with James looking into it! Occasionally we’ve had a shorter meditation at those points and sensed that it didn’t need such intense work, just to be acknowledged and move on. I wonder if my approach without yours could get quite heavy going, or keep us quite mired in the pain of our life past and present.

Ara: I don’t know for sure, but I think that might be part of the need for balance. And of course our third ‘containing’ part does something different again. 

James: Fox. They are the part who can simply delight in whatever is going on right now. They don’t go towards the feelings at all. They’re just with the immediate sights, sounds, smells, sensations around us – being present. They can bring that sense equally to a walk where they notice everything, or to gentling up and enjoying a good meal and a TV show. When another part is around and struggling they welcome that part alongside them with whatever is going on, sharing the wonder with them.

Ara: Pema described something like this in a recent talk we heard: accessing a part of yourself who is patient and kind, another part who has deep trust in your capacities, and a final part who can appreciate those fleeting times of contentment in the moment.

James: We should say it’s taken nearly 50 years for us to have full access to those three. Five years ago we’d only experienced the tiniest glimmers of these parts of us. Somehow we patchworked ‘us’ together from those glimmers, from other people who modelled this for us, from fictional characters…

Ara: So going back to your question I don’t think that any of those three approaches – mine, yours, or Fox’s – is ‘better’. It’s more about tuning into each time feelings are up and asking what they seem to need. And being up for trying one thing, and then another, if that doesn’t work.

James: Rupture and repair is important too isn’t it? Where we try something and it doesn’t help, and we can acknowledge how painful that is to a part who is feeling desperate, and suggest trying something else. We actually build trust between us through such moments.

Ara: Being up for acknowledging our imperfection, and having got it wrong, rather than making them feel bad for not feeling better. Again that’s healing for times in the past when people have protected the blame onto us when they haven’t been able to be around our feelings, or have felt inadequate for not being able to help.

James: Mm, and I’m also thinking there’s something here about us being alongside our other parts rather than doing this for them. There’s a sense in which rage is Beastie’s, grief is Max’s, longing is Tony’s, and terror is Jonathan’s. It’s important that they get to learn what works for them, and to apply it, with us helping them, but not taking over for them. Does that make sense?

Ara: Yes, empowering each one rather than taking over for them. On an inner level it mirrors the outer level. Bonnie Badenoch says that people need others to believe in them and support them in finding their path. It can be really damaging if a therapist, friend, or other person decides they know better, or gets into ‘fix it’ mode because they can’t handle being around the pain.

James: Right, but again with the paradox, because it’s also felt helpful to remind those four parts that they don’t have to do anything – like figuring things out or fixing them – they just have to be: bringing their feelings when they are around and trusting us to hold and hear them, and eventually act upon them if need be.

Escalating emotions or taking them seriously?

James: Okay here’s another one for you, related perhaps. We were just reading Pema’s ‘Living Beautifully with Uncertainty and Change’, which references a finding that feelings only last one and a half minutes unless you fuel them. The idea is that the thing to do is to let them pass through, to recognise their impermanence. You do that by ‘dropping the storyline’ you tell yourself about them. You try not to escalate the feelings with your stories about how bad they are, and how that means you’re bad, or somebody else is bad, or something like that. All those thought spirals somehow make the feeling fixed and solid, instead of allowing it to pass like a cloud in the sky.

Ara: Mmhm.

James: How does that fit with the trauma therapy idea you shared earlier that these emotions are vital motivators towards connection or protection, and that our problem in the past has actually been not feeling them enough?

Ara: I wonder whether there’s almost two phases to feelings-work James. There’s the phase of just being with the feeling – whether in the big open space, or in the kind of close-up description work that you do. Then there may be a second phase for more exploration of what the feeling brings up. Sometimes all that’s necessary is to welcome the feeling, fully experience it, and let it go to get back on with daily life. Other times the feeling is pointing to something important that requires more attention. 

James: Right, I’m thinking about how therapy tends to have components of helping clients to finally feel their feelings, and components of talking about the events of the past and present, for example. Or how Buddhism emphasises mindfulness practice and also applying the teachings to your everyday life.

Ara: So, for example, I recently meditated and Beastie was there feeling angry several times. Afterwards I chatted with her and we thought through together what the different angry feelings were about – why they were of value. We were able to see some that were a response to having repressed anger for so long – turned it in on ourselves. Some were about injustice – others having access to freedoms we don’t have. Some were about the specific pain of people offering something they don’t really have to give, and we could link current examples of that to early experiences. 

Beastie is very concerned, at the moment, that the capacity to feel anger more vividly doesn’t flip us from turning it in against ourselves to turning it out against others. We wondered about how we might ensure that it remained more of a counterbalance to shame. In the past we’ve too readily accepted others’ stories of everything as ‘all our fault’. Perhaps we can use the opportunities of Beastie’s anger to see other people’s stuff that might be in the mix, and wider cultural stuff.

James: I sense another blog post coming on! But if I can draw something out of that for emotions in general, you’re saying that it’s another both/and. There’s a place for noticing how we escalate emotions, and practicing doing something different to that. And there’s a place for getting curious about the feelings that come up regularly – and what triggers them – and using that as an opportunity to learn.

Ara: About ourselves and others. The first time Beastie felt hate outwards vividly she had a huge flash of understanding for those who have hated us. Previously we’d struggled to connect with how horrific hatred feels, and how people can act so violently out of it.

I think the difference is intentionality James. Taking emotions seriously is very different to escalating them. Instead of letting the storylines spiral round and round we’re deliberately reflecting on the feelings. And we also try to refrain from speaking or acting out of the feelings until we’ve reached a better understanding of them, and considered whether such speech or action is the wise and compassionate thing to do in that situation – for us and the others involved.

Different practices for different intensities?

James: I realise I’m asking a lot of questions here!  Another one I’m with is about the intensity of feelings. When we wrote ‘Staying with Feelings’ we didn’t have much trauma understanding so we just suggested practices for staying with feelings no matter what they were, or how intense. 

Since then we’ve come across trauma-based understandings which suggest that it’s all about the intensity of the feeling. Ideas like the emotional thermometer or zones of feeling suggest that we might want to do very different things in different zones.

Ara: A helpful way to see them is concentric circles with the comfort zone in the middle, the challenge zone after that, and the overwhelm zone as the outer circle. The trauma idea of ‘expanding the window of tolerance’ encourages us to keep moving from comfort zone into challenge zone and back again with our feelings, without pushing into overwhelm. In overwhelm we retraumatise ourselves – which may well shrink the window of tolerance – which is how spacious the challenge zone is.

James: We learnt that one well before we read any trauma literature. We decided to list all the traumatic events of our life so we could go through them one after another. That’s a fast track to overwhelm right there!

Ara: It can be really hard to learn that we have to go slowly, and that pushing into trauma tends to make it a lot worse. It’s much more about learning how to tune into our bodies so that we have a much better awareness of where we are in those zones. What are the signs that we might be heading towards overwhelm? Can we learn to notice those and pull back at such times? Can we learn what we need when we have tipped over to bring ourselves back?

James: So we shifted our perspective, last year, from ‘always feel the feelings’ to ‘feel them in the challenge zone’, but in overwhelm just focus on bringing yourself back to a more settled nervous system: using grounding practices and that kind of thing.

Ara: But you have a question?

James: I suppose it’s sometimes felt more complex than that. Like a big feeling has come up and been with us for several days, and by continuing to be with it – gently but thoroughly – we’ve eventually got to some major revelations about our life, and a huge sense of relief.

Ara: It feels like the process Brene Brown described in ‘Rising Strong’: being prepared to be with the messy middle.

James: It’s happened for us when it simply doesn’t feel possible to ‘bring ourselves back’, the feeling is so intense, so it’s more about weathering it and trying to have faith that it will get clearer at some point: that it likely has some pretty important learning for us if we can just hang on in there with it.

Ara: I don’t think those views are incompatible James. What we’re committing to is to not repressing feelings or trying to resist them.

James: Is the overwhelm zone what happens when we resist them? 

Ara: Sometimes I think so. They get louder and scarier when we resist them, in an attempt to be heard. But sometimes it’s more that we’ve reached an experience which is too much for us to deal with – at our current capacity – and it’s tipped us over.

James: Non-resistance then is more about recognising we’re in overwhelm and that’s okay, it happens. And being as gentle as possible with ourselves while we’re there, trying to remind ourselves that there probably is a big learning here: about what things are still an edge for us in the present and/or about how things were for us in the past.

Ara: We’ve found ‘reminding ourselves this is okay’ to be gold in all this. Instead of punishing ourselves for having got overwhelmed again, we remind ourselves that this is just okay. Even on the worst days there are moments that are calmer, or more connected.

James: I remember one time I held Beastie and we found this dot. Like the comfort zone had shrunk to a tiny dot, but if we stayed on that dot she could feel okay. Any attempt to think about what we were going to do next, or how we were going to handle some situation, would tip her directly into overwhelm, but we kept coming back to the dot over and over until eventually there was some buffer zone around it again.

Ara: I like that sense of all the concentric circles expanding and contracting over time. Long term, and even over the course of an hour or a day.

James: I wonder if it’s ever possible to convey this to those who haven’t experienced trauma feelings so starkly. Like we had whole weeks when Jonathan kept being pushed into overwhelm by the thought that our IPad battery might not last the whole day for an event we’re doing in several months time. When the comfort zone and challenge zone have shrunk that much, we’re in incapacitating overwhelming emotions for much of the time and anything can re-trigger them. Sometimes the whole day’s work is just bringing ourselves back from overwhelm for a moment or two. It is exactly like being a terrified child stuck in an adult’s body, but still as convinced – as he was back then – that terrible danger is about to befall him.

Ara: And there’s another huge paradox to all this. While it was agonising and debilitating, there is also a sense that it was a helpful thing to go through. For example it stripped away all the strategies we used to use to avoid painful feelings – like working too hard or wanting somebody else to ‘make it better’. It made those vital feelings far more accessible to us than they ever were before. 

James: I do feel a sense that when those young/traumatised parts of us are around it’s a kind of miracle, that we kept them safe enough all this time that they can now be here and share their feelings. And we’ll be able to live our life so much more wisely and compassionately now we have access to them. Also this whole thing has given us so much empathy for other people who are collapsing under the weight of these big feels. And for all those who are racing around in various ways trying like hell to avoid them.

Ara: Mm we notice how easy it is to go back to that avoidance too. To talk the talk of ‘welcoming the feelings’, but as soon as a flicker of one of the tough ones is around, viscerally that sense of trying to push it back down or pretend it’s not there. And if we manage to do that, there’s this sense of dissociation: being a bit vague or fake or performing.

James: Those times the feeling often comes back with a vengeance afterwards, and in confusing ways so it’s harder to know whose it is or what it’s about. Our sense now is that the more we can go towards all the feelings as soon as they arise, the more we can make our inner landscape safer, so there’s not that sense that we might stumble across something that is ‘too hard’ – because we know it all and are familiar with it all.

Learning from the big feels

Ara: Shall we finish with a bit more about our daily practices with this James, and what we’re learning from them? I’m aware that this changes somewhat week by week for us though. Maybe that’s one of the biggest learnings. One day it feels important – when we can – to be with the feeling all day long. Another day it feels right to get on with life, with pauses to be with whatever feeling is around every now and then. One week we seem to need huge amounts of rest. Another week we have big energy for getting out moving, or for creating things like this.

James: Yes, flexibility to go with that seems helpful, and another way of trusting the feelings – and the parts that hold them – to know what they need.

Ara: But we do have a few standard practices now.

James: Right. Every day you do a meditation sit in the morning and in the evening. After that one of us does a check in conversation with the ‘big feels’ parts to see if they have anything they’re feeling that we didn’t notice in the meditation.

Ara: That seems a great way to encourage regular feeling, and to check if there’s something there we haven’t noticed. If there is a bigger feeling present in that check-in, you might do some close-up work with that before we move on. Or we might journal about it, or go for a walk if it feels like it needs to move.

Another practice that has been helpful for just showing us that we can bear an intense emotion is feeling it in the body as a kind of vibration, trying not to even label it or understand it but just feel it as pure energy or something. Occasionally even an intense feeling has ended up feeling almost soothing when we’ve managed that.

James: And our therapist shared one about imagining the feeling as just one cell of our body and picturing it in front of us – seeing what texture, colour, size, and shape it is. 

Another one that’s been great when it feels stuck is to lie down and breathe in to the chest, then the belly, then exhale. That kind of breathing often seems to allow a kind of release, often tears.

But it isn’t always those more formal kinds of practices that are needed. Occasionally the thing to do has been to find a song that matches the feeling, and listen to it and allow the feeling to come. And we got a lot out of re-reading the Stephen King book, The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon, so we can flash on the way she went still and steady in the face of fear, when fear comes up for us.

Ara: Again there are so many possible ways to be with feelings. The main point is that we are welcoming them – not resisting them or reacting out of them.

James: It’s moving from resisting to responding, and reacting to refraining (from action) until you feel clearer and calmer.

Ara: There’s a couple of nice metaphors about welcoming feelings and how vital it is. One is the Tibetan Buddhist story of Milarepa in his cave, and how he had to fully welcome all of the demons – or feelings – who came to stay with him there – big or small, subtle or overwhelming. The other is the Islamic poet, Rumi’s, famous poem The Guest House. Again that sense if you can welcome all fully then there’s nothing more to fear in our inner world, and perhaps also in our outer world given that we’re familiar with it all in here. 

Often the parts with the feelings are convinced you’re going to send them away, or become overwhelmed by them, because that’s what’s happened in the past. So it’s a practice of showing them – gradually over time – that you don’t need to eradicate them or merge with them, you can just be with them patiently.

James: A couple of other learnings I’ve noticed. We’ve found that what we learn from one feeling often helps with others. We started with sadness. We did an irreverent reverse version of the behaviour modification of our childhood and decided to award ourselves a gold star whenever we cried! We’ve got really comfortable with sadness, sorrow and grief, where in the past we struggled so much with those feelings. Sometimes when we’re struggling with another feeling we can at least access that sadness about how painful it is, and release it in that way. 

Lately we’ve also found that many of the practices we developed with fear and shame last year work well for being with loneliness and rage too, as well as developing some new practices for those.

Ara: What else did you notice?

James: That fear and shame aren’t the only trauma feelings, as we’d previously thought. Loneliness and rage are trauma-related feelings too, just more about abandonment – for us – than annihilation. And that each part holds a whole cluster of related feelings. Like Beastie holds self-hatred, blame of others, self-protection, and anger at injustice. Tony holds loneliness, yearning and jealousy, but also a kind of ‘high’ joy when he’s pinned that on a particular person or situation, shame around being ‘too much’ and getting ‘sent away’, and a more steady joy when he’s allowed to be himself in the world: open and connecting. 

Ara: It’s useful to understand how the different feelings they hold work together. Like Beastie’s self hatred is often a sign something non-consensual happened to us and we didn’t give her a chance to get angry about it. Tony’s joy is more steady when we help him grieve for the losses of the past.

James: There’s something about the need for a pendulum swing I think. If you’ve tried to only feel ‘positive’ emotions much of your life, or if you’ve repressed and covered over tough feelings a lot, it seems like there is a period where you feel all the feelings you didn’t feel at the time. Perhaps you have to swing into recognising how bad some things were that you didn’t recognise back then, maybe because they were gaslit by yourself and by those around you. 

I think one of the very hardest things is taking that leap of faith, repeatedly, that having done this process things will become easier, now that we have access to the feelings and can act on them. It’s hard to make that leap of faith when right now all you’re feeling is way more pain than ever before.

Ara: There can be some nostalgia for the more ‘covered over’ time when things didn’t feel this intense, disorienting, and incapacitating. My sense is strong though that being able to feel the hard feelings will make them less overwhelming over time, and that it will make the other feelings more accessible too. That Kahil Gibran quote: ‘The deeper that sorrow carves into your being, the more joy you can contain.’

James: We experience that in the way long periods of tough feelings often end in much deeper understanding of ourselves, and/or others. Also there’s an intense relief when we crack through to some grief or gratitude, by being up for hanging out with a tough feeling.

Ara: I’d like to end with the multiplicity of learnings that are possible each time a big feeling is present. 

James: Please do.

Ara: We find it helpful to remind ourselves of this when we’re in them:

• This is an opportunity to learn how to be with this feeling more readily, so we’ll be more able to do so in future, expanding our window of tolerance.
• This feeling being touched and awoken right now gives us a chance to go back to our earlier experiences – when we didn’t get heard or held in such feelings – and do so now, perhaps putting that memory to rest finally.
• This feeling gives us the potential to do the general practice of dropping our storylines and being with whatever is present.
• This feeling – if we can allow it – gives us deep insight into what others with similar feelings are up against, and why they act in the ways they do, increasing our sense of compassion and connection.
• This feeling has something of value to teach us about the current situation if we can listen to it without repressing it or reacting quickly out of it. For example, it may be that something has reached the limits of what we can deal with right now, or that a situation or encounter was ‘off’ in some way.

For more on this topic check out my new book with Alex Iantaffi: Hell Yeah Self Care.

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Plural tag: This post was by James and Ara.

The post Staying with the Big Feels appeared first on Rewriting The Rules.

We’ve already recently posted conversations between two other parts – Beastie and James – reviewing what this book has to say about trauma and plurality, and how we can work with them if you want to read more on this topic. For background on plurality, check out the plural work page on our website.

CN: Brief mentions of difficult childhood experiences and self-harm, no detailed descriptions. Brief mention of a tarot card as a metaphor, not as a tool of divination.

Ara: Hey Max-y, are you up for doing this one with me?

Max: I’d like that. It seems a good fit given that I was the part of us who struggled to practice mindfulness our whole life – when I thought we were just me – and you are the part of us who mindfulness seems to come most easily to.

Ara: It’s fascinating to me that we moved away from these practices, then returned to them, from a slightly different angle, and suddenly they made way more sense. Like before we understood them intellectually, but only rarely did we feel what others described feeling from them. Now they have become our go-to practices. I notice that we even turn away from things that would have been welcome distractions, or imperatives, in the past, in order to return to our version of these practices.

Max: Like turning off a TV show halfway through if we start to feel troubled, or remaining still rather than going to the next task if it feels like there’s more that we need to stay with.

Ara: That’s what I mean. Beastie and I discussed the way we’re practising ‘the gap’ rather than any kind of formal sitting in our blog post. Here I’d love to talk with you about how understanding and treating ourselves as plural unlocks various aspects of mindfulness. We can draw on the Janina Fisher book which we hadn’t read when we wrote the gap blog posts.

Max: Okay.

Ara: Before we start, how’re you doing right now? I’m aware it’s been a rough ride for you lately.

Max: It has. This trauma process, it ebbs and flows rather than being some kind of steady progress towards feeling less traumatised. It’s hard when the feelings are intense again to believe in the path we’re on.

Ara: That reminds me of the poem we’ve had up in our room from the start, by Ijeoma Umebinyuo. I often read it to you when you’re finding things tough.

“Healing comes in waves

and maybe today

the wave hits the rocks

and that’s ok,

that’s ok, darling

you are still healing

you are still healing.”

Max: That poem has helped me through some very hard times. It’s still helping me through now.

Ara: You particularly I think – of all of our parts – because being to the fore all our lives means that the traumatic experiences we’ve been through have often hit you the hardest.

Max: Mm, and I’m also the part of us who perhaps has to change the most. It’s so hard to see that the strategies I employed in order for us to survive have hurt us so much, and other people too. It’s so hard to confront that without collapsing into shame, and so hard to have any sense of who I might be on the other side of this. Oh I’m crying as I write this.

Ara: Your tears are very welcome Max. When you feel this way we remind you how very grateful we all are to you. As Janina points out, without disowning the sides of us that we learnt were ‘bad’ growing up, and foregrounding only the ‘good’ in you, we would never have survived. Without repressing the feelings associated with trauma and developing a side of ourselves who could get on with everyday life, we could never have made it through. 

And what’s more, as you were surviving by becoming what the world told you you had to be, you were also learning – all the time – psychology, sociology, psychotherapy, philosophy. You learnt all the things that we needed to finally make sense of our own suffering, and the suffering that it came from: the systems and structures around us, the intergenerational trauma playing out through us, the patterns we’d developed that were hurting us. You enabled us to survive, and you kept learning. It’s a huge feat, gentle warrior. You got us here.

Max: I did. 

Ara: At great cost too. So much pain each time you tried to find safety and belonging for us in ways you’d been taught, but which didn’t really work. So hard when your learnings took you in directions which resulted in you being dismissed and ridiculed, even attacked publicly.

Max: So many times Ara. Each time I find the way of seeing things that helps us the most, it always seems to push right at the edges of what people are up for. Like ‘I know you were with me about the relationship rules being questionable, and about gender being fluid and on multiple spectrums, and about the erotic being way bigger than the sexual, but now I need you to believe that I am multiple people sharing a body – and you very well might be too!’

Ara: Thankfully we’re finding some validation for our experiences in others’ writings, and in the way many people respond to our writing. It seems that there’s much agreement, from social justice and intersectional feminism through to the physical and mental health literature – that a huge problem in our current culture is children learning that they have to cover over themselves, and repress their authentic feelings, and pretend to be okay as you did: people being alienated from themselves, from others, from their work, and from nature, as Gabor Maté puts it. 

This is the individualism of neoliberal capitalism which disconnects us from ourselves and others, makes us feel we’re never enough and can never have enough, makes us police ourselves and others – literally and metaphorically, and puts a huge toll on the ecosystems we inhabit.

Max: Sitting alone in our room during lockdown trying to befriend every part of us seems a far cry from addressing systemic violence, the epidemic of addiction, or climate change, but it does seem that they’re all connected.

Ara: The process can be very painful at times though, I know Max. It’s like Janina says: our inner systems develop in ways that reflect the outer systems we grew up in. Schools, families, communities, cultures, where our feelings weren’t welcome, our needs weren’t heard, we weren’t protected from danger, and/or our boundaries weren’t respected.

Max: We keep coming back to that image of the tower, from the tarot deck, again this month.

Ara: We do, although James and Beastie continue to regard my openness to such things in a highly skeptical manner. 

The tower is about a structure collapsing to the ground. It’s perhaps the most frightening card in the deck. But it’s only when systems and structures are dismantled that we can see that the foundations were rotten: that we need to create stronger foundations before we can start to rebuild on top of them. 

That’s true for each individual’s inner system. It’s true for the family systems built on unaddressed intergenerational trauma. It’s true of organisations built on unjust principles like valuing different forms of labour unequally. It’s true of education systems built on the non-consensual ownership of children by adults, and the desire to create conforming citizens. It’s true of criminal justice systems built to protect the owners of property, which included humans when they were first developed. It’s true of economic systems built to make rich people ever richer, and to encourage consumption far beyond what the planet can sustain, by making people believe that they are lacking.

Max: You may be open to the spooky stuff, but you can bring the politics too it seems Ara.

Ara: It does seem that way. Maybe I know that it helps you to open to these painful, vulnerable, processes when you remember how it’s connected to our wider work, and to our politics and values, Max.

Max: That’s true. Holding so much shame and responsibility, it helps me to always return to that question of how I can be most helpful for others and for the wider world. The answer right now is to prioritize this inner work. Shall we talk about mindfulness?

Ara: I think we may have already given some sense of what we’re about to say, and of our process *smiles*

Buddhism and plurality

Max: We were happy when we got to chapter 3 of Janina’s book and saw a quote from our favourite teacher, Pema Chödrön.

Ara: It suggests that the Buddhist perspectives that help us so much are very much in alignment with this neurobiologically and psychotherapeutically informed plural/trauma perspective that Janina is presenting. The quote she uses from from Pema is: 

“We think that by protecting ourselves from suffering we are being kind to ourselves. The truth is, we only become more fearful, more hardened, and more alienated. We experience ourselves as being separate from the whole. This separateness becomes like a prison for us, a prison that restricts us to our personal hopes and fears and to caring only for the people nearest to us. Curiously enough, if we primarily try to shield ourselves from discomfort, we suffer. Yet when we don’t close off and let our hearts break, we discover our kinship with all beings.” – Pema Chödrön

Max: That speaks to me so much. We have the image of me, for much of my life, as an armoured up warrior: presenting masks to the world that would gain me some degree of acceptance. I was battling and battling to get love and respect, and covering over my vulnerability, my shame, and my conviction that if anyone saw the ‘real’ me – beneath the masks – they would be disgusted.

Ara: The image of you now is the spiritual warrior that Pema describes in her writing. Prepared for this final act of bravery: removing the armour and the masks and standing there naked, ready to face what comes. But you’re not alone any more.

Max: I have all of you standing with me. 

So Janina understands the disconnection and separateness from the self, that Pema describes, as developing because we disowned vital parts of ourselves: leaving them behind in the past at the times we were taught they were unacceptable.

“By disowning the trauma, or the anger, or the need for contact with others, we lose or deny important aspects of ourselves. By over-identifying with the trauma-related shame, hopelessness, and fear of being seen, we constrict our lives and make ourselves smaller than we need to be. Both strategies, adaptive in a time of danger, become liabilities when the individual is ready to live a ‘life after trauma’, free of the constrictions and restrictions needed for living in a traumatogenic environment.” – Janina Fisher

Ara: And this sounds very similar to Buddhism doesn’t it? Buddhism is all about finding the middle way between hurling things away from us that we don’t want, and grasping hold of things that we do: between aggression and craving. We always use this quote from Martine Batchelor to describe it.

“Let’s imagine that I am holding an object made of gold. It is so precious and it is mine – I feel I must hold onto it. I grasp it, curling my fingers so as not to drop it, so that nobody can take it away from me. What happens after a while? Not only do my hand and arm get cramp but I cannot use my hand for anything else. When you grip something, you create tension and you limit yourself.

Dropping the gold object is not the solution. Non-attachment means learning to relax, to uncurl the fingers and gently open the hand. When my hand is wide open and there is no tension, the precious object can rest lightly on my palm. I can still value the object and take care of it; I can put it down and pick it up; I can use my hand for doing something else.”

Max: So this sense of not disowning any part of us, or identifying with any part of us, is much like that idea: holding it lightly.

Ara: Pema talks about not repressing thoughts, feelings, sensations, but equally not reacting out of them or focusing on them at the expense of everything else that is going on in our bodies and surroundings. The mindful practice involves being with every feature of our experience in a way that is both welcoming and spacious: not too tight, not too loose. 

Max: And we could see our lives as having been a process of disowning some parts of ourselves – and some experiences – and over-identifying with others. So this here-and-now practice of not disowning and not identifying is a way of counterbalancing that.

Ara: Right, we are up for being with the parts we disowned as ‘not me’, and for loosening the grip around those we over-identified with: saw as ‘me’. In our case disowned were our fight, attach, and freeze capacities. Over-identified with was you and your flight tendency to avoid feelings and stay busy, motivated by a strong fawn desire to please others at all costs, because the disappointment, disapproval and disgust of others was what had been so dangerous to us as a child.

This is the ‘no part gets left behind’ ethos that James and Beastie spoke about. Interestingly I found that echoed in a Pema audio I listened to this morning. She says that the aim of Buddhist practice is never to cultivate one part of ourselves and to to try to get rid of another. Splitting ourselves into good, virtuous and bad, irredeemable parts is a form of biased, fixated thinking. Instead the idea is to train in staying open to the whole thing.

Self-compassion

Max: That brings us on to self-compassion right? Self-compassion is a key feature of mindfulness and something that we always struggled to find through mindful practices, until we added plurality to the picture.

Ara: Mm and Janina explains why self compassion, and loving yourself, are so hard – if not impossible. It’s because we had to hate ourselves, or at least parts of ourselves, in order to survive. Any form of self compassion would actually have been dangerous. 

Janina says that, as vulnerable children, we have to believe that we can get love by being what we’ve learnt is ‘good’ and never what we’ve learnt is ‘bad’. This is far safer for a child than believing that they are out of our control and have no-one to turn to: that they’re alone in a dangerous world. 

So we disconnect from anything in us that we’ve learnt is ‘bad’ – because it was disapproved of or rejected by others. Those things are ‘not me’. We also disconnect from the victim child that the bad things happened to as ‘not me’. We hold onto the good child who can be acceptable and therefore safer in an unsafe world. And we minimise any sense that we’ve been a victim of traumatic situations. The good child might be precociously mature, perfectionistic, and/or invested in being helpful to others, for example.

Max: Sounds strangely familiar!

Ara: So we use dissociation, denial and self hatred to keep the ‘not me’ parts out, in order that the ‘good’ parts can keep developing. The ‘bad’ and vulnerable parts of us therefore stay stuck in the past, when they came into being. But we lose vital parts of ourselves in the process.

Max: Janina says that the bargain we make when we disown parts of ourselves as a kid in order to survive – as ‘not me’ – is that we have to hate the self. We have to keep out the parts we’re intimidated by and ashamed of. Again this links to Gabor Maté who says that disconnection from the self means not being able to connect with others authentically, not being in touch with our feelings, being unable to have boundaries, and being unable to treat ourselves kindly.

Ara: Think about that Max, that’s our Tony, Jonathan, Beastie and Fox right there. In order for us to survive, you had to disown the part of us who can confidently be himself and assumes that others can love him. You had to disown the part who is sensitive and vulnerable and feels things deeply. You had to disown the part who feels enraged when people treat us non-consensually and can let them know it’s not okay. And you had to disown the part who is a genius at gentleness and playfulness.

Max: I’d never quite seen it this way before though, that self-compassion would have been actively dangerous to us, that it would put us at such risk of being ‘not-me’. I always struggled to understand why I was so incapable of loving myself when people spoke about that.

Ara: Gabor says that when we disown those parts of us we end up prioritising attachment over authenticity, looking outside of ourselves for things we’ve disowned in ourselves, often in unboundaried relationships with work and with other people, and in addictive patterns more widely.

Max: But none of those things could really fulfill us, because we are like a mask with nothing behind it until we can reclaim those parts of ourselves, their capacities, feelings, and experiences.

Ara: I was interested in our reading on shame to hear shame described as ‘soul-murder’. That is literally what kids are encouraged to do in our culture: to murder their soul. They operate on shame logic: always pretending that they are better than human, because they are terrified that they are ‘really’ far worse than human. 

Max: But when you live like that you know that it is a pretence, and you are convinced that you really are worse, perhaps because you can sense that emptiness within you, that sense that you’ve murdered your soul. That’s precisely how I felt much of the time.

Ara: Janina describes plural work as ‘soul retrieval’: practising self-compassion one part at a time. Of course this is made more difficult by our cultural insistence that we are singular selves, or unified souls, but there are many cultures around the world who recognise multiple souls sharing a body. One even has seven as the norm, you’ll be glad to hear.

Max: I think this soul retrieval, and selves-compassion, was the main feature of our inner work for a long time actually.

Ara: The way Pema puts it is that you have to create a ‘cradle of kindness’ before you can do any of the other work of mindfulness: observing your thoughts and feelings, cultivating compassion for others, becoming comfortable with uncertainty, and so on.

Max: I always balked at that idea and tried to crack on with all the various mindful practices without that cradle of kindness. But now I think it’s right. In many ways we’ve only been able to get to our version of mindfulness now that we have selves-compassion. So interesting that the very first time we felt your presence, Ara, it was as a sense of cradling.

Ara: Jonathan felt me cradling him: our body as both cradled and cradler. I’m so sorry that I wasn’t able to give you all that sooner Max-y. I so wish that I could have cradled you through the hard times.

Max: We got to something like that occasionally I think. Janina helped to explain that experience too. Self-harm can be a way of regulating intolerable emotions. I guess the times I self-harmed were when disowned parts of us threatened to be revealed, or when I felt that they had already been seen. I felt totally overwhelmed by them, with their massive feelings of repressed rage, fear, yearning, or grief. The only way to calm them was to hit myself. After that I do remember feeling that cradling feeling: being able to put myself to bed and soothe myself, almost as if somebody else was doing it. You.

Ara: Babygirl.

Max: I know. I’m so glad that we’ve found another way now. However painful it can be at times to feel all these feelings, it’s so much better than that.

Ara: I guess the self-compassion piece of mindfulness, done in a plural way, involves welcoming all parts of yourself that you previously disowned. In our case it involves cultivating parts who are capable of deep compassion for all of you – the inner carer and protector that Beastie and James described.

Max: And what’s shifted for us in recent months is that you’ve both felt way more available to us, as we have brought you forward more and more. Like we can wake up with you to the fore, draw on you to do everyday tasks, and easily access you whenever we’re struggling. 

Ara: So cultivating a cradle of kindness, for people, could involve an act of self-excavation/self-creation to develop such inner parents. For us it began with journaling with an imagined voice – of how a kind nurturer or solid protector might speak with you if you had one.

Max: Patchworked together, in your case from memories of the kind moments we did have with caregivers and partners over the year, from Pema herself, and from a few wise, compassionate mentors we had recently: Sophia, Lokhadi, and now our current therapist. Do you include any fictional characters, the way James does, Ara?

Ara: Interestingly I think I’m more built from the real encounters we’ve had, whereas James is more built from fictional folk.

Max: I’m sure Beastie would have some theory there about the patriarchy.

Mindful observation

Ara: Okay so as well as helping us to achieve self-compassion, plurality has been a way to unlock the kind of mindful observation which has been so hard for us to date, despite you writing an entire book about it, our beautiful overachiever!

Max: I was trying to get here I guess! 

In mindfulness you’re meant to observe all the thoughts, feelings, and sensations which bubble up, by continually returning to a point of focus in the present: often the breath going in and out. But, for me, mindfulness generally involved being swept away by memories and plans, by fears and doubts, for fifteen minutes until the alarm on my phone went off and reminded me that I was rubbish at mindfulness as well as at everything else! It wasn’t always quite that bad, but not far off. 

Ara: Fortunately Pema is very open that that was her experience for a long, long time too, and still often is.

Max: So how is plurality helping us with this?

Ara: Again Beastie and James described Janina’s concept of ‘dual awareness’ at some length in their posts, including the neurobiological understanding of how it works, and some of how we’re practising it. Basically dual awareness involves one part – who is in ‘everyday life’ mode – holding whichever part is struggling, or having the tough thoughts, feelings or sensations.

Max: And that’s mindful observation unlocked right there! As soon as we can experience it as one part of us holding another, it becomes way more possible for us to do this. Can you describe a few of the times you’ve done it lately?

Ara: Mm yes, well this last week or so we’ve had the amusing image of James and myself in our tiny studio caring for five fractious kids. First we got sick, then this heatwave hit, and perhaps because you’re all finally feeling safe enough, there have been a whole lot of feelings around for everyone. The minute one of you starts crying it sets the others off, and it’s often hard to tell who is actually struggling, and what the problem is.

Max: Nice image. I’m not sure what I think of myself as a screaming child!

Ara: It fits with the tower idea too, like we’re finally safe enough to go back to our foundations, to rebuild them in a way where all of you are welcome, and all of each of your feelings are welcome too. No wonder there’s a lot of feeling there when you’ve been keeping them crushed down all this time.

Max: But we’re still not adept – shall we say – at locating the source of the feeling or what needs to be done about it.

Ara: It’s a wonderful process for me, coming to each of you in turn, exploring where you’re at, helping you to finally feel held and heard.

Max: I’m not sure whether James agrees with you about the ‘wonderful process’. He compared it to the time when our electrics went off, and he just had to turn all the fuse switches off and then flip them back on in turn, to determine which one was tripping the circuit breaker. He wishes he could just switch us all off and then back on again in turn to find out where the trouble is and fix it.

Ara: A very James response. And you know sometimes his approach reaches one of you when mine doesn’t. He’s more skilled at finding the humour in the situation, for example, which can often cut through the struggle. With Beastie that sense of the deep respect he has for her is a big deal.

Max: But you are badass with patience. I have no idea how you do it. 

Ara: I’m so glad that I can. It seems like I just know… you know that this is part of the process, that we will find our way through it, and I can help you to slow down and put a big space around it.

Max: The other night with Fox, you were looking out of the window together. It was one of those times where the trauma feelings kept flickering up in our body like lightning strikes. Each time we felt calmer, it would flash again. We were all so sick of it: just so tired, so desperate for some rest.

Ara: I held Fox under the big sky, and we just watched it happen, like watching a real thunderstorm – something we all love. Each time the trauma flashed: a moment of fear or shame, attached to a distressing thought or sensation, we named it and noticed it go away. And we remained watching the sky till the next one happened. It was like the lightning was the thought or sensation, the feeling the thunder.

Max: Which is mindful observation precisely isn’t it? To notice the thoughts, feelings, and sensations without following them or attaching to them, and without resisting them or trying to get rid of them.

Ara: James did it a different way with Jonathan later. We tried to enjoy a novel but the flashes started up again. They lay in bed together and James got curious about the feeling. What is this emotion we’re so terrified of when it flashes up? He helped Jonathan to get curious too, to feel safe enough to go towards it instead of closing his eyes, backing away, and putting the duvet over his head every time the feeling flashed. The image was of James holding Jonathan by the hand and helping him look under the bed or in the closet to check for monsters.

Max: That time when they tried to go towards the feeling there was nothing really there.

Ara: Other times there is something, and we’ll talk you through practices like focusing, or imagining it as a cell in front of us, in order to explore the feeling at a distance. Other times working through Janina’s befriending questions have helped you to feel held and heard when you’re struggling. The creative part – which I really love – is shifting the container: finding out what’s needed this time. And then that attunement feeling when you hit on just the right approach for this part on this occasion.

Max: If it was me I’d grasp hold of that – the goal of attunement – wanting to get it right. But that would fetch us right back where we started wouldn’t it?

Ara: I fear so. The beauty is in the process, not just the endpoint, as Meg-John and Justin would say about sex of course! Also, Janina points out how moments of rupture and repair are vital for building trust. So times when James or I ‘get it wrong’ but are able to realise that – or you are able to tell us – then we can acknowledge that and apologise and get curious with you about what would work better. Those times are perhaps more helpful than the times we ‘get it right’ first time, in building that sense of ‘earned secure attachment’ that he and Beastie discussed.

Max: Like when he joked that he wished we’d all calm down a bit, and Fox got the grumps with him, because they’re trying really hard to bring their difficult feelings to him now and not just be this easy, delightful kid.

Ara: The fact that Fox could express that and he could hear it and reassure them was so valuable. It’s like in therapy: rupture and repair are often the most helpful moments in building trust and showing us where our struggles are and how they manifest in our relationships.

Max: I’m thinking that too, how such moments in our inner system reflect struggles we have ‘out there’.

Ara: Always so helpful to see how things play out in here, and how that relates to how they’ve played out in the past, and how they play out in the rest of our life.

Max: So here we’re saying that dual awareness unlocks mindful observation for us. If we conceptualise it – and feel it – as a containing part of us holding another part. Then it becomes possible to sit still and observe the thoughts, feelings, and sensations with open curiosity, rather than getting caught up in them or trying to get rid of them.

Ara: Back to holding the golden object, yes. Sometimes we can just feel that sense of holder and held in silent sitting, often we use slow, gentle self talk to guide ourselves through it: like a guided meditation you might listen to. 

And I think again that the compassion piece drives the mindful observation. Because we love you so much, James and I are genuinely curious about you all and how you work. We really want to learn you better, to earn your trust, to improve our bonds with you. 

It makes sense that it’s a slow process though. As Janina says, it was adaptive in your early life to avoid comfort and self compassion, and to shame yourself and self judge before caregivers or others could find you lacking. It was also adaptive to distrust others as potentially unsafe and uncaring: to assume they will likely disappear or let you down.

Max: So hard for us now to trust even inner parts to really be able to hold us and hear us.

Ara: Such trust has to be slowly earned and built. Janina says that child selves need a palpable sense of someone very glad to see them, tender when they are wounded, unafraid when they are hostile. They need the same experience to be repeated many time over in order to trust it.

Max: That is the sense we’re developing, slowly.

Ara: I know you prefer to go fast, my little fleer.

Max: Janina says ‘slower is faster’.

Ara: She does indeed.

Embracing uncertainty

Max: So the final aspect of mindfulness that plurality seems to help us is with embracing uncertainty. This is what we talk about in Life Isn’t Binary with Alex. People – particularly in the west – tend towards binary thinking, polarising into us and them, right and wrong, good and bad… and me and not-me, I guess.

Ara: Exactly, and as Alex said in that book and elsewhere, trauma makes us polarise even more. In Life Isn’t Binary we explored various alternatives for non-binary thinking: the in-between or middle way; both/and instead of either/or; and holding multiple stories simultaneousy: embracing the paradox and uncertainty of the situation.

We’ve already explained how Janina’s plural perspective helps us to find a middle way between rejecting or disowning parts of ourselves – on the one hand – and overly identifying or merging with them – on the other. Instead of repressing emotions or reacting out of them, we can see all feelings as communication from traumatised parts and move towards them.

Max: Dual awareness is a both/and approach right? We are both the part holding and hearing the traumatised part, and we are the part being held and heard.

Ara: Yes. A misunderstanding about plurality that we’re always keen to challenge is that the aim should be to ‘integrate’ our fragmented selves into a singular self. Janina sites trauma scientist Daniel Siegel as making a strong case against defining integration as fusion. Instead he says that integration required differentiation and linkage. Before we can integrate any two phenomena we have to differentiate them as separate entities, then we can link them up. So instead of either rejecting them or merging with them, we can both discern the separate parts and (re)connect them together.

Janina also talks of holding the bothness of ourselves as one physical individual – in terms of our body and brain – and the fact that that body/brain is fragmented and holds many parts of different ages, stages, attachment styles and defensive responses. That way we get to a sense of ‘we together’ not each part ‘abandoned alone’. 

Max: That helps us to tolerate and understand the unnerving sense that we contain such radically opposing capacities. For example for the last year or so we’ve felt impossibly fragile, as well as knowing that we can be pretty robust. And now simultaneously we can feel that vivid sense of being cradled and of cradling.

Ara: Yes. For quite a long time we felt each one of us come to the fore separately, never together. It’s been under two years that we’ve come to sense two of us together simultaneously: initially mostly when we wrote dialogue in our journal, then increasingly in verbal conversation between our parts, and now much of the time there is a vivid sense of two of us present at once.

Max: What about embracing paradox and uncertainty.

Ara: I have a few thoughts about this. One relates to the cradle of kindness. While we were building that cradle together – bringing each of us forward and nurturing the bonds between us – we were terribly polite to each other, in a way.

Max: Yes, there was a weird sense that we agreed on most things, even though we knew that we were radically different characters, driven by very different motivations.

Ara: That loving kindness between us that we so desperately needed perhaps required us to all pull in the same direction for a while.

Max: And there’s a sense of our inner system replicating early outer ones, where it didn’t feel safe enough to ‘rock the boat’, and we were all very scared of hurting each other, or of ‘ruining the day’ for other parts. Each of us tried to remain in our most palatable forms: Fox being delightful and pretending not to be scared, Beastie being forthright but never letting herself fly off the handle, and so on.

Ara: This last month we’ve noticed less politeness, and much more sense of the inner conflicts being available to us.

Max: As soon as it began you took that as a good sign.

Ara: I’m sure it is. Because Pema and Janina agree that embracing uncertainty, being comfortable with not-knowing, and holding paradox are vital life skills. We’ve written before about the Buddhist teachings on accepting praise and blame, success and failure, pleasure and pain, fame and disgrace as part of life, in fact questioning which counts as which.

Max: Who knows what’s good or bad?

Ara: Janina talks about how all of us contain the seeming opposites of vulnerability and control, shame and pride, longing to be seen and to be invisible, preferring closeness and distance, clinging to others and pushing them away. Understanding our plurality enables us to contain all of that within this system, and work with it to ensure everyone is heard and has their needs respected, rather than pretending that everybody wants the same thing.

Max: Going back to each part as a trauma response pattern, she suggests that attach wants help, love, and protection. Fawn wants to please. Fight wants control. Flight wants safe distance. And freeze wants to stay invisible.

Ara: Although in our case freeze did set up our Instagram account.

Max: To share pictures of animals, not of us though. Although we do occasionally allow Tony to get a selfie in!

Ara: The ability to tolerate paradox and to embrace uncertainty is so vital in the work we’re doing. For a start, as I said before, what we’re doing requires adaptability: an ever-shifting container to hold and hear parts in the way they need each time they are present. That’s much like how actual parents need to adapt how they respond to their different children, in different emotional states, and as they grow over time.

Also there is a huge paradox that learning to do things differently to how we’ve done them in the past can actually cause more tough feelings before we get to a point of feeling more able to deal with them. This makes sense because we’re letting go of our long-held habits and survival strategies, with only faith to go on that the newer ones we’re developing are really going to be more helpful.

Janina describes the paradox that as soon as we relax our anxiety escalates, because softening, letting our guard down, and trusting ourselves or others, have always felt dangerous.

Max: That’s one I experience a lot.

Ara: Pete Walker likens trying new habits to going to the dentist. You know that it will bring more pain in the short term, but less in the long term. 

Max: The area of life that happens in all the time at the moment is around boundaries. We’re trying so hard to honestly let people know what our boundaries are around the type and amount of contact we want. We know that such things should be consensual: that people in our life shouldn’t ask of us to have more contact, or contact of different kinds, than we actually want. That would be just as non-consensual as asking a partner to have more sex, or sex of different kinds, than they actually want.

But pretty much every time somebody assumes that we’ll want a kind – or amount – of contact that’s more than what we want, we go into a trauma response. It can take hours, even days, to process the fear/shame feelings and to formulate a reply to that person which feels both kind and honest.

Ara: I’ve held you through that one a few times haven’t I, using the befriending questions?

Max: Yep, I know where it comes from now: all the times my boundaries have been violated. I’m so scared the person will just push through, will annihilate me, if I hold my boundary. And I guess Jonathan – our fawn part – feels as though we need to give people what they want or they’ll abandon us.

Ara: Luckily we have Beastie now who can bring clarity and protection to those situations, and Tony who doesn’t mind being ‘a bit crap’, rather than feeling he always has to go the extra mile for people who aren’t treating us very well or respecting our boundaries.

Max: But we notice the paradox that doing the thing that’s better for us in the long run, can bring up more trauma and pain in the short term. So we can’t use the intensity of our trauma feelings as any measure of how well we’re doing at all this.

Ara: That can be really confusing love, no wonder you feel frightened and self-doubting at times. This work requires such a leap into the unknown.

Max: Now then, you know that you can always get me on board with a Frozen reference don’t you?

Ara: Just let it go Max-y *chuckles* You are so our Elsa. 

Plurality helps us to be with those paradoxes and uncertainties. Of course parts of us are soothed by us holding our boundaries, but other parts of us are scared by it because people have pushed, or rejected us, when we did that in the past. Parts of us long to trust me and James to hold them through this time, and other parts are very reluctant to trust. Parts of us would love to expand out into the world again, and other parts are terrified by the prospect. As Janina says, it’s about being up for engaging with all those parts, and about having a steady inner presence to hold the bothness. 

Coming home

Max: Nearly there Ara. D’you wanted to finish with coming home?

Ara: It seems appropriate. Just click your heels three times Max-y! Yes this was one final theme we saw in Janina’s plural/trauma writing that rang bells with our Buddhist reading. In fact the Wizard of Oz reference is apt.

Max: It’s one of many childhood tales where a person travels to a fantasy land and meets all these characters, but then has to come back to the ‘real world’ and ‘grow up’. 

Ara: Winnie the Pooh, Peter Pan, Labyrinth, Alice in Wonderland, the list goes on and on. An alternative plural reading of such fiction is that in childhood we have this capacity to be all these parts, with different characteristics. Our culture – for the last century or so – has forced us to kill off those capacities in order to be what we perceive as ‘adult’: a singular, consistent, rational, self. 

Max: Many of the so-called ‘adults’ are causing untold destruction at the moment in the name of keeping hold of that way of life.

Ara: It relates also to the ways that ‘the other’ has always been portrayed as more ‘childlike’ or ‘primitive’ in order to justify oppressing them: women, disabled people, people of different races or nationalities, the working classes.

So perhaps we might want to flip the ‘home’ that Dorothy longs to return to as Oz, rather than Auntie Em’s. Whatever the case, welcoming home is a key theme in both plurality and Buddhism. Janina says:

“Resolution of past painful events cannot truly be achieved without reclaiming the lost children and disowned parts of ourselves, extending to them a helping hand, welcoming them ‘home’ at long last, creating safety for them, and making them feel wanted, needed, and valued.”

Max: In many of her case-studies Janina encourages clients who are holding traumatised child-parts to show them that they have a safe home which they live in now: like to literally to take them around that space.

Ara: We do that too. Looking around our room and telling the stories of various objects can be a soothing and grounding activity for our traumatised parts. We even bought an armchair which we felt was a good representation of me and James, as the chair we go to when we needed to be heard and held.

Max: That was the most money we’ve ever spent on ourselves, other than for our top surgery which brought Jonathan forward, and for the fox tattoo on our arm. How interesting.

Ara: Inner parents and children are worth a few quid it seems!

Imagining the fantasy home that we all live in together, and where each of us are in or around that home, can work in a similar way to looking around our actual home.

Max: Finding Jonathan a place in the kitchen – the heart of the house – has helped him a lot lately. He can nourish us all, and listen to all our feelings as he cooks without getting overwhelmed by them.

Ara: It’s such a good alternative to the chalkboard room where he was disconnected from us all, and stuck trying to figure out all that confusing emotional input. It’d be great to keep talking between us about our roles and spaces within that imaginary home.

Max: Recently a plural system tweeted about how many plurals imagine a house like this, some larger innerworlds or mindscapes.

Ara: Shaping our imaginary homes is a nice way of reshaping our inner system along different lines to those that originally shaped it, having gone all the way back down to our foundations. Moving between fantasy and reality in this way is something we’ve always found very helpful.

Max: Like tuning into what our fantasies tell us about where we’re at, what our fears and yearnings are. And also using fantasies as ways to deliberately try different ways of relating.

Ara: Recently we tried deliberately meeting all of our ‘shadow’ sides in fantasy. That was powerful. 

I also wanted to mention somatic elements to our work here: increasingly embodied touch is something we now bring into the holding and hearing time.

Max: Mm, like self-talk, nurturing self-touch is not something that people are encouraged to do. It’s seen as pretty weird.

Ara: We need a whole further post to cover how solo talking and solo touch are stigmatised, while talking and touching with others are encouraged. And if you are going to solo-touch, then erotic touch is allowable, but not nurturing touch: cuddles, strokes, and the like. That’s similar with fantasies too, few people try nurturing fantasies even though they might try erotic ones. Sari Van Anders’ theory would suggest that we should treat the solo and partnered, and the nurturing and erotic, aspects of our experience as equally valid.

Max: How does the welcoming home part relate to Buddhism Ara? 

Ara: I’m reminded of Manu Bazzano’s work on hospitality. In Buddhism the aim is to be able to welcome all sentient beings: the image of inviting them all into your home for a feast. That’s one that Jonathan would like. Islamic poet, Rumi, captures a similar idea in his poem The Guest House, which Zen Pencils did a great comic of here: very plural.

James and Beastie didn’t love Janina’s idea of the ‘getting on with normal life’ part. But towards the end of the book she suggests ‘host’ as an alternative word for this part: like they are hosting the other parts, and their body is literally a host for all. Janina says that you need a host, otherwise the kids feel ‘home alone’.

Max: This sounds like what Beastie and I were discussing in our accompany not abandon post. If we can welcome all of our parts home, then we’ll be better able to welcome all sentient beings, because there’s nothing ‘out there’ that we aren’t somewhat familiar with ‘in here’. Part of why the outer world has always been so frightening to me is that I was encountering things out there that I was terrified of in myself: particularly other people who criticised me, became angry with me, or demanded too much of me.

Ara: Recently we realised that the responses you fear when we hold our boundaries are other people becoming furious, or them feeling abandoned. Interestingly those relate very much to the ways in which our Beastie or Tony might respond: our two most disowned parts.

We can see plural work as a way of welcoming all parts of us home, and mindfulness as an act of hospitality towards ourselves, no matter what. Janina suggests that if we do this work it will have a knock on effect on our relationships with others as well. We’ll be better able to tolerate them not being there, and keep our hearts open when they are.

Check out the previous two blog posts in this series to find out more about the theory and practice of plurality and trauma. For much more on plurality, check out the plural work page on our website.

Patreon link: If you liked this, please feel free to support our Patreon.

Plural tag: This post was written by Ara and Max.

The post Plural mindfulness / mindful plurality appeared first on Rewriting The Rules.

It turns out these two have a lot to say so we’ve divided the post into two: The first post dealt with understanding plurality from this trauma-informed perspective. This second post deals with working with plurality in practice. A further post to follow covers how these ideas and practices link to mindfulness.

James: Are you back with me Beastie?

Beastie: Yep, time to continue our conversation. One of the delights of plurality is that different parts have different ideas about the best ways to spend our time, so it’s been a couple of days since you and I had a chance to sit down to this.

James: Fox is off in the hills or dreaming up drawings, Max is still deep in her trauma healing, Tony needed to go swimming with friends apparently.

Beastie: And Ara seems to think that sitting still is just as valuable as all the studying and writing that you and I want to do.

James: I know right? It’s an interesting co-parenting arrangement that she and I have.

Beastie: I’m struck that teasing is probably our main inner love language. I really hope that translates in our written conversations! 

James: Me too. I’m honestly not sure it would be possible to love all of you more than I do. Teasing Tony about his ego, or Ara about her openness to woo, definitely comes from a place of deep love and respect. Like what would we do without one part who actually thinks we’re awesome most of the time, or one who is open to life’s mysteries which keep hitting us over the head?

Beastie: You get to be all mushy in this post old man, don’t worry, it’s coming.

James: Alright then Beasie, heh maybe we’ll get to see the softer side of you too.

Beastie: We’ll see about that. Anyway, to recap on the last post. In that one we explained this understanding of people as being divided into parts: each of which represents one of the survival strategies of fight, fawn, flight, freeze, and attach. Child and adolescent parts of us remain stuck in those patterns – and in the times in the past when they developed, so when we are retraumatised, or triggered, they feel like it’s all still going on.

The trick is to recognise – when we’re triggered or reactive – that it is not the whole of us who is struggling, but just a part. Then we can cultivate ‘dual awareness’ where a part who is not struggling can help the part who is. In this post we’re going to dig deeper into how we actually do that.

James: Alright, let’s do this.

No part gets left behind

Beastie: I loved this phrase in the book: no part gets left behind. It reminded me of the TV show Sense8 which was a hard plural relate for us when we watched it.

James: A cluster of people who can experience the same things and occupy the same body, who all bring different skills and struggles to the team. Dunno what was familiar about that to you Beastie.

Beastie: Gosh it’s good though. A crime it got cancelled. Oof now I’m super tempted to do an aside about which of us is closest to which character…

James: I’ll take tough Wolfgang with a hint of good-guy Will.

Beastie: Tony is obviously Lito *eye roll*.

James: Jonathan’s Capheus. Aw, I love Capheus.

Beastie: I think Fox would be closest to Kala; Max to Riley.

James: Making you Sun, of course. And leaving Ara as Nomi. I’m so intrigued whether plural experience was a part of the Wachowski’s inspiration for this show. 

Beastie: Fascinating that the cluster connect through various erotic, romantic, and close friendship bonds too, no?

James: Indeed. But we got sidetracked. Our point here was that Sense8 has that same ethos of ‘no part gets left behind’. A few times they are faced with a challenge where it makes sense to leave somebody in danger, and they insist on bringing everyone along, even when that puts the cluster at greater risk.

Beastie: And by the end it is clear the same applies to the ‘sidekicks’ as well. Everybody is equally valued, equally important.

James: I guess this is another place where we were already on it with Janina’s perspective. Ever since realising that we were seven we’ve had that sense that it’s vital to bring everyone forward equally; to regard everyone as having just as much to offer.

Beastie: Whether they have been foregrounded or backgrounded through our life, whether they are grown-up or childlike, strong or gentle.

James: Janina describes a couple of challenges in this process with clients. First they have to recognise that they have vulnerable child parts, then that they have challenging adolescent parts, who often come in to block the process in some way.

Beastie: Right. With the vulnerable children the challenge is to recognise that we really have parts to us who are that vulnerable and fragile, but they tend to be very easy to love once we’ve found them. Teenage parts are often more challenging because they can seem harsh, critical, angry, even highly destructive. This maps onto what we’ve written about elsewhere about how important it is to own the parts of us who have been victims/survivors, and the parts of us who are capable of oppressive or abusive behaviour: if we are to engage helpfully in social justice, that is.

James: The trick with the more challenging parts is to assume that they are being sensible – given the life that they’ve had – and that they are probably trying to protect the whole, or the vulnerable ones, even though it may seem like the opposite. Ring any bells Beastie?

Beastie: Yeah, teen me seemed to think the way to protect us was to scream hateful abuse at us constantly. I’m not proud.

James: But it makes sense in a life where we had to learn very complex contradictory rules about how to be in order not to be attacked or abandoned by the people around us. To have a loud inner critic to keep ‘reminding’ us of the rules was essential to survival, if not particularly pleasant.

Beastie: That’s an understatement. So Janina describes many times working with a client to take care of their frightened child parts, and then suddenly an angry, sabotaging, sceptical or destructive part pops up. The thing you can do then is to shift the work to that part, treating it just as respectfully.

James: And she suggests shifting the tone too. Child parts need a really gentle, soothing tone, and simple language. Sometimes they even communicate non-verbally. Teen parts need straightforward language. Janina suggests asking clients how they would communicate with an actual troubled teen, and going with that.

Beastie: Vulnerable child parts often want reassuring that they are safe and loved, whereas tough teen parts want to know they are respected and honoured – like war veterans – for how they helped us to survive. All parts need to be spoken with truthfully too.

James: You and Max wrote last time about how things shifted dramatically for us when we befriended you Beastie. That was a turning point, when we quit fighting you and finally embraced you.

Beastie: And we’ve kept that as our rule now. Whatever part turns up, or whatever aspect of a part, however resistant or scary, we welcome them home.

James: Janina says that when we can welcome home the hurt, lost, and lonely parts, self hatred and disconnection can transform into self-compassion.

Beastie: Again deep resonance for us. The idea of loving ourselves was entirely impossible to us as a single individual. Loving our parts from the perspective of other parts is easy.

James: The metaphor of home is helpful here too. Janina notices that child parts often feel stuck in dangerous home places of the past. She helps adult clients to literally show those parts the safer homes they inhabit now, to bring them home there.

Beastie: We do some of that. Finding a safe-enough physical home space has certainly been important to us. But we also imagine a fantasy home that we live in as separate selves. That can be a safe place to go to when things get hard, a good location for internal conversations, and a space to play in our imagination. The child parts find it soothing to imagine where each of us is in that space at the end of the day, or when they are struggling. Janina says that ‘imagined experiences of safe attachment can generate the same feelings and sensations and evoke the same attunement bliss’ as actual experiences.

Holding and hearing

James: Okay we should say more about Janina’s practice. We’ve explained that trauma responses can be understood as merging or blending with traumatised younger parts, but how do we cultivate the ‘dual awareness’ or ‘parallel process’ required to un-merge? 

Beastie: Janina describes how to do this in the therapy room: the therapist guides the client to always use the language of ‘a part of me feels…’ rather than ‘I feel…’, and then to engage in internal conversation with that part. If they start to merge, she gets the client to ask the traumatised part if they would mind sitting back a little. She explains that parts usually feel safer and more relaxed when that happens. It makes them feel unsafe to be that merged, and it is a relief to unmerge.

James: That makes sense. So the alternative to merging or blending is dual awareness. As we said last time, Janina refers to this as the ‘getting on with normal life’ part taking care of the traumatised part. In our case it is whichever part – often a parental part – who feels in the ‘C’ place: able to access compassion, clarity, calm, etc. That part looks after whichever part is in the ‘F’ place…

Beastie: …freaking out or trying to figure everything out, with the five F survival strategies.

James: Mm. And the mantra here is ‘hold and hear’. A part who is struggling needs to know that they are held safe enough, and that the other part is hearing them well. It can take a while to locate which part is struggling, to separate from them enough that they feel held, and to find the way that they like to be heard. But with practice we get used to the process of finding what works each time.

Beastie: Right, it’s like being up for being flexible and shifting the container to find out what’s needed each time. Who needs to be held and heard? Who do they need it from? What does holding and hearing look like this time? And there can often be a real sense of clicking – and nervous system relaxing – when we get there.

James: I’m also struck that this process relates to what we’re aiming for in our outer relationships now too Beastie. That move from fear/shame trauma responses to a combination of protection and connection.

Beastie: Right, the holding provides that sense of being protected enough and safe enough to come forward. The hearing is the connection piece, feeling really heard and understood.

The befriending questions

James: One piece of solid gold this book has given us are the befriending questions. That’s a set of simple questions to ask the part who is struggling.

Beastie: Every time I think it’s not going to work – that it can’t apply in this case. And pretty much every time it’s been an incredibly helpful process. There are other practices that Janina suggests too, like showing the child selves that they are safe now, or working with them to figure out which aspects of everyday life they want to engage with and which they don’t. But these befriending questions would be the central practice: the questions to ask in order to hear a part once you have got them sitting with you.

James: Here are the questions. You identify a part that is in some kind of distress. Then you ask them:

1. ‘What are you worried about if you…?’ (e.g. say ‘no’, read that message, see those people)
2. When they reply, ask them, ‘what are you worried about if [repeat exact description they gave] really does come true?’
3. When they reply, ask them, ‘if those worries that [repeat exact description they gave] really do happen, what are you worried will happen next?’ Keep repeating this question until the core fear is reached, often a fear of annihilation of self, or abandonment by others.
4. Acknowledge that fear by mirroring it back to them, then ask them ‘What do you need from me right here, right now, to not be so afraid of…?’ You’re looking for a small enough, sufficiently concrete thing that can definitely be met by you.

Beastie: Wanna role play it with me old man?

James: Oh go on then, am I talking to old struggling Beastie?

Beastie: Yep and she’s a hot mess. Somebody just assumed we’d do something for them that we really don’t want to do. She wants to tell them where to go.

James: Okay Beastie. I feel your rage and it’s welcome indeed. But are you up for exploring this a bit with me first before we do anything.

Beastie: Did you see what they did? Those fuckers. I’ve got to show them how non-consensual that is.

James: I’m so up for a conversation about what we might communicate with them in a bit, but you know when these strong responses come up it’s often a good opportunity to understand each other better. I really want to understand what’s going on for you here.

Beastie: Alright, I guess.

James: Thank-you. I promise we’re going to take this seriously.

Beastie: Okay. Ask your damn questions.

James: What are you worried about if we don’t tell them where to go immediately?

Beastie: We’ll wind up doing this thing they’re asking for, allowing them to treat us this way.

James: And if we wind up doing it: allowing them to treat us that way? What are you worried will happen if we do that?

Beastie: They’ll keep doing it more and more. 

James: And if they keep doing it more and more? What are you worried will happen next?

Beastie: I hate it.

James: What do you hate?

Beastie: It’s this image of us, with like these knives getting in, like they’re intruding on us, and there’s nothing we can do.

James: I can see it Beastie, that image. Can you put a word to it?

Beastie: Invasion, annihilation, it’s like there’ll be nothing left of us.

James: That’s spot on. You described it well. That fear we have of people treating us that way and us just being annihilated by it. Can you tell me what you need from me right here, right now, to not be so afraid of this happening?

Beastie: I get what you’re saying about not responding right away, while this is so live. But could you help me write some bullet points of what I want to convey about how we need to be treated? Then we can agree to return to those in a few days and turn that into an email if it still feels right.

James: You need to know that the rest of us are going to listen to you, to take this seriously, to make sure we’re clear that we can’t offer what they demanded from us.

Beastie: Oo now you’re going off script.

James: Phew that got pretty real actually.

Beastie: You doing okay old man?

James: Are you?

Beastie: Yeah. Maybe a little pause before we continue. Thanks for being up for that.

James: You’re very welcome.

Emotional attunement 

Beastie: Ah that’s better. What’re we on? Attunement. Great, now for the bit where you get mushy.

James: Hmph.

Beastie: So these next bits relate to what we’ve been learning about shame and trauma more widely. This sense that the aim is ‘emotional regulation’, ‘expanding the window of tolerance’, and ‘earned secure attachment’. 

What you’re trying to do is to learn how to regulate emotions that come up rather than being flooded by them, so that you can tolerate them more easily over time. That involves meeting yourself like a parent should meet a child with a tough feeling. We wrote about this particularly in the post about Pat de Young’s book on shame. She said that chronic shame was caused by not having our emotions regulated as kids, and that we could learn to do it now. That would lead us towards that ‘earned secure attachment’. 

James: Kids who aren’t emotionally regulated like that are likely to form insecure attachments with caregivers – and later others – in various ways. Kids who are emotionally regulated by their caregivers can form more secure attachments. They know that they have a safe place to return to from their explorations where they will be emotionally regulated (rather than being punished or ignored, or evoking stress in their caregiver, for example). 

This ‘earned secure attachment’ idea suggests that we can learn to do this emotional regulation for ourselves if we haven’t had it as kids. Back to the neuroscience, we are retraining our brain and our nervous system by holding and hearing those trauma responses or overwhelming emotional states.

Beastie: Which we can do because of neuroplasticity. Follow a different neural path enough times when these things happen and we’ll eventually respond to potentially triggering situations with curiosity and containment rather than overwhelm, melt down, shut down, or fragmenting.

James: So I notice you’ve called this section ‘emotional attunement’ rather than ‘emotional regulation’ Beastie, why is that?

Beastie: Still trying to avoid the mushy part James? Okay I’ll bite, it’s because of neoliberal capitalism.

James: Of course it is.

Beastie: Think about the language ‘emotional regulation’. I don’t like it. It suggests that emotions are a problem, something to be regulated – presumably by rationality – rather than being immensely valuable. There’s a disturbingly patriarchal and colonialist legacy right there. We’re watching the documentary The Century of The Self at the moment. It demonstrates the roots of the consumer capitalist model – which is responsible for climate crisis, the rich/poor divide, exploitation and dehumanisation, huge mental and physical health problems…

James: ..the eroding of real democracy, everything bad basically. 

Beastie: It’s rooted in psychoanalytic thinking, particularly the ideas of Anna Freud that people need to learn how to regulate their unconscious forces by bringing in the rational ego. Anna and co encouraged people to do this in order to conform to normality (which at the time meant a whole bunch of misogynist, homophobic, racist ways of being). And many of the people who drew on her ideas back then believed that they – as the elite – should control the irrational unconscious forces of the masses, making them into docile consumers who would cause no trouble and keep the economy going.

James: And we’re living through the terrifying end result of this approach to humanity. I can see why you’re not keen on ‘regulation’ Beastie.

Beastie: It also doesn’t accurately capture what these authors are actually describing James. I think ‘emotional attunement’ is a much better word for it.

James: Agreed. When we are holding and hearing one of us who is struggling, we’re not trying to regulate them into shutting up. In fact, trying to do that was the problem. When we used to try to repress these parts – and their feelings – that damaged us, leaving us disconnected from ourselves and from others. 

Beastie: Or the parts and their feelings just got louder and louder because they were being ignored, or ended out reacting when in such states. Not helpful either

James: So the aim of attunement is that we stay with that part, demonstrating to them how much we welcome them, how we are able to hold them, and how we are interested and committed to hearing them.

Beastie: And when we find that click moment, where they feel truly held and heard, that is emotional attunement…

James: Okay now I’ll get mushy about it. So the books we’ve been reading describe emotional attunement as like the feeling a parent gets with a child. It’s that state that a parent and child go into when the parent has figured out exactly what that child needs and has provided it.

Beastie: ‘Are you crying because you’re tired? Because you need changing? Oh no you’re hungry, here’s your bottle…’

James: And then both parent and child go into that blissful state. That’s emotional attunement.

Beastie: We had another smug moment realising we’d already got to this with each other before reading Janina’s book.

James: But that’s been the part of plurality that we’ve perhaps found most difficult – embarrassing even – to convey to others.

Beastie: Indeed. We’ve gone from not even being able to conceptualise what loving ourself could be like, to experiencing moments of deep emotional attunement with ourself, which feel precisely like that feeling of parent/child bliss, falling in love, or the afterglow of sex.

James: Indeed they sometimes actually are those things, if they’re between parts which feel a parent/child bond, a romantic bond, and/or an erotic connection.

Beastie: Tell us about your feels old man!

James: Okay well this week I had the parent/child version with Fox. They’d dragged us up to one of their favourite outside spaces and taken a bunch of pictures of flowers and animals, and we were walking home all sun-soaked and tired, and they were chatting away to me, and… honestly Beastie when it’s like that I just find it hard to believe that somebody looking at us would not see a tall man walking hand in hand with a little kid. It feels so vividly like two different people. And I looked down at them with such love and fondness, and such wonder you know? That this delightful part of us exists and wants to be with me. Is that mushy enough for you?

Beastie: You did good *grin* So I guess we’d already found our way to attunement moments with each other in various different ways. We can also get there by joking together…

James: The teasing. It’s like we’re getting to know each other better and better so those jokes come from that place of deep understanding of each of our foibles.

Beastie: Like knowing it’ll embarrass you to be so open about your feelings, for example.

James: Like that, yes.

Beastie: And we can reach a similar sense of attunement in romantic or erotic moments, whether in fantasy or reality, or the in-between.

James: The other day I pulled you up to dance with me after we finished writing.

Beastie: To Stevie Wonder no less, very smooth.

James: I love that it’s me you come to to have these conversations Beastie.

Beastie: And I love that our inner prof respects me and my ideas so much, it’s a good counterbalance to all the patriarchal bullshit we’ve had to endure.

James: I do respect you Beastie: deep respect for your ideas and how they develop our thinking.

Beastie: Okay, okay enough. So I guess we’re saying that any kind of emotional attunement you can get between parts is awesome. And specifically – drawing on Janina’s work – it’s good to aim for that when a part is struggling, in other words when any tough emotion, thought, or sensation comes up.

James: Which is a great way of flipping that experience, so that each time it happens it’s an opportunity to find attunement, and to keep moving towards that part with curiosity until we’ve found it. That’s a radical shift from any tough experience feeling like it’s a bad sign, or something we should avoid.

Earned secure attachment and inner parents

Beastie: A little more on earned secure attachment and inner parents?

James: This perhaps relates more to Pete Walker’s work on cPTSD, although Pat De Young writes about earned secure attachment too. One of the bits of Pete’s book which really stuck with us was the idea of ‘reparenting yourself and reparenting by committee.’

Beastie: That’s what we’ve been aiming at since reading his book. How to provide yourself with care and protection, and to cultivate multiple relationships where you receive that kind of care and protection too.

James: Reparenting by committee means that you don’t put that on one person – as we can so easily do in codependent-type relationships – but rather you develop your support system of people who you turn to for care and protection, as well as offering that too.

Beastie: Hold your horses James, we’ll get to plurality and external relationships in a sec.

James: Okay, okay. So the sense we have is that a key aim here is to cultivate an ‘earned secure attachment’. This would mean that we were less flooded by tough emotions and trauma responses because we would trust our own capacity to attune to ourselves, and to care-for and protect ourselves, when those things came up. Practising emotional attunement with all parts of us, in all situations, is the way of moving towards that earned secure attachment.

Beastie: And inner parent parts are pivotal in that – we think. There isn’t much about that in Janina’s book – it’s more a sense that the ‘getting on with normal life’ adult part is the inner parent. But Sarah Peynton, Pete Walker, and others have more of a sense of cultivating specific inner nurturers, protectors, or wise witnessing parts, however they describe them.

James: And I guess that’s what we have done with me and Ara.

Beastie: It almost felt like building you out of patchwork. Mm, like we said in our previous conversation James, an act of excavation and creation simultaneously: finding what was always already there, and deliberately shaping you both and bringing you forward. You feel like a combination of memories of attuned moments we had with actual family members, teachers, companion animals, etc., as well as our relationships with a few great therapists, supervisors, and mentors along the way, and a lot of examples in fiction that we draw on.

James: My starting point being queer James Bond, although now our littlest one is addicted to hospital dramas I’m becoming more of a combination of Richard Webber from Grey’s Anatomy and Daniel Charles from Chicago Med.

Beastie: Fox is bizarrely obsessed with Dr. Charles right now. 

James: Our first experience of Ara was one of emotional attunement huh? Jonathan felt that sense of being cradled, after we started our process towards gender surgery.

Beastie: Now we have that cradling feeling more and more. I guess the point here that all people have these potentials in themselves, even if woven together from the merest scraps of memories and fictional examples. And we can all work on developing and strengthening parental parts, or whatever we want to call them. Perhaps caring and protective parts is less loaded.

James: I can’t even with the shift we’ve experienced in this. A few months back we rarely felt me or Ara around much, whereas now we can have whole days where one of us is to the fore in our everyday life, and/or much of our time is spent in dialogue between one of the two of us and other parts.

Outer relationships: Delegating our parts to others

Beastie: I think this gets us to the final issue that we want to touch upon, although I expect it’s one we’ll return to in more depth in future. One reason why we didn’t have much access to you and Ara in the past is because we didn’t understand how we needed to cultivate parental parts for ourselves.

James: Right, so one thing we did was to look for other people – mainly partners – to be that for us. And another thing we did was to offer us – me and/or Ara – to other people, rather than learning how to be that for ourselves.

Beastie: I guess this is the piece we’re least proud of. It seems so obvious now that we’ve done all this reading. But we’ve hurt others and ourselves a lot by trying to be that kind of parent for them, and by trying to find that kind of parent in them. What does Janina have to say about this?

James: She cites Judith Herman who said that trauma leaves us with desperation for an omnipotent rescuer. She also points out that therapists have often done damage in the past by assuming that their role is to become that attachment figure for a client, and to work with the relationship in that way. She sees the therapeutic role instead as facilitating the client to find the capacity in themselves to parent their traumatised inner child and teen parts. She writes a good bit about how to explain this to clients, and to side step attempts by them – and temptations in yourself – to take on that role.

Beastie: This has been so helpful in understanding how we want our relationships of all kinds to be. When we feel drawn by somebody else into that kind of role, perhaps through them pedestalling us or assuming that we can parent them, we now feel highly uncomfortable. We try to discuss openly where our boundaries are, and how we might facilitate them finding that capacity in themselves, if indeed we have that to offer in that relationship. We can also notice when one of us has fallen into projecting this kind of thing onto somebody else.

James: That one of us often being Tony.

Beastie: Now we realise that he’s our ‘attach’ part, yep.

James: There’s something so important about empowerment and disempowerment here. To take on a parental role for another person’s child parts is inherently disempowering, however great it might feel for all concerned. It so easily leads to dynamics where the child parts become dependent on that person to feel safe, or where that person simply can’t sustain that level of ‘parenting’ and the child parts become retraumatised. Instead we need to trust others to find their own inner parents, whichever way works for them. That’s far more empowering for them, and less risky for everyone involved.

Beastie: Writing like Janina’s, and hopefully ours, might help people to find something of a route-map for this, but nobody should ever be offering to do it for another person, or telling them how to do it. Everyone has to find their own path, ideally well-supported with others who understand this work and are doing it alongside them, and/or facilitating them in it.

James: I’m struck that the internal process Janina describes requires de-blending, or un-meshing from our parts, and how that relates to doing the same in relationships with others. It doesn’t help anybody to become blended or enmeshed, as we do when we unconsciously enter stuck parent-child dynamics in relationships. Remaining separate and mutual is the thing.

Beastie: Back to being both protected and connected.

James: Okay another 5000 words for part 2 of our epic blog post Beastie. Time for another break before we come back, write a summary, and put it out there.

Beastie: Plan.

Plural superpowers

James: So we’d like to end by suggesting that plurality is a superpower.

Beastie: I mean we would say that wouldn’t we? But I think Janina agrees. First she points out that fragmenting or compartmentalisation is only ‘pathological’ when it is unconscious. It is a natural response to trauma. It enables us to survive. And when we make conscious use of it, it can make us incredibly strong.

James: For a start, cultivating dual awareness means that we’re far less likely to get reactive and hurt others and ourselves out of that reactivity. But beyond that, when we’re conscious of all our parts, and able to bring them forward or allow them to retreat, we can find the ‘right part for the job’: the part with mastery in that area. Like the times we’ve found Tony for public speaking, or Ara for facilitating a workshop, or you for holding our boundaries Beastie. The feeling is extraordinary when one of us is in their element, and it connects way better with others too.

Beastie: I think there’s way more to discover here. Like the kind of art that might emerge from playful Fox rather than productive Max, or what it will be like to bring Jonathan’s capacity for emotional empathy to relationships when he’s not so overwhelmed.

James: Heh right now it’s more like the bit in the superhero movie where the hero realises they have powers but has no idea how to use them.

Beastie: Spidey crashing into buildings and getting goo everywhere.

James: We’re so using that superhero theme for our next graphic guide on mental health Beastie.

Beastie: I can’t wait. Let’s end with a list of the key practices here.

James: Great writing with you Beastiegirl.

Beastie: Right back atcha.

Repeat the following (repetition is soothing and required for neuroplastic shift) 

• Recognise all feelings and triggered reactions as sensible communications from a part (e.g. expressing worries, attempting to find solutions, up/down regulating emotions)
• Elicit a felt sense of that part and respond curiously from differentiated adult part
• Emphasise the togetherness of adult and child: holding and hearing
• Encourage reciprocal communication, attending to how each part feels and responds
• Use the four befriending questions
• Anything that doesn’t work is an opportunity to learn and develop trust (e.g. if a part backs away let them know you understand why)
• Maximise moments of attunement, stay embodied
• All parts are equally valuable so bring them forward equally – no part gets left behind
• Check in with everybody regularly to let them know that they are held in mind and get curious how they’re doing
• Cultivate compassion for all parts and communication and trust within each dyad

Check out the first blog post in this series to find out more about the theory around plurality and trauma.

Patreon link: If you liked this, please feel free to support my Patreon.

Plural tag: This post was written by Beastie and James.

The post Plurality and trauma – 2 – practices appeared first on Rewriting The Rules.

It turns out these two have a lot to say so we’ve divided the post into two: The first post deals with understanding plurality from this trauma-informed perspective. The second post deals with working with plurality and trauma in practice. A further post to follow covers how these ideas and practices link to mindfulness.

Beastie: Ready to shoot the breeze with me again James?

James: Always Beastie.

Beastie: I’m glad we finally got around to this post.

James: Worth waiting for this moment I think. Janina’s book filled in so many of the missing pieces for us. 

Beastie: And affirmed much of where we’d already got to ourselves, drawing together our learning on trauma with our experience of plurality. I felt quite smug reading parts of the book. Like ‘we got there all by ourselves, nice going.’

James: Should we explain what we’re intending to do in this blog post?

Beastie: Right, well we considered doing another book review post like we did on the books by Pete Walker, Pat de Young, and to some extent David Treleaven. But that would’ve been a lot because we basically highlighted something on every page of Janina’s book. Also we’re more interested in digging into some of the key ideas and practices, and how we’ve been applying them, rather than just summarising it.

James: Yep. We’d certainly recommend the entire book to anybody who this blog post resonates with. 

I’d also like to start with my usual point that this stuff is relevant to everybody, no matter how extreme or mild their experience of trauma, or how muted or vivid their experience of plurality. We all get reactive and experience overwhelming feelings at times. And it’s valuable for everybody to locate that reactivity and emotion in parts of themselves rather than in the whole of themselves, in order to work through it rather than becoming stuck in it.

Beastie: I mean who isn’t traumatised during a pandemic? And who doesn’t disown parts of themselves growing up under the shaming self-policing system of neoliberal capitalism. Am I right?

James: As you are about so many things Beastiegirl.

Beastie: I sense you’re a bit looser than last time we had one of these conversations old man. This is going to be fun.

Plurality and trauma: An Overview

James: So we were excited about this book because Janina brings together somatic work around the neurobiology of trauma together with a multiconsciousness model of how people work. These are the two areas we’ve been bringing together in our work of late, although we also like to mix it up with Buddhist and social justice / intersectional feminist understandings. 

Specifically Janina weaves together Sensorimotor Psychotherapy with Internal Family Systems Theory, but she also draws more broadly on the literatures on trauma, attachment, mindfulness, and plurality.

Beastie: Right. So what that looks like in practice is that she assumes that all distressing thoughts, feelings, and bodily sensations are communications from traumatised parts of us, who are still stuck in the past when the traumatic things happened to them. What needs to happen is for all parts to be befriended, heard, held, and brought into the present, where they can finally feel safe enough.

James: What we were smug about is that Janina suggests that our parts often map onto those trauma survival strategies of fight, flight, freeze, etc. The way these have become encoded over time as learned patterns of behaviour.

Beastie: Regular readers will know that we already got there a couple of months back: Mapping me, Jonathan, Max, and Fox onto the four Fs.

James: But Janina throws a further F into the mix, which isn’t an F at all: Attach.

Beastie: And that finally helped us to make sense of our wild card, Tony. Tony is totally the 5th F.

James: He also had a different idea about what that 5th F might stand for in his case, which I won’t repeat here because it’d only encourage him.

Beastie: Well I guess that is one way of attaching to people.

James: We’ll get more into the Fs in a moment. Anything else we need to say up front about this way of understanding – and working with – ourselves?

Beastie: A key sense is that what people tend to do when traumatised parts show up is either to disown them – which is probably what they did in order to survive growing up – or to completely identify with them: feeling like the flood of emotions are theirs and worrying that they’re broken because of how overwhelming that feels. The alternative to this is to cultivate a dual awareness so that you can hold and hear the traumatised part, but not become them.

James: Right. We’ll say a lot more about how that works in the second half of this post.

Beastie: As a therapist Janina is mostly describing how she works with clients in this way, but here we’ll emphasise how we’ve used this approach ourselves. There’s important stuff in the book about how the therapist’s task is to help the client to develop the parts of themselves who can meet and hold their traumatised parts, not to do it for them. That’s very much how we’ve experienced our own therapist.

James: Yeah she was stoked when our most compassionate self – Ara – showed up in therapy, clearly well capable of holding the rest of us through the tough feelings. At that point our therapist spoke of stepping back and her trust in our own capacity to do this work.

Beastie: It helps to keep seeing her for now though. The way she talks us through these practices teaches us how to do it for ourselves in a space that feels very held and safe, particularly when going to the really hard, vulnerable places.

James: I’d certainly recommend that people access a trauma-informed therapist with a non-pathologising affirmative understanding of plurality to facilitate this kind of work. We’ve had plenty of past experience of therapy as both therapist and client, but we still really needed that kind of guidance and holding through this process.

Beastie: Just make sure the therapist is all about empowering you to find this wisdom and capacity in you, rather than being invested in doing it for you. We’ll come back to that in the second post.

James: Mm. Janina suggests that a lot of therapy in the past hasn’t worked for clients – and might even have damaged them – because it has assumed them to be singular rather than plural, and because it has focused on replaying past traumatic memories, rather than helping traumatised parts to find safety in the present.

Beastie: Right, if you assume you’re working with a singular self who has all these overwhelming feelings and experiences, even to the point of self-destruction, then you’ll easily reinforce the belief that they are ‘crazy, damaged or inadequate’ because of their bewildering reactions and contradictions. 

It can be incredibly reassuring for a client – or for anyone – to learn that those feelings, experiences and behaviours only reside in a part of them, and that that part can be heard and brought into a much safer relationship to the rest of the self. Also it helps hugely to learn that we all have parts who are strong survivors and who can function well. That’s a much more empowering message.

James: In that way this book is more optimistic than the book on shame that we reviewed, which suggested that those with chronic shame would never fully recover.

Beastie: We’re still sceptical of linear recovery narratives, but we like the sense here that people may be fragmented, but that doesn’t mean that we’re forever broken. Fragmenting, compartmentalision, or dissociative splitting, was actually a normal and smart strategy which enabled us to survive the past rather than remaining trapped in trauma. And it can give us superpower in the present if we can master how to bring each part forward when needed.

James: Comparing this to other books we’ve read, we also prefer some of the message here to Pete Walker’s.

Beastie: Yeah Pete is very down on the inner critic, he’s all about fighting and dismissing the critical voices. Janina rightly points out that angry critical parts are trying to protect us and it;s just as vital to listen to and befriend them as any other part, even if they seem to be destructive or blocking progress.

James: I can see why you might prefer that message Beastie.

Beastie: Reformed inner critics can be the best allies in our experience.

James: Some of them turn out to be pretty keen bloggers too.

Beastie: D’you know what makes me angry James?

James: Um, you’re our fight part. Do you want me to give you the full list? 

Beastie: Hilarious. What angers me is that when we first learnt about plurality, and about trauma, as a trainee psychologist, both were dismissed and ridiculed. I remember us learning that ‘Multiple Personality Disorder’ was made up, just some attention-grabbing behaviour whipped up between crazy patients and their gullible therapists. And I remember hearing all the backlash against the idea that developmental trauma was very common. Again a sense that most people were probably making it up, or making too much of it.

James: I share your anger Beastie: these understandings that are so helpful to us now – and potentially to so many people – have a legacy of gaslighting around them, by wider culture and by the so-called experts. There’s denial that these things are real, or that they really happened. There’s a good deal of the blaming of survivors in order to defend perpetrators and the systems that allowed damage to happen. And there’s a sense that people should be easily able to ‘fix’ their struggles, rather than recognising the huge challenges of living with a traumatised nervous system.

Beastie: Again we’d emphasise that both trauma and plurality are on a spectrum. But the things that have happened to us definitely ‘count’ as trauma, and our plurality is certainly a genuine embodied experience which takes us in the direction of healing. We could have been saved a lot of pain on this journey if people hadn’t attempted to minimise and question these experiences. We wasted far too much time and energy wondering whether what happened to us was ‘bad enough’ and whether our plurality was ‘real’. That kind of internalised gaslighting just kept fetching us back in shame and retraumatising memories.

James: So I guess we’d want to convey to the reader that whatever happened to them, and however they experience themselves, is legit. And whatever they can do to embrace it, assume that it is sensible, and befriend themselves around it, is for the good. 

Beastie: Okay enough preamble. Let’s dig into some of the specifics of this way of understanding – and working with – plurality.

Plurality and the 5Fs

James: So a big ‘aha’ moment for us reading this book, as we’ve said, was realising that our parts mapped onto the major trauma survival strategies: flight, freeze, fight, fawn, and – the new one on us – attach.

Beastie: We have heard another idea that the fifth F is ‘fragment’, but our sense is that fragmenting or splitting is what happened to separate us into these parts in the first place. And it doesn’t seem to map onto a separate part of us in the way the other Fs (and A) do. 

James: We can still ‘fragment’ when something really overwhelming hits. But that, for us, is a sense of being scattered: unable to find each other and to look after each other through whatever is happening.

Beastie: That’s the sense of being abandoned internally rather than accompanied that Max and I wrote about.

James: Another piece that Janina wrote about, which helped us to make sense of our internal system, was the idea of different survival strategies as located at different ages. So she says that attach and freeze are very early infant strategies. The infant is so helpless that they trust and reach out to caregivers even if they aren’t always met or emotionally regulated by those caregivers: that’s attach. The kinds of startle responses and frightened disappearing that we associate with Fox’s freeze response are also very young.

Beastie: We always thought of Fox as a very young part of us, but it’s new to locate Tony as an infant. He always had such strong adolescent energy that we didn’t see that. But it makes a lot of sense as he’s driven by a yearning for intimacy, and he’s also… how shall I put this?

James: Very full of himself.

Beastie: Right, and narcissism is associated with infancy too: you really believe that you are the centre of the universe at that age. Don’t get me wrong, it’s hella useful to have a part of us who actually thinks he’s pretty awesome, given how many parts are convinced that they’re terrible.

James: But recognising that Tony is driven by yearning for intimacy, and can be overly sure of himself, has helped us to understand him better and to help him think about how he can channel those energies in ways that are safe-enough for the rest of us.

Beastie: We generally let him take our public-facing roles, which means him taking credit for all kinds of work that isn’t really his. We help him to understand that there are many ways of getting intimacy needs met to temper his hot love and fastlove tendencies. Given his narcissism, we put him in charge of our ‘look’.

James: Which is why we dress like a teenaged boy.

Beastie: Don’t worry prof, some day we’ll indulge your fetish for elbow patches and tweed.

James: Ahem. Going back to Tony, when his energy gets too hyper…

Beastie: We make him do the vacuuming. It is very helpful to have one hyper inner boy…

James: And another who wants to please us all by making us delicious meals.

Beastie: This has been a real theme since our last post James: finding the everyday tasks that each of us excel at and enjoy, so that we all get some time ‘fronting’ each day.

James: And the tasks that work well for each dyad, so that we nurture each relationship too.

Beastie: Like reading and blogging together in our case. 

There’s definitely that sense in this book too that it’s important to keep checking in on all parts and giving them space. Janina suggests making sure that you ask inner children how they’re doing regularly, buying them soft toys, whatever it takes to let them know that they are held safe and heard.

James: The other aspect of locating our parts in the five Fs that we found useful is that it helps us to know which part a difficult feeling is coming from. Because we have one part who tends to feel all the feelings for everybody – out in the world and in here – we have often assumed that it is him who is feeling every tough feeling that we experience. But now we can remember that Fox’s fear and Tony’s yearning often lie underneath Jonathan’s struggles.

Beastie: Janina also points out that fight and flight are generally more teen parts, because those strategies develop in adolescence. That certainly makes sense of how we experience me and Max, and the period of our life that we associate with Max coming forward and me being cast out – because it wasn’t safe to be angry.

James: So now we can trace tough feelings back through you all. Recognising that the noise of fight or flight is often a response to the frantic hypervigilance of fawn, and that that may be triggered by those younger freeze or attach parts feeling frightened or desperately yearning for closeness.

5 parts, 7 parts, or more?

Beastie: So that’s five parts James, but what about you and Ara? You don’t get a mention here. And what about people who don’t experience their parts as five Fs?

James: So Janina refers to parts beyond the five Fs in several places. There can be further traumatised parts whose job it is to block progress, for example, or who carry the urge to self destruct or to give up. She also refers to a ‘getting on with normal life’ part who is the adult who can be brought into communication with all these parts. We’ll come back to them shortly.

Beastie: For us the way it works is that there’s a vivid experience of the five of us, and the two of you – James and Ara – who feel like parental parts. We used to think of it as two kids (Fox and Jonathan), three teens (me, Max, and Tony), and two ‘grownups’ (you and Ara). I guess Tony has shifted down to a kid, but the rest of that feels pretty accurate.

James: Mm but we did cling rather tightly to the idea of being seven for a while in ways that weren’t helpful. It meant that we didn’t want to engage with any experience or feeling that couldn’t clearly be located in one of the seven of us.

Beastie: The way we’ve loosened that is to recognise that each of us can manifest in multiple ways. Like sometimes we can be the aspects of us that we are now: like an adult aspect of each of us. But sometimes we can still feel the child aspect of each of us: who they were when things were hard. And sometimes we can feel a kind of pure form of each of our energies: like when I really connect with my rage.

James: We could say that each of us has an everyday aspect, a stuck/traumatised child aspect, perhaps also a shadow aspect and a sacred aspect: representing our worst and best potentials.

Beastie: So we might be seven, or twenty eight, depending on how you look at it.

James: For us it works best to mostly function as seven, but to be up for welcoming and listening to each of our aspects when they’re around.

Beastie: It all reminds us that it’s wise not to hold too tightly to any one model. Like the sense of us as the five Fs is very helpful, but it can equally be helpful to see us as more like the emotions in Inside Out (anger, fear, sadness, joy, shame, with peacefulness and powerfulness as the parents), or more like the five Buddha families when Ara’s getting our spiritual on.

James: We’re mostly hopeless geeks so we can spend a lot of time going down those rabbit-holes until we’re reminded that we’re meant to be following the feelings rather than spending all our time intellectualising.

Beastie: I don’t mind enabling your geeky habits every now and then prof.

Dual awareness rather than merging

James: Thank you. So another pivotal idea in Janina’s book is that when people feel swept into the trauma vortex they are merging, or blending, with their traumatised parts.

Beastie: This has helped us so much. Even though we understand ourselves as plural, when triggered we often experienced ourselves as purely whichever part was activated. 

James: Most people do. You are just enraged, or terrified, or swamped with shame. It feels like the only possible reaction to what has happened. It feels like all that you are, and even all that you will ever be. And you are desperate to react out of that place: to lash out, to do something, or to disappear, for example.

Beastie: So what Janina is suggesting is that we cultivate the capacity to detach at such moments. Detaching is also helpful at the less intense moments when there are just flickers of such feelings rather than full on trauma responses. She calls this cultivating ‘dual awareness’ or ‘parallel processing’. 

James: It’s a lot like the mindfulness idea that we can have an observing mind who is not caught up in the emotions, thoughts, or sensations. We’ve always struggled with actually doing that, but the plural piece made it all fall into place. If we see everything as messages from traumatised parts, we can absolutely experience ourselves as one part – who is calm and clear – holding another part – who is caught up or activated.

Beastie: Janina suggests that the ‘getting on with normal life’ part learns to hold the traumatised child parts. We do it a bit differently to that, as we’ll explain in a moment.

James: But this way of seeing things – that people have a tendency to merge or blend with their traumatised parts – is extremely useful in making sense of our hugely confusing experience of feeling simultaneously like a competent adult and a fragile child.

Beastie: I know right? In the midst of our post-traumatic stress time it could be extremely disorienting that we’d manage to go and facilitate a training for fifty people, and later that same day we’d meltdown over not having a safe-enough TV show to watch that evening. It was absolutely terrifying that sometime it might flip and a traumatised child part might show up when we were doing something ‘grownup’. A few times we had to get ourselves home fast when that happened.

James: Janina also explains imposter syndrome helpfully in this way. Our five F parts can feel so intense that we can come to mistrust the ‘reality’ of more bland ‘getting on with life’ parts: like they are the ones who must be unreal or fake, because we know that really we are this impossibly fragile person who can hardly function day-to-day.

Beastie: Mm, so when people accept their plurality they don’t have to get caught up worrying about which parts are real or fake. What a relief.

James: Janina says she likes the language of ‘parts’ because it’s what people already use in everyday language. It’s commonplace to say ‘a part of me feels… ‘ And putting it like that helps to create that distance – that dual awareness. ‘A part of me is scared to go out, and I can listen to his fears without imagining that he is all of me.’ Rather than ‘I feel a rush of terror, it must mean that I’m incapable of anything, and when I do seem capable that’s all a facade.’

The neurobiology of parts

Beastie: Let’s not get too much into the neurobiology of trauma here because you have already done a whole post about that, but we can understand all of this on that level: having parts associated with the 5 Fs, and dual awareness.

James: We can. And in fact that helps us to understand just how different each of us feels on an embodied level. We have wondered at that, as have those who we’ve been brave enough to allow to meet separately in person. We really do feel like different beings: bigger or smaller, stronger or weaker, tighter or looser: like our whole body seems to alter as we shift between parts.

Beastie: We always knew we were a shapeshifter! But that makes sense if we consider the way the nervous system is so different in those different trauma responses right? When we locate our parts in those responses then it makes complete sense that we’d experience our embodiment in very different ways.

James: Right, and the idea of dual awareness also makes sense on a neurobiological level. We are able to locate part of us – in Janina’s way of seeing things, the ‘getting on with normal life’ part – in the ‘rational’ brain, and whichever other part we’re dealing with in the ‘emotional brain’.

Beastie: I would still like us to read more about the neuroscience aspect of this, because some authors like Janina and Pat de Young talk about the left (rational) brain and the right (emotional) brain, while others like David Treleaven talk about the prefrontal cortex (rational) and the more mammalian/reptilian parts (emotional). And even then the rational/emotional binary is an oversimplified shorthand for more nuanced distinctions. But whatever the science, it fits our lived experience. 

James: It does seem that attuning to traumatic emotional survival responses, and connecting them up to more analytic, task-oriented, modes is a key part of trauma recovery. And it is helpful that this whole way of seeing things lends legitimacy to experiences of plurality.

Beastie: Not that something should need a biological basis in order to be treated as legit of course James, I’m sure you’d never suggest that.

James: Fair criticism Beastie, of course it is all always biopsychosocial. I like when Janina says:

‘I can sense my medial prefrontal cortex is curious about the negative mood state connected to the right subcortical area of the brain’ doesn’t evoke the same emotional connection or self compassion as ‘I can sense in myself some curiosity about the depressed part’s sadness.’

Beastie: All of us – including you and me – could be seen as simply a shorthand for these physiological states, but that shorthand is extremely helpful when it comes to bringing compassion and understanding to what’s happening.

James: My physiological state is up for hanging out with your physiological state any time Beastie.

The ‘getting on with normal life’ part 

Beastie: Heh what’s next? Oh yes, Janina’s idea of the ‘getting on with normal life’ part was a challenge for us, because we really don’t have a sense of such a part any more: a ‘Meg-John Barker’ who is separate from the rest of us. Our sense is that the part that ‘got on with normal life’ for most of our adulthood was Max, who is totally identified with flight. She’s the workaholic, overachiever who has been sent to the hammock while the rest of us figure out how to relate more kindly and consensually to our work!

James: Yes quite the challenge to read that we need a ‘getting on with normal life’ part, when we were so proud of ourselves for getting rid of any sense of having a leader, and working as a collective.

Beastie: I am also extreme side-eye to the word ‘normal’ in there.

James: Yes, and that would be one of our few criticisms of the book right? The lack of critical engagement with this concept of ‘normal life’ which people should be aspiring too, which looks suspiciously like that of the good neoliberal capitalist citizen.

Beastie: Going after a nice normal romantic partnership, a nine-to-five job, and all the goals that make a good successful singular self.

James: I don’t think that is quite what Janina is saying to be fair. The valid – and vital – point is that everybody, even the most traumatised people, have access to a part that can sometimes function in everyday life. Or at least that they could imagine what that might be like. And that is hugely helpful to access when you’re feeling utterly overwhelmed by trauma.

Beastie: Absolutely, no question. But I would like to challenge the sense that the best thing for that part to pursue is ‘normality’ in a world where ‘normality’ is leading us over the edge of a cliff. I would also challenge the sense that the ideal outcome is to appear in the world as a singular ‘getting on with normal life’ part, albeit one who is holding their much-loved inner children close and safe inside, having rescued them from their traumatised pasts.

The Fs and the Cs

James: I think that your comment right there demonstrates exactly what we’re about to say next. All of our ‘traumatised’ parts also hold potentials that are extremely helpful to us. It serves us better to regard each of the seven of us as holding both useful capacities, and particular struggles, rather than the ‘getting on with normal life’ part – whoever that may be – holding all the good stuff, and the other parts just holding trauma. The rage that you have brought to a couple of places in this conversation – and which you bring to our life more broadly – is immensely helpful in enabling us to see clearly when situations are not okay, and in setting boundaries and challenging harmful messages.

Beastie: Thanks, I try to bring the thunder in useful ways.

James: You do Beastie. It is very much appreciated. Again to be fair I don’t think that Janina is suggesting that there is no value in the traumatised parts. There’s a definite sense in there that once the traumatised parts have been befriended and brought home, we can draw on their energies in helpful ways: like encouraging confident parts to give the presentations, and the gentle parts to care for plants and animals. There’s a sense that the ‘getting on with normal life’ part might bring those parts forward for experiences they enjoy and excel at, and encourage them to stay away somewhere safe for things they find scary and triggering.

Beastie: But Janina does suggest that it is only the ‘getting on with normal life’ part who can access all of the ‘C’s.

James: Yes, this book is all about F words and C words, I am so very glad that Tony isn’t part of this conversation.

Beastie: Quite. The Cs are things like curiosity, creativity, compassion, confidence, connection, courage, clarity, commitment, calm. Janina locates those in the ‘rational’ brain of the ‘getting on with normal life’ part, but we have a different experience right?

James: Right. You made a table of it.

Beastie: Here…

James: Oh I like that you found a more decent F for Tony.

Beastie: The main point is that we experience each of those Cs as being a capacity that one of us has more than the others. There’s a sense of each of us having a place where we get stuck, and a capacity which is our most helpful potential.

James: I like that you’ve found Fs for me and Ara. Even the parent parts have places they can get stuck.

Beastie: In our experience Ara’s main difficulty has been actually being available. She’s been the most elusive, hence ‘fade’. And you’ve struggled at those times when you haven’t been able to access your rational competence because a situation is beyond your comprehension or capacity.

James: Which feels like getting lost in the fog. Nicely put.

Beastie: So my alternative to Janina’s ‘getting on with normal life’ part vs. traumatised parts model would be to suggest that all parts have patterns they get stuck in (Fs), and potentials (Cs). Dual awareness, for us, involves finding a part – any part – who is in their C place, and bringing them in to listen to – and hold – the part who is their F place. Often it helps to go to a parental part as you are more consistently in your Cs, but it’s also helpful to mix it up so that all parts can experience their potentials when they have them.

James: It’s good Beastie. And I think there’s also a further layer where the Fs can have a cascade effect: one of us stuck in F can mean others go into their Fs too. But similarly, the more some of us access our Cs the more others can as well.

Beastie: Right. I’m just getting this. Like if Fox is frightened and we don’t notice, or try to ignore the flicker of fear, we often end up with Jonathan going into his hypervigilent fawn mode and trying to figure it all out, and me or Max getting caught up in noisy busy, shameful, or angry, thoughts about whatever-it-is. The whole system goes back to it’s old trauma mode, and it can feel harder to access you and Ara as you go into Fog and Fade.

James: But as we find our way through this trauma time, and Max relaxes, you feel clearer, we notice that suddenly Tony’s confidence is back, Fox’s creativity returns.

Beastie: Right now Fox is planning to write a whole plural graphic memoir so I’m guessing that’s a good sign.

James: I don’t want to say that Janina is definitely wrong about a ‘getting on with normal life’ part. It may well work for other people, and it may even be a better model for us someday. Certainly we find that remembering that we are capable of daily tasks – by moving into them for a while – can be a relief when the trauma is up but not overpowering. However I personally like the idea that each part of us can do that. And I like the empowering and equalising sense that we each have capacities as well as foibles.

Beastie: I thought ‘foible’ was a bit more friendly than ‘flaw’ or ‘fault’.

James: Definitely.

Check out the second blog post in this series to find out more about how you can work with plurality in this way in practice.

Patreon link: If you liked this, please feel free to support my Patreon.

Plural tag: This post was written by Beastie and James.

The post Plurality and trauma – 1 – theory appeared first on Rewriting The Rules.

Over the course of the conversation it emerged that he was going through a vital personal process at the moment. A fellow Buddhist and therapist, he described how he was spending much of his non-working time engaged in spiritual practices. Frequently what was coming up in these was excruciatingly painful, and deeply challenging, but he was being helped through by his teacher who reminded him that this is exactly the process described by most Buddhist – and other contemplative – practitioners as the path to awakening. By the end of our conversation he had decided that this process was what he wanted to focus on for the foreseeable future, rather than any writing project.

I walked away from this meeting in a bit of a daze. The process he had described was something very similar to what I was going through, myself, in the early days of what I have mostly been describing here as dealing with post-traumatic stress. We were both experiencing overwhelming emotions, intrusive troubling memories, and confrontation with the aspects of ourselves we most struggle with. I walked home feeling much lighter than I’d felt during my journey out to the cafe. This heavy trauma story I’d been telling could be reframed as something very different: a sacred process, the path of a spiritual warrior.

Holding multiple stories

Following that time I’ve sunk far deeper into my process, as regular readers will be aware because I’ve been documenting – here – what I’ve been learning along the way. Throughout this time I’ve found it useful to hold both those potential stories about what I’m going through: trauma and spiritual awakening. This is reflected in my reading, my practices, and my writing. 

Nearly every day I read – or listen to – some Buddhist teachings (usually my main go-to, Pema Chödrön), and some trauma literature (the kinds of books and videos that I’ve been summarising here). I’ve also been weaving together practices that I’ve learnt from Buddhism with ones from the trauma literature, for example bringing bodily/environmental grounding into my sitting practice, using brief meditation as a form of consent check-in, and working with a Buddhist trauma-informed therapist. I hope that my writing reflects this synthesis. While writing about trauma I’ve endeavoured to hold onto the sense that there is a spectrum of traumatic experience, that we’re all impacted by historical and intergenerational trauma, and that the ideas about how to navigate triggering and reactivity are valuable for all of us.

It occurred to me that there are actually four different stories which I’m telling myself about my current experience:

• Shame story: The story from within my trauma is a shame-saturated one where I am a bad person who harms people with their habits. I need to retreat substantially from the world in order to address these habits and make myself safer for others in close relationships and in my work, if that’s even possible. This is the story I tell myself, each time trauma feelings hit, which any amount of intellectual knowing-otherwise struggles to shift.
• Trauma story: The trauma-informed story is that I’m a person who has gone through several periods of trauma in their life: for a year or two each decade following school bullying and family struggles in my teens; rejection by my university friends in my twenties; and workplace bullying, public shaming, and sexual assault in my thirties. I’m now understanding this as post-traumatic stress, and its roots in intergenerational and developmental trauma, and applying a trauma-informed perspective to this process in my forties, instead of withdrawing from the world and looking to a partner relationship to rescue me as I did those previous times. Hopefully this will mean that I heal or recover to some extent, or at least that the fifties version of me who goes through this again will be better resourced when they do so.
• Human story: The human story is that this is just what people go through. I’m neither especially bent or broken (as the shame and trauma stories might suggest), nor am I going through something particularly special or meaningful. I’m neither wholly the small fragile person I feel like when I’m in trauma, or the big strong person I feel like when I allow that I’m brave to be doing this work and to be sharing it this way. What I’m going through could be framed as the kind of existential crisis which most of us hit at some point when we’re forced to evaluate how we’ve been operating in the world. It’s the stuff of so much of the fiction I’m reading and watching because it’s so common. This story humbles me and connects me with others. How different am I really to the stereotypical ‘mid-life crisis’ guy who makes sudden life-changes and is completely thrown when everything crashes down around him? Perhaps I can find compassion, rather than criticism, for all of us caught up in these moments.
• Sacred story: The sacred story frames what I’m going through as a spiritual emergency. I feel like the caterpillar who went into the chrysalis, became goo, and is slowly emerging, impossibly fragile, with damp wings which need to dry in the sun before they’re able to fly. There is no going back, and what emerges is radically different from what was there before. During the toughest times I thought of what I was going through as ‘goo-life’: everything fallen apart, everything being reconfigured at every level of my life from my neural pathways to my place in the world. On the other side of this I will be more awake to myself, to others, and to the world. I’ll be committed to a spiritual path as the main purpose and practice of my life. I’ll have far more to share with others, and I’ll be able to do so in more grounded, compassionate and containing ways. I’ll be able to welcome my death when it comes because I’ll finally know that I can accompany myself through anything.

Setting down these stories was reassuring because, in some ways, it doesn’t matter which one I tell. The answer is the same. Whether I’m a harmful person, a traumatised person, a messy regular human being, and/or a spiritual warrior, I need to retreat sufficiently to give myself enough space, I need to build enough support around me to hold me through this, I need to learn enough self-compassion to be able to take a clear, honest look at my habits and patterns, and I need to do the slow, steady, work of shifting those habits that can be harmful to me and/or others. 

Holding multiple stories is also helpful for reminding me not to cling too tightly to any one of them. In the break-up chapter of Rewriting the Rules I explored how this sense of multiple stories can prevent us from falling into the polarised stories of good and bad, right and wrong, which so often circulate within us – and in the wider world – following a relationship ending. 

Here, for example, the trauma story can remind me to go slowly and treat myself gently given what we know about how nervous systems respond to trauma. The human story can help me to feel more connected to everyone else around me, at a time when it is easy to feel isolated and alienated – like others couldn’t possibly understand what I’m going through and like I should hide it for fear of troubling them. The sacred story can give me the courage I need to turn towards my demons instead of away from them, each time they arrive. The sacred story also helps me to weather the days spent desperately trying to welcome feelings I would so much rather avoid. Instead of a flailing mess, I can visualise myself as the warrior getting back up off the arena floor time and time again (Captain Marvel is my go-to image for this).

Even the shame story is helpful, if held lightly alongside the other potential stories. It reminds me that all of us have the capacity to hurt others with our actions, and that it is important to look at this honestly and openly, and to do something about it where we can. It also connects me with all others who are steeped in shame, perhaps those whose actions have been even more devastating in their impact than mine. If I can hold that they are redeemable – that nobody deserves to be endlessly punished and tortured for their mistakes – perhaps I can hold that for myself too.

I liked this exchange I recently read between a character and their therapist in the novel Cousins, by Salley Vickers. The character is beating themselves up for putting another character in danger with their actions. The therapist says:

You made a mistake… and the trick of life is to make the mistakes as fast as possible not try to avoid making them.

The character protests that the impact of their actions on the other person could have been really bad. The therapists replies:

It strikes me that the other person also made a mistake. You can’t nab all the mistakes for yourself.

Multiple stories, parallel tracks

As well as these being multiple stories that I can tell about my life, they also operate as different tracks which are constantly playing through my everyday experience. Different ones play louder at different times, but it is – perhaps – always possible to tune in to any of them.

I like this parallel tracks idea because it doesn’t have the ‘end point’ which might be present in the idea of a story. It’s easy to fall into the sense that the shame, trauma, human, or sacred stories have a linear narrative from beginning, to middle, to end. In the shame story I should eventually ‘become a better person’. In the trauma story I should eventually recover or heal myself. In the sacred story I will ‘awaken’ or reach some kind of enlightenment. I worry that holding out for such a ‘happily ever after’ will become another kind of grasping which will keep me struggling. I believe that the truth of human experience is much more like a spiral where we go round and round the same themes many times, perhaps reaching a slightly deeper understanding each time. 

This would certainly make sense of my decade-ly return to these particular kinds of struggles, challenging my sense that each one is a ‘failure’ because I didn’t manage to ‘sort myself out’ once and for all. 

While it is intense – and perhaps a bit self-punishing (hello, I’m MJ, have we met?!) – to imagine my fifties trauma/crisis before I’m even out of my forties one, maybe doing so is more hepful than hoping that this time I’m going to finally ‘do it’, whatever ‘it’ is.

I found it useful, in relation to these tracks, to think about the different Buddhist heaven and hell realms which I wrote about here. Pema Chödrön, suggests that these can usefully be seen as states that we move between on a daily basis, all of which are possible in any given moment.

• The shame track is like the hell realm. I’m in torment, believing myself to be bad and worthy of punishment. I’m totally inward facing, I can’t see anybody else through the fog of gaslight that surrounds me, telling me that I’m terrible, will harm/lose everyone, and should just give up.
• The trauma track is like the animal realm. I can’t live anything like regular everyday human life. I have to be supremely careful about what I take on, what I do, what contact I engage in, because anything can quickly overwhelm me. It’s just one day at a time, slowly, slowly, doing the work I know that I need to do. It’s still very inward facing and hard to be around anyone except very safe others, or to see other people and their stuff clearly.
• The human track – or realm – is like the gap in the clouds. I can see clearly again for a moment and it is wonderful. My nervous system is relaxed. I can feel excited about my projects again. I’m not mired in confusion and self doubt over every decision. I can contact easily what I want and don’t want to do. I can imagine a future. I can connect with other people. Turning outwards feels good.
• The sacred track – or heaven realm – feels utterly open and connected with myself and to others. I can even see clearly those who have hurt me and how it comes from these same places of shame and fear that I am grappling with myself. I can grieve for how we’re all caught up in these dynamics together – and the damage they cause – at the same time as seeing the strange tragic beauty of it all. I know that the very things that divide us could be points of deep connection. Kindness for myself and others isn’t something I have to work on, it’s just the obvious response.

Again, recognising all four possible tracks, or realms, and their simultaneous availability can help us not to become too stuck in one of them. It’s easy to desperately try to escape the hell and animal realms when there: to tune out the shame and trauma tracks. It’s also easy to want to turn up the human and sacred tracks when we can hear those: to grasp hold of the human and heaven realms. 

Buddhism has this paradoxical idea that it’s important not to prefer Nirvana to Samsara. It’s not about transcending our human lives to reach some eternal enlightened state. Most of the great religious figures had a moment of choosing not to retreat into blissful solitude, but to return to the world with others, even though they knew how painful that would be and how they would be dragged back into messy human struggles, even be overwhelmed or destroyed by them.

If we can allow each of these tracks – or states – without trying to cling to them, or escape them, when they are present, perhaps we can flow through them more easily. There is as much – if not more – to be learnt from accompanying ourselves through shame and trauma as there is through our beautiful, complex everyday lives, or through our moments of transcendence.

Back to writing

Returning to the story I began this post with – about my friend who was considering writing – curiously, a number of the people I mentor with their writing have come to similar conclusions of late. They’ve begun with a parallel personal and creative process, and have eventually dropped the creative element entirely, or shifted it into something more private and unconventional, that may or may not ever see the light of day. For example many are exploring forms of doodling, collaging, crafting, zining, or small-scale playing with words and stories, rather than the more standard novels or memoirs that they began with in the hopes of getting published.

One of my own challenges – through this time – has been to let go of the sense that I should be working on some ‘big project’ – probably a book – as I’ve mainly been consistently doing for the last decade. My shame story about this sneaks back in occasionally, but what has actually felt right – during this time – has been to only write when it feels absolutely consensual, and to focus on these short (for me, if not for a blog post!) dispatches from my trauma recovery / spiritual awakening.

Another friend got in touch recently to ask how I was fairing through lockdown. She said that her romantic idea of me was that I was hunkered down working on my masterpiece. After a brief flicker of shame I laughed because I think that I very well might be.

Patreon link: If you liked this, feel free to support my Patreon, it will certainly help this self-employed person to maintain some income during these uncertain times.

Plural tag: This post was written by Ara.

The post Holding multiple possible stories through our experience appeared first on Rewriting The Rules.

I have a whole post coming on what we can do about shame when it hits, how it operates at multiple levels (cultural, systemic, interpersonal, and embodied), and how we can relate with ourselves, others, and our communities in ways that minimise the potential for crashing into toxic shame, or triggering it in others. I want to read a bit more on the subject to ensure I cover all the bases before sharing that.

Meanwhile I thought I’d share my notes on one book that I’ve found particularly helpful. The book is Understanding and Treating Chronic Shame, by Pat DeYoung. The book is aimed at therapists, and some parts are pretty theoretically dense, weaving together relational psychoanalysis and neurobiology. For that reason I imagine that most folks who struggle with chronic shame would be unlikely to pick up this book. Hopefully my summary here will be helpful if that’s you. 

The full book is definitely worth checking out if you do enjoy grappling with big ideas, and I found Pat’s descriptions of her client-work some of the most generous, caring, and open that I’ve read. She demonstrates huge compassion for all those struggling with chronic shame, whether it manifests in ways that are easy to spot and work with, or a great deal harder as in cases where people attack others or shut down in the face of shame.

What is chronic shame?

Pat points out that most of us struggle to describe shame because it’s so unbearable that we generally don’t tolerate it. We push it down or cover it over with feelings that we can handle, and often these are all we know of shame. 

‘The classic shame response is hyperarousal and a desperate struggle to contain it: blushing, sweating, trying to shrink, slumping the shoulders, dropping the head, averting the eyes, covering the face. This state of shame is excruciating’.

Pat locates most mental health struggles in the strategies we use to repel and avoid further harm – and shame – after experiencing relational trauma as kids. These struggles include depression, anxiety, relationship difficulties, and numbing addictions that ‘fill-in’ for deeper unmet needs or offer some sense of emotional regulation.

When something comes up which is beyond these tactics, we probably experience shame as utter fragmentation or disintegration or ourselves. It feels like we are totally falling apart, and we are utterly desperate for anything to get rid of it. Shame is related to self-loathing, to the emotion of disgust aimed at ourselves, and to having a vicious and noisy inner critic, but it is fundamentally non-verbal and visceral: what Silvan Tomkins calls a ‘sickness of the soul’.

The definition of shame throughout the book is: 

‘the disintegration of the self in relation to a dysregulating other’.

Shame is relational not individual

A major message of the book is that we tend to experience shame as individual but it’s actually relational. 

When shame hits we individualise: believing that we are a bad person, that there is something terribly wrong with us, and that we’re personally responsible for harming others. We tend to withdraw into ourselves to address this and/or to protect others from ourselves.

‘Shame feels like solitary pain, and chronic shame seems like a personal failing caused by one’s own negative thinking and low self-esteem.’

However, Pat insists that shame in all its forms is relational. It is forged in relationships – the dysregulating others mentioned in the above definition. It is generally triggered by relational situations, such as being blamed or shamed by others. And it needs connection with others in order to be addressed.

This point is vital to keep ahold of: while shame feels like it’s happening in our self because we are bad, it is really happening in relation with others – past and present – and it needs to be addressed in relationship too.

Why do we have chronic shame?

So shame comes from the impact of ‘dysregulating others’. What does dysregulation mean? As children we require regulation of our feelings by those close to us in order to learn how to regulate them ourselves. That means that we need those around us to be attuned to our feelings – to pick up on them, and to help us to hold them, to tolerate them, and to understand them. If we don’t experience this then our emotions will end up feeling overwhelming and terrifying, and we’ll fragment or fall apart in the face of them. 

‘People who struggle with chronic shame usually report that emotions were either shut down or out of control in their family.’

‘Acceptance was missing, too; the family system didn’t create space where the kid could be confident of an unconditional welcome for his unique being, including his wants, feelings, and failings.’

‘A child has to have at least one caregiver who is able to respond in an attuned, consistent way to what the child feels. If this is missing in a major way, the child will translate the distress of the mismatch into a feeling like, “I can’t make happen what I need…so there’s something wrong with me.”’

Like other authors, Pat explains that – as a child – when faced with a choice between:

• Believing that we are bad but at least that the world makes sense and that we might have some control over it (e.g. by becoming good), and 
• Believing that we are not bad but that the world is chaotic, that our caregivers can’t contain us, and that we have no control

We will choose the former as the far safer option.

‘It’s so much easier to understand, “I’m bad and disgusting” than it is to understand, “Something happened outside of my control and I feel like I’m falling apart”.’ 

Because we’re not familiar with others responding to our feelings with empathy and compassion, we don’t develop the capacity for self-empathy and self-compassion. Because others do not meet the whole of us – in all emotional states – in regulating ways, we don’t develop a coherent sense of ourselves and there is always the sense of threat that we might disintegrate or be annihilated. Shame makes people:

‘feel blank, “vaporized” or incoherent, even to themselves. In moments of feeling humiliated, they can’t speak, or even think. They feel shattered, or as if they are falling apart.’

Dysregulating others

I was particularly struck by the links between shame and the gaze of others that Pat discusses in her chapter on shame theories. This dysregulation does not just happen verbally, but often non-verbally through mismatches between children’s cues and the facial responsiveness of the caregiver. 

‘When a child fails to elicit a gaze that supports his intentionality, excitement, and indwelling sense of self, he will experience something else: being looked at in a way that objectifies him.’

This leads to us objectifying ourselves: evaluating ourselves from the outside as bad, assuming that others are always looking at us, and judging ourselves through others’ imagined eyes. I’m struck by how we can feel visceral shame when others won’t look at us, or drop their responsive expression when they look towards us.

Another thing that I appreciated about this book is that Pat demonstrates vast compassion for the ‘dysregulating others’ as well as for the children they meet in that way. Clearly she locates our relational trauma in the similar trauma that resulted in our caregivers being fragile, needy, wounded, or otherwise unable to regulate our emotional states. There’s a real sense of the intergenerational trauma that’s in play here: shame passed down through the generations.

‘I’m never surprised when, after a while, a shamed client tells me that her mom, or dad, or both, “had a really crappy childhood too.” For their own reasons, they just didn’t have the selfhood they needed to attune to their children…. Shame was everyone’s lonely secret, managed however possible. No one talked about all that pain, or even tried to make it any better, even though no-one wanted it.’

Guilt vs. shame

Like many authors, Pat delineates between guilt (I’m a worthwhile person who did a bad thing) and shame (I’m a bad person). Guilt can be painful but it doesn’t affect your core identity, whereas shame is acutely painful, often incapacitating, and feels as if you’ve been:

‘exposed as a fundamentally defective or worthless being’. 

Shame makes good relationships extremely difficult because we experience everyone as potentially threatening – they could so easily disintegrate us. Collapsing into shame makes it virtually impossible to empathise with others, or to accurately discern what is ours and what is theirs. Guilt is a relational strength because it helps us to express regret, empathise with others, and take responsibility for any harm we have caused. Pat describes shame therapy as all about helping clients to move from shame to guilt.

When caregiving is good-enough there may be momentary shame when a child misbehaves or makes a mistake – felt as a danger of shattering – but there is a quick return after the caregiver’s displeasure or discipline to relational connection, so the child gets the message ‘I did a bad thing, but it’s over, and I’m still a good kid’. In later life presumably such children will be able to feel guilt when they have hurt others or made mistakes, take accountability, and forgive themselves.

However, if a child frequently experiences such disintegrating moments which are not repaired, with no quick return to connection, they’re left struggling alone with wondering who they are in relation to the other. This might happen, for example:

• If there’s unclear distinctions between having done deliberate wrong or having made innocent mistakes – responses to both give the message that you are bad and stupid, 
• If caregivers show that they can’t tolerate emotional distress or there is a ‘no emotions in my house’ rule in the family,
• If it takes too long to reconnect after a conflict or drop in connection,
• If a caregiver’s care and attention often drops unpredictably – or blows up into anger, 
• If a child’s moments of delight and excitement tend to be squashed or deflated by a caregiver – this is felt as a painful and sudden fall.

‘When I am feeling a rush of emotion, the other’s response fails to help me manage what I’m feeling. Instead of feeling connected to someone strong and calm, I feel alone. Instead of feeling contained, I feel out of control. Instead of feeling energetically focused, I feel overwhelmed. Instead of feeling that I’ll be okay, I feel like I’m falling apart.’

Instead of learning that we can do something bad and survive, in shame we learn that our emotional self – who feels those ‘bad’ feelings – is bad, and we try to disconnect from them. We often learn to perfect a ‘good kid’ performance, and block out any sense of badness – and the ‘out of control’ feelings we associate with that. As we grow through adolescence we often attach our shame to challenging parts of experience like our bodies, sexualities, emotions, and competence. By the time we’re adults we may have perfected ways to cover up our shame, but those will tragically alienate us from ourselves, and make it very hard to forge genuine connections with others.

‘A person with chronically unresolved shame can’t be “a good person who did a bad thing.” The idea of having done harm may be unthinkable – it just couldn’t/didn’t happen. Or it may feel like the excruciating exposure of a despicable self. In neither case can good and bad aspects of self coexist in a coherent experience of doing one’s best to live up to certain chosen ideals.’

The neurobiology of shame

The big message from the neurobiological understanding of shame is that it is all happening in the non-verbal relational/emotional parts of the body/brain/mind but that we generally tend to deal with it in the more verbal, rational, analytic parts. 

This understanding makes sense because our emotional experience hasn’t been met, recognised, or regulated growing up. We have little experience of good body-to-body non-verbal emotional connection. Therefore our rational brain has had to do all the work of trying to deal with frightening emotional experiences.

This explains why people with chronic shame attack themselves with self-denigrating ideas (to at least give them some sense of control), or try to ‘think themselves better’. Neither approach helps because the sense of being terrible, disgusting or despicable is non-verbal and visceral, out of reach of this rational, logical, language-based approach.

These ideas relate back to what I wrote, previously, about trauma and the body. If we are met with caregivers who are dysregulated themselves – or reactive – and who can’t regulate us, then our own nervous system will go into energy-expending hyperarousal (fight or flight), and then into energy-conserving hypoarousal (freeze or dissociation). If dysregulating interactions happen frequently, our self-protective habit will become dissociating from emotional connection and our emotional brain development will suffer.

‘From a neurobiological perspective it seems that someone could live in a chronic state of low-arousal shame that is chronically dysregulated because, although she’s always somewhat conscious of shame, it is well hidden from others. At the same time this shame-prone person could use various forms of dissociation to keep memories and experience of acute emotional pain completely out of her conscious awareness, and also to protect herself against any further shame-assaults on her self-cohesion.’

Of course what we know now of neuroplasticity suggests that we should be able to address this way in which the nervous system has become set up. This is why Pat puts so much emphasis on emotion-to-emotion attuned, regulating connection with a therapist as an important part of working with chronic shame. I’ve certainly found this to be gold myself and now tend to focus, in therapy, on finding and expressing my feelings – and having them met – rather than on talk or figuring things out. Having my emotions met and welcomed, and also having any moments of disconnection or misunderstanding repaired, are extremely valuable.

What is also needed is better emotional-rational brain integration so that the emotional brain self comes to make sense to us again. In chronic shame these connections are often poor. We can tell rational stories that make sense of our experience, but when we can’t connect the emotional and rational brain it can feel – to us and others – like there’s a disconnect between what we’re saying and the experience of our being. This can even feel gaslighting to others as we say one thing but they feel something very different from us.

How does chronic shame manifest

Very few people approach a therapist directly to help with shame because we tend to avoid and cover over shame so well. We might well not realise that shame is at the heart of what’s going on for us. 

Pat details clients who manifest shame in a range of different ways, depending on their particular childhoods and dispositions. 

One client could avoid shame so long as she was performing well and being a competent self, but the inevitable failures along the way felt intolerable. Performance became a way of life, hiding some disgusting or demeaning truth about who she was. Another client kept a double life where he could be a happy enough family man, but on the side he kept engaging in risky sexual activities. He felt split between being a hero who he liked and a total jerk who he hated. A further client only felt able to survive if she was utterly extraordinary, and could never meet that standard so spent much of her time melting down and feeling worthless, but she still strived to eventually pull off something extraordinary.

Another client felt hopeless despair much of the time, exacerbated by deep loneliness when those around her misunderstood her. A final one kept herself separate from other people because nobody noticed her struggles as a kid and she’d learnt she was safer without others, fearing that any friends would – of course – eventually see what was defective about her.

Shame in relationships

Pat also describes an example of how relationships often play out when more than one person carries chronic shame:

‘Both shame partners bring to the relationship the hope that true love will erase their vulnerabilities and undo the deprivation of their childhood attachments. But of course, each partner has moments of failing to understand and appreciate the other. And then, for that other partner, the original trauma of not mattering seems to happen all over again. The vulnerability of wanting to be loved becomes shame and then rage that lashes out in counter-shaming attacks.’

Pat explains that early shaming relationships become internalised – in the form of voices within us that replicate key people in our lives. For example, our internal voices may directly shame us with attacks. They may indirectly shame us with disappointment in our ‘failings’. They may neglect to give us care or pride. They may require us to be high-performing. They may transfer the shame that really belongs to others for their abusive behaviour onto us. Internally we have both an inner critic part who shames us, and other parts who are shamed by them. 

When these internal dynamics are highly familiar to us, shaming relationships easily get replicated again and again in our lives.

‘Shaming and being shamed is just what they know how to do. It’s no surprise that the drama gets played out in the world when it’s what they are negotiating internally, unconsciously, all the time.’

‘Karen Horney speaks of three ways to manage shame anxiety: moving toward people, moving against people, and moving away from people. Each is useful, with a downside. If we move towards people with compliance and self-effacement, we won’t lose their love; however our self-worth comes to depend on being liked, needed, or wanted. Moving against people feels powerful, but we have to keep winning to stay superior and invulnerable. Moving away from people liberates us from needing approval or success. What can shame us then? A small life seems a small price to pay for such freedom.’ 

These paragraphs about shame in relationships really hit home for me:

‘People who struggle with chronic shame are deeply lonely, and they have trouble with love. Most of all they have trouble believing that anyone actually loves them. But usually they keep trying to love and be loved. Something tells them that what they so desperately need is hidden there in “love”. They are profoundly right about that, even when they go about it all wrong, hiding their longing behind performance… On the one hand, this is the truth: what they have missed and continue to miss is genuine connection with somebody who understands and accepts who they are and what they feel. On the other hand, it can be a very dangerous enterprise to try to get that connection while feeling so vulnerable to exposure, so sensitive to slight, so damaged and defective, or so extraordinarily misunderstood and angry.’

‘What they know in their bones (their neural wiring) is that bad things that happened before will happen again: their need to connect will only cause them pain; a regulating other will become dysregulating – will turn away or turn mean – and the awfulness of disintegrating shame will happen. It makes sense that they protect themselves from this kind of repetition – even though they also want to trust.’

‘A chronically shamed person knows in a visceral way that what happened before in moments like this – dysregulation, rupture, or misunderstanding – is too painful to repeat. And so he repeats disconnection instead.’

Addressing chronic shame

Because this book is aimed at therapists, the focus in the chapters on how to address chronic shame is on the therapeutic relationship. Engaging in therapy is certainly a great idea – if possible – for chronic shame because a good therapist can provide the kind of emotional regulation that was lost or lacking in childhood. Given that shame is relational, it probably does require experiencing a relationship like that in order to address it. 

Therapy

Pat suggests that this importance of a regulating relationship might be one reason for the well known finding that it doesn’t much matter which type of therapy a therapist practices, it is the quality of the relationship that is vital, particularly the presence of  what Daniel Hughes calls PACE: playfulness, acceptance, curiosity, and empathy.

Certainly it is vital to shop around for a therapist and find one who you have this kind of rapport with, and who has worked on their own shame. I found these ideas about shame and becoming a therapist/healer very interesting:

‘Why might excellent therapists also be shame-prone therapists? First of all, it’s a matter of innate emotional sensitivity. Some babies are born needing extra regulation for an emotional response system easily over stimulated. They become emotionally sensitive children, alert to the interpersonal dynamics that surround them. 

Second, it’s a matter of family history. If there’s emotional trouble in the family, these sensitive children try to manage it as best they can. They feel responsible for the well-being of fragile parents and vulnerable siblings. They spend their childhood offering emotional attunement beyond their years and doing without the emotional understanding they need. It’s no wonder that some of them would one day make a career out of their attunement skills and their deep desire to see emotional hurts eased and relational brokenness repaired.’

Pat suggests that a therapist who has worked on – and continues to work on – their own shame has more capacity to help those who are burdened and silenced by shame, knowing what they are up against. Also, if you – as a client – have a lot of shame – the therapist is bound to pick up on it, and probably feel it too. They’ll need to be familiar with shame in order to work through such moments well with you, as well as to tolerate the times they make mistakes and to model the capacity to own these honestly, and make amends rather than being incapactated by shame. A good question for any potential therapist would be whether – and how – they have worked on their own shame. 

Working with a therapist in this way helps us to learn what it is like:

• To experience emotional connection, 
• To be accepted and accurately mirrored, 
• To be with somebody who can tolerate and contain our emotional states, 
• To navigate inevitable ruptures and repair them rather than being left in that disintegrated fallen apart state,
• To be recognised and treasured in all that we are by somebody who can welcome and enjoy the energy of our passion, excitement and joy when it is present.

All of these things should help us to develop a relationship with ourselves which is more emotionally regulating, and relationships with others which are more genuine and mutual, and less grounded in the avoidance of shame. This is akin to Pete Walker’s idea that we need to reparent ourselves and be reparented by committee.

It’s important to recognise, however, that therapy isn’t available to all. I would think that process/sharing groups, spiritual mentorship, peer-support, and other forms of relationship should be able to have a similar impact, so long as those involved are trauma-informed, are working on their own shame, and have enough of their own support around them.

Mindfulness and compassion practices

Given that a problem for folks with chronic shame is that others have not been able to accept their own inner states, or to accurately hold their subjective experience in mind, something vital here is learning how to be able to do that for ourselves. Again we can learn this through therapy – through having a relationship where somebody is able to do that with us. However, developing our own capacities – through mindfulness and self-compassion practices – can also be helpful here. 

Check out my staying with feelings zine, and recent posts on ‘the gap’, for more about how we can practice being with ourselves in a regulating way through all of our emotional states. Again through such practices we’re developing PACE. Mindfulness can help us to hold things lightly, see the bigger picture, and not take ourselves so seriously (playfulness). It can help with self-acceptance as we get to know ourselves deeply in all our states. It encourages us to get curious about our relationships with ourselves, others, and the world. Mindfulness also develops empathy for ourselves – instead of the confusion and abandonment of ourselves that comes with deep shame.

Regarding curiosity, Pat talks about constantly asking ourselves questions like ‘what’s going on for me?’ and ‘why?’, or ‘what happened?’ and ‘how do I feel about what happened?’ We often avoid such questions because we fear our usual shame-filled responses (because I’m a bad person).

‘Consistently wondering about “what happened?” suggests the possibility again and again that maybe feelings don’t just come from weird, wrong places inside… Maybe they are understandable responses to real events!’ 

Mindfulness of emotions, and other feeling practices like focusing, can also help us in experiencing all our emotions: both what they are (becoming more able to identify mad, glad, sad, and afraid, for example), and what intensity they are at. It can help us to both expand our emotional range and to bring ourselves back from high intensity experiences.

Pat also particularly recommends the self-compassion practices of mindfulness therapists like Paul Gilbert as helpful in shifting away from shame and self-criticism.

Telling our story: giving shame light and air

Pat emphasises telling our stories as a vital part of integrating emotional and rational brains: bringing the emotional brain stuff of autobiographical memory – linked with feelings, relationships and context – together with the linear organisation, cause/effect understanding, and logical interpretation of the rational brain. With shame we may be able to tell logical narratives of our lives, but there can be a sense of something missing or it not all hanging together: it is cohesive but not coherent.

Depending on our specific experiences it may be that we tell our self-story repeatedly but that it lacks something – particularly that depth of feeling. It might be that we can only bear certain self-stories and try to avoid others. It could be that there are big gaps in our story, or that lots of stories spill out of us full of chaotic and intense feelings. It’s not about finding the ‘true’ story, or a ‘happy’ story, but telling a story where we – and our intentions, emotions, and self – are expressed clearly and compassionately, where we can ‘integrate pain and joy, pride and regret, relief and resignation’.

Through telling these stories, we’re connecting up our understanding of ourselves with the emotional experience and memories that hold our sense of self together – the opposite of the kind of disintegration of self that we experience in shame.

Obviously therapy can be a great place to learn to tell such stories, with somebody who has expertise in facilitating that. But we might also consider, here, the value of journaling, memoiring in various forms, sharing circles, spoken word nights, anything where we get to tell our stories, particularly anything that enables us to access the embodied, relational, and emotional aspects of our experience. Pat suggests that we might usefully tell our stories about how the following things were dealt with in our upbringings: communication, emotions, needs, mistakes, difference, achievements.

Pat emphasizes that a key antidote to shame is ‘giving it light and air’, given that we usually keep it – and the things that we feel it about – hidden and secret in the shadows. Telling our stories to safe-enough others can be extremely valuable in this way, although certainly we should be careful to develop trusting and mutual relationships for this to happen in. Sharing stories is also another way to get the kind of connection that we often struggle with when we hide parts of ourselves due to shame.

Playing with plurality

You can imagine how delighted I was to see that Pat’s book includes two long sections on working with plurality around shame. She explores how the idea of being different parts can work with clients in general, and she then talks specifically about working with somebody who had a vivid experience of being a plural system. 

This latter section completely undid me and I cried through my whole reading of it. Pat describes how a client of hers began to realise how they had fragmented into separate selves, and had started to bring those selves to therapy. One self – who had previously been quite hidden – fell in love and went through a relationship and breakup, which was blamed upon them.

‘That’s when a lifetime of dissociated shame broke through, self-hatred wrapped around the core implicit knowing “I’ll never get what I need from the other person. It’s my fault. I’m wrong, bad, disgusting”. A flood of shame shut the system down’.

But eventually, this time of emergency meant that something could change, the excruciating emotional experience could be shared. It meant that Pat and the client could finally work through the ways each part of them had held shame for their whole lives. 

I love the way that Pat presents plurality as a potentially positive way in for all clients to talk about shame (‘a part of me feels…’ often being safer to express than ‘I feel’). I also love how she suggests that those with vividly plural experience may have an easier task than those who cover over ‘unacceptable’ parts of themselves completely.

‘It’s no different, essentially, than attuning to any client’s different states of self, and in fact easier since here each “self” is so clearly delineated from the others.’ 

Pat goes on to discuss clients who might fall under the category of ‘narcissistic injury’ because they completely split off parts of themselves as unbearably shameful and bad and therefore ‘not-me’. They then don’t have any  conscious awareness when they are acting/communicating from those split off parts, for example with defensive attacking, grandiosity, idealization, intense neediness, etc. Recognising these as just as much parts of the self as the named parts of plural people – and having just as much compassion for them – is very helpful for the therapist here.

Pat draws on Internal Family Systems Theory and Bonnie Badenoch’s idea of ‘internal community’. Both of these encourage befriending all parts of yourself – particularly those who are disowned or split off, and developing dialogue and compassion between different parts. It’s vital that we stop trying to eradicate shame-filled parts of ourselves, but instead learn how to turn towards them and befriend them. This is something I’ve covered in my plural selves zine and FAQ, and will certainly be writing more about in relation to shame.

Education

Learning about shame – how it operates, where it comes from, how we tend to react to it, and how we can address it – can certainly be helpful here. Hence me writing these blog posts. Pat says

‘It often helps to hear that shame is probably the most painful emotion human beings can feel, and that not only does it feel excruciating, it’s so disconnecting and isolating that it can go on for a very long time without anyone noticing – except for the person feeling the shame.’

She teaches clients the ‘core story of shame’:

‘When you’re little and you need to be seen and understood, when you need to matter to someone and it seems you don’t, that hurts. Even the hurt is invisible. That’s how it feels – you feel bad, and nobody cares how you feel. So you decide that those needy feelings are useless and having them makes you stupid. You tell yourself “What’s wrong with you anyway, to feel this? Get over it!” That’s how shame takes over when emotional needs are ignored or denied. The needs themselves become something wrong with you. And then your hurt feelings about not having your needs met cause you even more shame.’

Pat concludes the book saying that she doesn’t think that chronic shame can ever be completely cured, but that ‘shame reduction’ is possible.

‘Long-term relational trauma leaves our psyches indelibly marked… We don’t just get over a lifetime of wondering whether we really matter to those closest to us or whether we can be enough for those to whom we do matter. We don’t radically reconfigure a personality built around anxious self protection.’

However she believes that coming to terms with chronic shame can make life a lot more bearable than soldiering on oblivious.

Again Pat emphasises the need for both empathic, real relationships with ourselves, and with others, so that we keep reinforcing the new neural connections through sharing openly with ourselves and others, being met by them, and – when hurt happens – taking responsibility for our actions without taking all the blame for how the other feels (guilt, not shame). 

‘The dark emotional convictions of chronic shame will feel like truth until they are brought out into brighter spaces where compassionate acceptance is the rule.’

Patreon link: If you liked this, feel free to support my Patreon, it will certainly help this self-employed person to maintain some income during these uncertain times.

Plural tag: This post was by James and Beastie.

The post Chronic Shame appeared first on Rewriting The Rules.

The slow relating post brought the fastest side of myself together with the slowest to have a dialogue. This post sees a return of that slowest side – Ara – but together with my reformed inner critic – Beastie – who is perhaps best placed to interrogate these ideas and practices. 

If you haven’t read one of my plural blog-posts before and aren’t sure who these people are, feel free to check out my Plural Selves zine, and my previous dialogue post about plurality. But hopefully you don’t need to get that part in order to find the content here useful. Click here if you want to read a more standard form post about the gap.

Ara: Hey Beastie.

Beastie: Hey Ara. Ready to talk about the gap?

Ara: I am. I’m interested to hear what you make of it. But perhaps we should introduce ourselves a little more first, so people have some sense of us.

Beastie: I think the kind of dynamic we have was best captured in that Netflix Tales of The City last year: the characters of Shawna – played by Ellen Page, and Anna Madrigal – played by Olympia Dukakis.

Ara: Mm the sage old queer and the young upstart.

Beastie: Not quite how I would have described it. I love the scene where Anna says something characteristically vague and wise-sounding and Shawna says: ‘You know the rule against talking in fortune cookies around me.’

Ara: And Anna immediately replies: ‘And you know the rule against being a smartass around me.’

Beastie: So. No Madrigaling me in this conversation, okay?

Ara: I wouldn’t dream of it Beastie.

Returning to the gap

Beastie: So something curious happened recently. We moved away from doing any kind of meditation or mindfulness practice, and then returned to something which probably looks quite similar but feels very different.

Ara: Right. Reading that David Trevealen book on mindfulness and trauma helped us to see that meditation may not have been our friend in the past. Irene Lyon says something similar: many people with post traumatic stress report that meditation feels like sitting in a small room with a man shouting at them.

Beastie: Sounds familiar. At worst it was like that for us. At best just falling into our noisy thoughts for fifteen minutes each morning without much consciousness about them. We would often feel some shame about it afterwards, although we tried to be kind towards ourselves. It was a relief just to allow ourselves to stop, and to start the day with journaling instead, which we enjoy a lot more.

Ara: Reading the trauma literature helped a lot with that: recognising why our brain was hypervigilantly searching past, present, and future for any sign of threat whenever we stopped. Also why staying in an activated state was making it harder – rather than easier – to stay present and to feel kind towards ourselves and others.

Beastie: But then our therapist said something about how it could be useful – with trauma – to find safety in the sense of the space around us. When she said it, we didn’t want to hear it. We’d just got away from the idea that we should be doing meditation. That place had never felt very safe for us. Why would we go back there? But the next day you tried it.

Ara: Right. Something in what she said chimed with me. And of course our main Buddhist teacher, Pema Chödrön, describes something similar in her work. It was such an interesting experience Beastie. It was as if we’d approached this thing that we’ve been thinking and writing about for decades from just a slightly different angle, and our perspective on it had completely changed.

sitting not Sitting

Beastie: What d’you think was different?

Ara: I think we finally let go of the attempt to make it this special thing. Which is, of course, what wider culture has done with mindfulness and meditation also. I’m thinking of the shift as a move from Sitting (with a capital S) to sitting (all lowercase). I literally just sat in a chair in the window of our flat and hung out with everything that was going on: sounds, sights, smells, sensations, feelings, thoughts, memories: whatever happened I was there with it.

Beastie: There was a sense of welcoming too right?

Ara: Yep. Whatever came up I tried to embrace it with warmth as part of the whole experience, even imagining saying ‘you’re welcome’, but not treating it as any more important than anything else that was going on. 

Beastie: Not grasping it, not trying to get rid of it: That’s the Buddhist idea.

Ara: Yes. The overall feeling, by the end, was of sitting in this current moment of our life, within a wide open space, and anything could come into that space: like there was room for everything. It wasn’t about aiming to reach any particular state, or have a ‘good’ or ‘successful’ experience, whatever that would mean.

Beastie: Just being present.

Ara: That might be how a fortune cookie would describe it, yes! It’s hard though isn’t it because even these kinds of words – ‘presence’, ‘being’, ‘spaciousness’ – hint at something special. And as soon as we imagine in that way it becomes harder to do. I like Pema’s word ‘gap’, or the idea of hitting the ‘pause button’, or sitting lowercase. They are much more everyday and straightforward words. It really is just hanging out for a while with whatever’s around – internally and externally.

Varieties of sitting

Beastie: So since then we’ve started doing this a lot more. Again it amuses me. Before we’d do it once a day and feel a bit bad about that. Now we can’t seem to get enough of it. It just makes sense to keep returning to the gap several times a day.

Ara: I guess it tied in to a wider process we’ve been in about self-consent: noticing how easily we override our consent in relation to others, and work, and ideas of what we should be doing. This sitting provided an opportunity to make a gap between one thing and the next, so we could return to a kind of neutral, and check in with ourselves what we actually felt drawn to doing next.

Beastie: There was a challenge to that as well. We noticed that when we had done one thing we often wanted to crack on with the next for fear that, if we stopped, we wouldn’t be able to continue. That’s our Max’s flight tendency. We also noticed that when we were feeling a little edgy, uncomfortable, or uneasy we wanted to go to some kind of work, or escape into TV or a novel, rather than hanging out in the gap. We feared that if we sat still the feeling would get worse: perhaps overwhelming.

Ara: I think that’s another reason why pausing is so helpful. It gives us this regular reminder that escalating of tough feelings doesn’t have to happen. In fact I think trying to avoid those edgy feelings with work or escapism much more frequently leaves us feeling worse than when we started. That’s not at all to say that there’s anything wrong with working or chilling out, but it seems that we enjoy those things much more if we’re not going into them trying to drown out tough feelings. 

Beastie: It’s wild. Many times lately we’ve actually chosen the gap over work or distraction, knowing it tends to leave our nervous system in a better place than those things. We’ve even started making a regular small gap between the different elements of a work task, episodes of a TV show, or chapters of a book, so that if we continue we know we’re in self-consent.

Ara: Such a relief to finally feel the gap as a good place to rest.

Beastie: I guess we’re now trying to do what Pema calls ‘on the spot’ and regular sits. Regular ones – after we finish one activity and before we start the next – allow us that ongoing consent check-in with ourselves, and remind us that this space is always available to us. ‘On the spot’ is when we notice that we’re having a difficult feeling, thought, or sensation, and deliberately sit then-and-there in order to welcome that into this space. If we can’t sit then-and-there then we at least make a promise to that feeling, thought, or sensation that we’ll return to it as soon as we have the time.

Self-talk and sitting

Ara: That regular vs. on-the-spot distinction relates to another one. When we’re feeling relatively calm it’s possible to just sit quietly and notice the sound of the birds and traffic, the feeling of the breeze, a memory flickering up, a fleeting feeling. When tough feelings are present – particularly those we connect with trauma – that’s much more challenging. I guess our response to this is a bit like the distinction between doing a guided meditation on an app or something, and one where you just sit there quietly without guidance.

Beastie: So we sit quietly when there isn’t anything particularly challenging present. But if there is something, we try to sit in whichever part of us is struggling, and another part guides us through the sitting: often you or James being the more parental parts of our psyche, but really any of us can do it for any other.

Ara: Yes. James and Jonathan recently documented our process in this blog post. But where we’ve got to now is perhaps even more simple and straightforward than what they described. The guide part of us just imagines holding the other part of us while they say – out loud – what they are with. Perhaps reminding them to come back if they drift into noisy thoughts.

Beastie: Like ‘I’m with that seagull arcing through the sky… Now I’m with the thought that I fucked that thing up… Now I’m with the feeling of my throat being all constricted… Now I’m with the sunlight shining on that building… Now I’m with the sound of the seagulls… Now with the fact I just got lost in trying to plan what I’m going to say to that person…’

Ara: If Tony were here he would point out how lately it’s shagging seagulls we’ve mostly had the opportunity to be with.

Beastie: I endeavour to have a little more decorum than Tony.

Ara: Shall we say a bit more about what this means for us now?

Beastie: Yes please. I think that safety and befriending are the main themes. I’ve just noticed how they map onto what we’ve been exploring around protection and care. The counterbalance to the fear/shame feeling of trauma is a combination of protection/care. Protection alleviates fear by keeping us safe enough. Care alleviates shame by befriending ourselves and our experience. 

As a non-binary person we’re a little embarrassed that our parental parts are quite so gendered but James does a good number in protection and keeping us safe, and you are good at kindness, care, and connection.

Ara: I like to think that we both do both, but I see what you mean. 

The gap and safety

Beastie: So safety?

Ara: Yes. Well the thing about post traumatic stress is that it feels like a very unsafe place to be. Even things that used to leave us unphased can now feel like a big threat. And, after the multiple big stressors we’ve been through in the past year, we’re left feeling that we couldn’t handle anything else.

Beastie: Like a global pandemic or something would just be too much to cope with.

Ara: Heh, that was our feeling before that hit, yes.

Beastie: So we’ve been feeling very unsafe, largely because we’re so fragile and easily triggered. It’s hard to predict what we have capacity for, and what will tip us into overwhelm.

Ara: And those fear/shame feelings can easily feel intolerable: impossible to stay with. So this is where the gap comes in. If we can show ourselves that this space is a big enough container for any and all feelings, then we can finally feel safe to ourselves: at home in ourselves.

Beastie: How does that work?

Ara: Well now that we know more about the physiology of trauma I guess a big part of it is that, in the gap, we’re attending to the whole of our interior and exterior experience: not just the traumatic feelings or thoughts that may be around. 

By tuning into everything about how our body feels – our feet on the ground, the air on our skin, our hand on our belly – we ground ourself in it, reminding ourselves that our body is safe enough to occupy. 

By orienting to the environment – what we see, hear, smell, touch, taste – we’re reminding ourselves that we’re safe enough here-and-now. 

Most trauma researchers and therapists suggest strategies for grounding in the body and the environment. They also emphasise reminding ourselves that we’re not in the traumatic experience any more: that it is over and we can put that ‘ended’ time stamp on it. We have survived.

Beastie: We’re not there yet. There’s still a lack of trust in the gap to hold more vivid trauma responses or emotional flashbacks. 

Ara: Absolutely, and remember it’s not about making the feelings go away, or some idea that it’s only ‘worked’ if we feel nice and calm after a certain period of time. It’s more about holding. I love that phrase of Pema’s: ‘hold it in the cradle of loving kindness’. My sense is that – in time – we might be able to bring any feeling we have into the gap and be with it warmly in that wide open space. The potential then is for a profound sense of being safe-enough with ourselves, knowing that any state we’re in could be held in that way.

Beastie: Practising with the flickers of feelings – before they become a flame or fire – is certainly a good way of working up to it. But yes, you and Pema do seem to be optimistic that, given time, we can hold anything in that gap.

Ara: What we’ve found so far is that, with bigger feelings, particularly shame – which I know you intend to write more about Beastie – we have to keep returning to the gap. Some days it’s been about going back time and again, each time we feel that flicker accelerating into a flame. Pema talks of times she’s sat up all night with that kind of feeling.

Beastie: Again it’s not about eradicating or avoiding the feelings, thoughts, sensations, etc. but being with them along with everything else. There was one day we went for a walk in the woods and I was in a very angry place.

Ara: Getting in touch with our beautiful and long-absent fight response.

Beastie: Heh. It was interesting because it felt like I kept re-igniting – going back into angry ruminations – but at the same time the rest of you were able to be with the green leaves and the breeze. The plural thing certainly helps us to hold multiple states that way: generally one part struggling and one part able to hold them. But it can also feel that the gap is holding the aspects of experience that are more difficult, alongside aspects that are less so.

Ara: I like the bit where Pema says that if you go barefoot and your feet get cut to shreds, you could try to cover every piece of land you want to walk on in leather. Alternatively you could make yourself a pair of shoes. That’s how we’ve been thinking about what we’re doing right now isn’t it? Making ourselves a pair of shoes.

Beastie: Proper, solid hiking boots is the plan. That’s a good analogy for what we’re hoping for from the gap isn’t it. Right now we can easily become scared, because we’ve been so overwhelmed and incapacitated. But the more we sit with each experience as it comes – and learn that we can tolerate it – the more we have that sense of being safe-enough to ourselves. 

Ara: That brings us onto befriending.

The gap and befriending

Beastie: So what do you mean by befriending?

Ara: Certain phrases really lodge in my mind lately. Pete Walker writes about ‘becoming an unflinching source of kindness and compassion towards yourself’. Pema talks about befriending: complete acceptance of yourself as you are, no sense that you need to change or improve. Chani Nicholas writes about building an unbreakable bond with yourself, accompanying yourself no matter what, wanting yourself like your life depends on it.

Beastie: Chani Nicholas being?

Ara: An astrologer. 

Beastie: *Raises eyebrow*

Ara: Yes I know, I know. I have become that queer. At least I have you and James to keep me honest. What she suggests is really good though, whether or not you buy all the understanding behind it… Just like Pete and Pema now that I come to think of it. You may or may not buy that our suffering is primarily located in our childhood trauma, or in the combination of past karma and human attempts to avoid suffering which Buddhism suggests, but you can still find their advice extremely helpful.

Beastie: Fair point, well made Ara. I’ll give you that one.

Ara: Feeling gentle today huh Beastie?

Beastie: Well I have to remember I’m speaking to an old woman.

Ara: Remember Anna’s rule about being a smartass.

Beastie: *grin* If Tony gets away with publicly sassing you then I definitely do. So you’re saying that the gap can help us to befriend ourselves, as well as making us safe-enough.

Ara: I think they’re related. Right now we do not know that we are an okay person no matter what. We don’t want ourselves no matter what. We can’t accompany ourselves anywhere. When we have the shame feelings in particular, we do not feel that we’re okay, or deserving of being accompanied or loved – even by ourselves. And there is also a fear that we couldn’t accompany ourselves in future – if certain things happened like realising we’d messed up in ways which we find particularly challenging.

Beastie: Too right. I’m rarely the part of us who struggles with those feelings, but the couple of times it was my turn it was shockingly hard.

Ara: So giving ourselves the message that we’re up for hanging with ourselves in the gap whatever we’ve done, however we feel – that’s how we befriend ourselves. Again we can conceptualise it plurally – whichever part of us is struggling, the other parts will be there, tag-teaming in to accompany them through it however bad it gets.

Beastie: Like we always do that if one of us wakes troubled at night: get them a hot milk and talk to them kindly.

Ara: Plurality has been a good way into self-love for us because it is easier – with a background of self-hatred – to love our component parts than it is to love the whole. But I think this gap goes beyond our plural love, to let every aspect of us – and our experience – know that we can tolerate it – even welcome it.

Beastie: Just like embracing me – the inner critic – we can work towards a point where we can embrace anything we go through: any feelings, any thoughts – befriending everything.

Ara: And as with you, I suspect we’ll find that much of what we’ve attempted to avoid or eradicate becomes a fierce ally if we can embrace it.

Beastie: We’ve already found that with the fear aspect of trauma haven’t we? Gratitude for how it protects us against overriding our consent again.

Ara: All part of learning to accompany ourselves rather than abandoning ourselves.

Beastie: The big ongoing challenge is going to be accompanying ourselves through shame. But we have already begun to see that holding shame in the gap, and getting curious about it, are leading us to helpful places, just as we did with fear. For example, when we stayed with shame we got the sense that we may be holding a lot of shame that isn’t really ours – more transferred onto us by others who can’t bear to feel it – the way that wider society tends to blame the person with trauma rather than the people and forces that traumatise them.

Ara: I look forward to reading your thoughts on shame soon Beastie. I’m also now thinking about the gap as past, present, and future protection and care. The gap enables us to be with feelings we have avoided in the past in ways that enable us to tell a different story through our life. 

The gap enables us to be in a good relationship to the here-and-now, instead of fearing what might come up. That’s an antidote to loneliness: knowing that we never have to feel abandoned in the present. 

Finally, being able to stay with feelings like fear, shame, anger, and sadness, means that we can protect and care for ourselves in the next instant, and longer term future. When those feelings become tolerable in the gap we can listen to what they’re telling us – instead of what we might assume they’re going to tell us.

Beastie: So when there is fear we might ask ‘How might I have been in danger of overriding my consent – or allowing it to be overridden?’ instead of just trying to get the hell out of there. When there is shame we could ask ‘Where does this shame belong?’ rather than collapsing into self-loathing. When there is sadness ‘What do we – and others – need to grieve?’ instead of sinking into depression. When there is anger ‘How can I have my boundaries?’ instead of lashing out.

Ara: ‘Positive’ feelings too. When there is joy ‘How can I dance with this – or share it – while it is here,’ instead of trying to pin it on a particular person or situation and grasp hold of that.

Beastie: True, true. That’s one for Tony, our joybringer.

Ara: Anything else to say about the gap?

Beastie: I think we’ve said the rest in our other post. That one deals with slowing down and creating gaps on the macro – as well as micro – scale, and more about the politics of slowness.

Ara: For now then Beastie.

Beastie: See you in the gap Ara.

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Plural tag: This post was written by Beastie and Ara.

The post Mind the gap 1: On slowing down and making space appeared first on Rewriting The Rules.

I was particularly struck by Pete’s idea that it could be valuable to reach a balance between these four different ways of being. None of them are intrinsically ‘bad’, but when we can only act from one end of either spectrum we are limited, and perhaps also more likely to become stuck in the ways of reactive thinking and behaviour which hurt ourselves and others. 

It seemed like a useful non-binary approach to ask how we might find a more both/and or in-between approach to fawn/fight and freeze/flight. From a plural perspective I have a great way into this because I can access four selves who map onto each of the four Fs. So I thought it’d be fun to put them into dialogue here to explain what each of the four Fs feels like, what their strengths and limitations are, and how they’re doing the work – now – of operating together to become more balanced.

This post focuses on fawn and fight. You can find the other conversation – between freeze and flight – here. I’ve written here about how a move from flight and fawn, towards freeze and fight, can represent a shift from being with the fear of making yourself into something for others, to the shame of being for yourself. I’m also struck how, for me, freeze to flight represents that kind of shift around work, and fawn to fight around personal relationships.

Fawn and Fight (Jonathan and Beastie)

Beastie: Our turn kid, are you up for this?

Jonathan: Yes. Nervous like Max, but yes.

Beastie: Seems like the sides of us who have been to the fore all our lives find this harder than the sides of us who’ve not had as much airtime. Me and Fox are ready to do some talking! But you should probably start. What’s it like to be a fawn?

Fawn

Jonathan: I always called it people pleasing, before I heard about ‘fawn’ as a trauma response. I’m very frightened of disapproval so I try to do whatever people want, to keep them happy. I love feeling like I’ve been good, and I hate feeling like I’ve been bad.

Beastie: Right. So fawn as a trauma response is where you try to appease people – do whatever it takes to get out of danger. Fight – my response – is where you get angry and lash out, or use your power to control others and get out of danger that way.

Jonathan: The same way flight became familiar to us, and freeze almost impossible, fawn became our everyday way of being, and we hardly ever went into fight.

Beastie: It worked a bit differently between me and you thought didn’t it? We did have a ‘fight’ part – me – but I became turned inwards instead of outwards: the inner critic. 

Casting out fight

Jonathan: Yes. The way we think about it, it was like we learnt young that it was never okay to be angry, or even really to say ‘no’, so we had to get rid of the part of us that would’ve been capable of doing that. We imagine it was like severing you from us and casting you out into the ocean, and then you became this terrifying sea monster, attacking us from out there.

Beastie: Like if people get rid of their capacity for anger, blame and criticism, that can easily become turned against themselves. And that’s what I was: the terrifying inner critic roaring at you from the depths. Like Fox I occasionally came forward and let that anger out at another person – often in extreme conflict – but mostly I was out there turning it in on us.

Jonathan: You still sound just a little bit proud of being the terrifying beastie.

Beastie: I’m not, honestly I hate how much damage it caused the rest of you to have me out there instead of in here. But I do kindof like the image of me as a powerful kraken destroying everything. I like being familiar with the darkness: it’s important.

Jonathan: We were so scared of you. We kept reading all those books about how you should embrace the inner critic and we were like, ‘are you kidding?’

Beastie: You did try to eradicate me. Sadly not an effective strategy with inner critics. I just got louder and meaner.

Jonathan: Because inner critics are trying to protect the whole system. We understand that now. They just can’t communicate very effectively when they’re out there. Because nobody is listening they say whatever they need to as noisily as they can to get heard. So it is often confusing, contradictory, and extremely harsh.

Beastie: Poor Max-y, it’s a killer combination with ‘flight’ isn’t it? I keep screaming about how terrible you are, and she keeps working harder to try not to be. Meanwhile our little people pleaser…

Jonathan: Gets stuck in the chalkboard room trying like hell to figure out how to keep everybody happy, which is an impossible equation, I know that now. We made a comic about that.

Beastie: So fawn and fight both have their potentials, and their big risks right, when it comes to relating with ourselves and with others.

Fawn potentials and pitfalls

Jonathan: Right. Fawn means you constantly shape yourself to win other peoples’ love and approval, so they don’t really get to know you, and you can’t really be vulnerable or get close to people. You often lose relationships because it’s hard to sustain. We wrote before about being a shapeshifter and the down side of that. 

I guess the potential of being really great at fawn is that I’m so tuned in to other people’s feelings. I learnt how to do that early on. So I think I can be really good at compassion, if I can learn to stay with people’s feelings rather than trying to fix them. I usually find that I can imagine why a person might be behaving the way they’re feeling. Even when it’s tough, I can feel for them, and for all of us caught up in these painful dynamics.

Beastie: You’re so good at feeling for others, when we can get you out of that chalkboard room. Whereas I find it too easy to dismiss people as being assholes.

Jonathan: You should maybe say how things changed when we finally did embrace you Beastie.

Fight potentials and pitfalls

Beastie: Right. Still only just over a year ago – it’s not been long at all. I guess it felt like I became an ally rather than an enemy. Instead of being outside focusing all that anger in on us, I was inside and able to feel anger out. That doesn’t mean just going from shame to blame, but finally we were able to set some boundaries with people, and see more clearly other peoples’ roles in difficult dynamics instead of just taking all the responsibility on ourselves. Also I guess it helped Max to relax that there wasn’t that loud voice screaming at her all the time.

Jonathan: It was hard for her to realise that she still did that to herself though, even without you there. It’s not like embracing the inner critic makes all the mean thoughts and shameful feelings go away overnight. It’s like the whole inner system takes time to adjust. But since you have been on the inside it has been easier to evaluate those critical thoughts we have.

Beastie: I feel like my potential is that I can be a force for clarity, knowing what we need, asserting boundaries. But unchecked I can just be angry, blaming, critical and judgemental. That’s where the fawn/fight dream team comes in right?

Jonathan: I think it’s still a work in progress. I feel like Fox and Max may be a bit ahead of us.

Balancing fawn and fight

Beastie: Perhaps a scared little boy and a terrifying sea monster is an even less likely partnership, but I loved it as soon as we saw the importance of our relationship.

Jonathan: How do you see it working?

Beastie: Well at the moment it feels like what happens is that life throws us a situation where you would previously have gone into fawn. You still retreat into the chalkboard room at those points and we feel all the fear and shame feelings come up. You want to do whatever it takes to make the other person approve of you so that you can avoid shame, but you’re also very frightened of ending up in another situation where someone is treating you non-consensually, or you’re treating yourself that way.

Jonathan: It’s so scary when that happens. I feel like I have to think about it all the time to figure it out: fear or shame, fear or shame, fear or shame. It gets so noisy in my head.

Beastie: So my role at the moment is to help you see you’ve gone into that, and to help you see that there are usually other options than ‘override yourself and feel fear’ or ‘upset someone else and feel shame’. Often the other option we find is to explain honestly and vulnerably where we’re at, and clearly state what our boundaries are. We sometimes think of it as expressing our ‘can’t’ and our ‘won’t’.

Jonathan: So what often happens is that I spend several days in fear and shame, trying to figure it out, and then you step forward and write an email or have a conversation like that.

Beastie: Because the fight part is good at honesty, boundaries, and seeing the whole picture clearly. But what I lack – on my own – is kindness and feeling for the other person. What I hope is that we can do over time is to bring my clarity and boundaries together with your kindness and tenderness: Protection and connection.

Jonathan: Tough and tender.

Beastie: Right? Sounds like an excellent crime-fighting duo!

Paradox and balance

Jonathan: And like Max and Fox it’s not just that you bring tough and I bring tender, more that I can help you bring tenderness to your toughness, and vice versa.

Beastie: So I always try to get you to vet what I’m thinking of saying, to make sure it’s kind enough. And I try to remember that if I go into proper rage I’m probably missing where the other person is coming from.

Jonathan: They’ll be acting out of their survival strategies just as much as we are.

Beastie: And now we have an inner experience of all four of these strategies – the four Fs – that could mean: far greater capacity to notice when other people have gone into theirs, far greater empathy for the harm that causes them, and far better ability to be clear what we can and can’t offer, depending on how much people are up for looking at this stuff themselves.

Jonathan: That’s the team we could be, I hope: having the compassion and tenderness to understand why other people are acting the way they are and feel for them, and the clarity and toughness to let them know what we will, and won’t, accept.

Beastie: Or maybe the clarity and toughness to understand why other people are acting the way they are and feel for them, and the compassion and tenderness to let them know what we will, and won’t, accept. I’m just thinking that it takes both of us for both parts really. It’s like what we once wrote that kindness without honesty isn’t really kindness, and honesty without kindness isn’t really honesty. You always need both the kind tenderness and the honest toughness I think.

Jonathan: Like when I’m people pleasing I’m not really being kind however much they might like it. It hurts people long term. And when you’re angry-critical you’re not really being honest because you’re missing so much of what’s actually going on.

Beastie: Looks like we’re stuck with each other. Neither of us works without the other one.

Jonathan: Which means I’m safe from the chalkboard room and you’re safe from the ocean. We need us both for either of us to be what we really want to be: kind for me, and honest for you.

Beastie: I’ll come get you out of the chalkboard room and you come get me out of the ocean, if we slip back. Deal?

Jonathan: Deal.

You can find the first part of this conversation here.

Patreon link: If you liked this, feel free to support my Patreon, it will certainly help this self-employed person to maintain some income during these uncertain times.

Plural tag: This post was written by Jonathan and Beastie.

The post Balancing fight, flight, freeze and fawn: A plural perspective 2 appeared first on Rewriting The Rules.

Lately I’ve been writing blog posts in two different formats: the regular style, like this one, and a plural style, where I work things through in conversation between two different sides of myself. This time, as an experiment, I’ve tried writing on the same theme in both formats. You can read the plural conversation version here. Feel free to pick just the format that works best for you. Or, if you like, you can read them both. I’m fascinated by the different potentials opened up by the different formats, and how they compare for readers, so feel free to give me any feedback about that.

One of the big ideas in Pete Walker’s book on cPTSD is the sense of trauma response as a combination of fear and shame. That’s very much how it is for me. When something triggers me I tend to feel somewhere on the spectrum from worry to utter panic, combined with somewhere on the spectrum from self-doubt to self-loathing. In emotional flashback I’m convinced that I’m in huge danger and that I’m a terrible person.

Understanding that this combination of feelings probably underlies most of my stuck patterns in how I relate to myself, others, my work, and the world. I’ve tried to get curious about them and to make it my business to understand the anatomy of my trauma response. Of course my experience and understanding may not resonate for everybody, but I expect these conclusions apply beyond just me.

Fear/shame and other/self

As I’ve mentioned before it’s not always possible – or advisable – to sit in the overwhelm of an emotional flashback. But what I have been doing is to pause when I feel the flicker or flame of fear/shame coming up and to ask myself what might be happening. I’ve also been reflecting after a period of flashback about what might’ve been going on for me.

Where I’ve got to is that nearly always a triggering situation had occurred which I felt required to make a choice between myself and somebody else: either I could choose the other person and hurt myself, or I could choose myself and hurt somebody else. Sometimes it’s more that a memory of a previous such time has come up, or that I’m imagining a future situation which might put me in that predicament.

This self/other dilemma is something I’ve had a sense of for years. The new piece is to map this onto the fear/shame element of trauma. I feel the combination of fear and shame in those moments because choosing the other person over myself equals fear, and choosing myself over the other person equals shame. This makes it feel an unbearable choice.

The fear(others)/shame(self) spectrum

It seems extraordinary how this simple binary – fear(others)/shame(self) – underlies practically everything I struggle with: from something as massive as a break-up to something as tiny as deciding what task to do next today.

Big fear(others)/shame(self) moments

When I’m deciding whether to walk away from a relationship which is hurting me, it generally manifests as a sense of terror at the possibility of remaining in such pain in order to avoid hurting the other person and a sense of debilitating shame at imagining being the person who walks away and hurts the person they love. A similarly huge fear/shame response generally accompanies finding out that something I did in my work hurt somebody.

Small fear(others)/shame(self) moments

When I’m trying to figure out what task to do next today, sometimes the choice of doing something ‘productive’ like writing a blog post or answering emails can be accompanied by an almost imperceptible frisson of fear that I’m falling into my old habit of overriding my self-consent in order to do something for others. The choice of doing something ‘unproductive’ and gentle for myself – like watching TV or going for a walk – can be accompanied by a similarly tiny frisson of shame that this behaviour – and therefore I – am somehow bad, or at least less good than the alternative. A similarly small fear/shame response might flicker up, for example, when deciding which book to read next: one I think I should read or a ‘guilty pleasure’.

I could probably map pretty much every situation I struggle with on a spectrum between these big and small examples.

Where does the fear(others)/shame(self) binary come from?

I think there are many strands which come together to create – and reinforce – this fear(others)/shame(self) binary. 

In one sense it is a human tension, which existential philosophers in particular have written a good deal about. Sartre’s famous quote ‘hell is other people’ is all about his notion that we’re constantly forced to choose between objectifying ourselves for other people, and/or objectifying other people for ourselves. This is something I’ve written about a lot in my work on conflict. I love Terry Pratchett’s Granny Weatherwax quote for this: ‘Sin is when you treat people like things. Including yourself. That’s what sin is.’

In another sense this fear(others)/shame(self) binary is a product of – at least exacerbated by – neoliberal capitalism, because within this system we are trained to experience ourselves as atomised individuals in competition with others. More from me and Justin about how that works here.

Finally the trauma component of the fear(others)/shame(self) binary is important. Pete Walker – and others – locate the starting points of developmental trauma in the lack – or loss – of protection and care. This is another binary that we could see as mapping onto fear(others)/shame(self). When we are protected we are safe enough and have no need to fear others. When we are cared for we know that we are okay in who we are and have no need to feel shame.

Personally I have a memory of a pivotal moment when I became locked into this fear/shame binary way of thinking, feeling, and relating. At nine I moved to a school where it seemed that I was being taught, daily, by my peers that everything about me was unacceptable. My struggles with this were hard for people at home so I felt increasingly unacceptable there too. 

I realised that either I could hide this unacceptable person that I was and shape myself into what others said I should be, in order to belong and be approved of. Or I could ‘be myself’ and continue to feel isolated, unwelcome, and disliked. I chose the former: fear(others) over shame(self). Interestingly I’ve since had conversations with people who felt faced with the same choice and went the other way. At that age it’s unlikely that we’ll be able to find options beyond the binary.

The four Fs and the fear(others)/shame(self) binary

If we see the four F trauma responses – fight, flight, freeze and fawn – as habitual styles of relating to ourselves, others, and the world, then we can also see them as four different ways of trying to avoid those horrible fear/shame feelings. Of course most of us employ a combination of these different strategies.

• In fight we blame others, attack out, and attempt to control others so we don’t risk anyone overriding us (fear) and don’t have to feel at all responsible ourselves (shame).
• In flight we keep busy doing things. This means we don’t have to slow down and feel the fear that we may be prioritising winning other’s approval over our own needs. It means we avoid addressing the shame that means no amount of ‘success’ will ever mean we’re good enough.
• In freeze we distract ourselves constantly from having to face the fear that we might not be protecting ourselves well enough, and the shame that we might not be okay. That may be with social media, TV, food, alcohol, or whatever our mode of avoidance is.
• In fawn we become what we think we need to be in order to please others. We hope this will mean we can avoid the shame of realising we’re not really acceptable. We hope that if we are ‘good enough’ then other people won’t hurt us and we won’t have to feel that fear.

But none of these strategies work. In fact they all fetch us right back in the horrendous fear/shame place that we were trying so hard to avoid.

• Fighters will probably hear more and more from others that we hurt people and are ‘bad’ (shame). The more we defend against hearing this, the louder and more attacking and intrusive those voices are likely to get (fear).
• Fleers are going to have to go faster and faster, overriding ourselves more and more, in an attempt to outrun our feelings. We may well start to feel the underlying fear of what we’re doing to ourselves. We risk overstretching, burnout and the accompanying shame of not being able to do anything any more.
• With freeze, the fear tends to get louder and louder the more we distract ourselves because we’re not listening to what it’s telling us about how we’re failing to protect ourselves. We may also face the shame of realising that we haven’t been there for others.
• Fawn folks are going to keep fetching back up in fear/shame because we can’t sustain turning ourselves into something for others long term. However hard we try to be good, others will hurt us, indeed we may be particularly drawn to relationships in which that’s likely to happen. And however much we try to be something pleasing and good for others it will be unsustainable and they will see what we’ve been trying to hide.

You could also see it that in the forced binary choice between fear(others) and shame(self), flight and fawn choose fear(others) over shame(self), and fight and freeze choose shame(self) over fear(others). Flight and fawn are both more about being-for-others in order to get approval, recognition, love, or belonging. Fight and freeze are both more about being-for-yourself either by blaming, attacking or controlling others, or by disappearing into self distraction or avoidance. 

So perhaps fight and fawn get used to managing the fear which comes when overriding themselves for others. They find the shame which comes with standing up for themselves intolerable. For fight and freeze it’s the other way round. Certainly as I’ve moved towards balancing my go-to strategies of flight with freeze, and fawn with fight, I’ve noticed a tip towards more shame and less fear, rather than the other way around.

So what can we do?

So far so bleak right?! There’s already a lot in my other posts about how we can notice the flicker, flame, and fire of the fear/shame response, work with emotional flashbacks, and shift our stuck patterns. Here I want to focus on two things which I haven’t written so much about yet, but which have been hugely helpful to me recently: welcoming fear/shame with gratitude, and shifting out of fear/shame logic.

Welcoming fear/shame with gratitude

This week it dawned on me that pretty much everything I’d been doing till this point was still with the aim of stopping the fear/shame response. This is pretty understandable given that the feeling feels utterly horrendous to me. When the flicker of fear/shame arises, a previously pleasant day becomes tinged with doom. There is an additional layer of fear that it might get worse, and shame that that could mean I won’t be able do the things I had promised to others. When a full flashback hits I feel small and incapable, terrible about myself, and under huge threat. Who would want to feel like that?

Of course I’m also an advocate of staying with feelings, but the trauma literature has helped me to see that this is not always the best strategy with trauma responses. Staying with intense trauma feelings can be retraumatizing and keep your body and brain locked in trauma responses, making it more – rather than less – likely that it will keep happening.

However, trying to avoid these feelings, freaking out at the first sign of them, and attempting to get rid of them was not working for me either, to say the least! Conversations with my therapist and listening to a new Pema Chödrön audio got me thinking about whether there might be another way. When the feelings were up I decided to try to welcome them warmly as part of the full experience that I was having in that moment. I guess it’s that idea that I’ve written about before of holding everything in an open hand rather than grasping hold of it or hurling it away.

What this looked like for me was pausing the moment I felt the flicker, flame, or fire of fear/shame and sitting – often in my window – trying to be with the whole moment that I was in (the sounds, the sensations, the thoughts, the feelings). This moment included – but wasn’t restricted to – the fear/shame element which often manifested as churning compulsive thoughts, a tight chest, an adrenaline lump in the throat, a sense of contraction, and feelings of anxiety and being a bad person. I tried to welcome those aspects of my experience – while not making them the entirety of my experience. I even said ‘you’re welcome here’ and tried to hold them with warmth.

What surprised me was a sense of gratitude that started to come up. I realised that previously in my life I have managed to cover over this fear/shame feeling with my four F strategies, stuck patterns, etc. Now the feeling is so strong that it’s having none of it! Also it seems to have flipped from a preference for fear(others) over shame(self) to the opposite. The fear I feel every time I risk overriding myself – even in small ways – is so intense that I can’t do it to myself any more. This means that I can’t abandon myself, even if it does mean feeling a lot of shame when I set boundaries or walk away from a situation that is hurting me. 

It feels like this fear/shame feeling is protecting me: warning me when a situation has arisen where I risk hurting myself. Maybe it has always been trying to protect me. I can feel grief for the times I haven’t listened to it in the past, and gratitude for its continued presence and the fact that I am listening to it now.

So now I can – sometimes – sit with fear/shame and say ‘thank-you’ as well as ‘you’re welcome here’. I know that the feeling is probably trying to tell me that I’m risking overriding myself in some way, even if it does feel like an overreaction to a small situation – or even to a memory or an imagined event. Paradoxically, of course, when I listen to fear/shame in this way it doesn’t have to shout quite so loudly.

Shifting out of fear/shame logic

The other thing I’ve been doing is recognising that fear/shame is rooted in binary logic. Some of my favourite thinkers like Simone de Beauvoir and bell hooks have challenged the self/other binary, suggesting that there are ways to engage mutually with others, supporting each others’ projects reciprocally, and valuing ourselves and others equally. It’s not a matter of pendulum swinging from others-over-self (fear) to self-over-others (shame). It’s about how we can hold all lives, bodies, and labour as equally valuable, and understand ourselves as inevitably interdependent and interconnected. 

This is partly why I make such a big project of exploring how we can treat ourselves and others consensually. Fear(other)/shame(self) logic is inevitably non-consensual: either we override our own consent or another’s consent. For me the consent project is all about finding alternative – mutual and ethical – ways of relating to ourselves and others in all aspects of life.

I read an interesting idea in Jessica Fern’s forthcoming book Polysecure from the attachment and trauma literature. This is that for good relationships with ourselves and others we need both protection and connection. Protection requires keeping ourselves safe-enough, having boundaries, not allowing others to hurt us, etc. Connection requires being open, vulnerable, and real with others.

It struck me that being stuck in fear/shame logic doesn’t allow for either of these things. In fear we override ourselves for others and don’t give ourselves protection. In shame we cover over our vulnerability in case others see how ‘bad’ we are, so we don’t allow ourselves real connection. 

Instead of choosing fear(other) or shame(self) it’s about choosing protection and connection. This moves us from an either/or binary to a both/and. Also it neatly maps onto Pete’s sense that we fetch up in fear/shame trauma responses because we lost or lacked protection and/or care, and that finding protection and care within – and from our team of outer relationships – is the way forward.

What shifting out of fear/shame logic looks like – for me – is, again, pausing when I feel the flicker, flame, or fire of fear/shame. I sit with myself and often try to talk from a kind, wise voice to a more vulnerable child voice: the one who is stuck in the fear/shame response. I invite that child side to reflect on how whatever has triggered me is a fear/shame thing. 

Usually it’s fairly easy to see how this situation feels like a choice between others (fear) or myself (shame). Generally naming this, in itself, results in feeling a bit more space or expansiveness around it. I usually try not to rush to any decision right then, but I remind the part of myself who is caught in fear/shame that there are always other options beyond choosing other or self: that this is a false binary, albeit one that is very understandable to fall into.

In exploring how this fear/shame logic works I’ve also realised that it’s understandable to obsess over past memories as I can find myself doing. It’s an attempt to prove to myself that the situation was bad enough to warrant hurting another person, in order to avoid shame. But it’s also retraumatizing to keep going over these memories, putting me back in fear. It similarly makes sense to hypervigilently go over situations where I might have fucked up, or to imagine future scenarios playing out in order to figure out how to avoid fucking up. This is all about trying to prevent shame. But again I can recognise that it’s triggering to do this, which puts me back in fear. 

Generally when I feel any flame or fire of fear/shame I park any decision-making until a time when I’m feeling clear and calm again, perhaps promising myself that I’ll check in about it over morning coffee which is often a good time for me. Once I get to that point I try to expand out to consider all options, and aim at a choice that combines protection and connection. For example, lately the eventual choice has often involved openly explaining my vulnerability to others (connection) and clearly stating my boundaries (protection). If clearness and calmness do not feel possible around this situation yet, I try to commit to going slow and refraining until I feel ready, perhaps explaining that this is what I’m doing to anyone else involved if a response is required.

I’m not saying here that any of this is easy. Believe me the last year or so of my life is living proof that it is not! This approach towards fear/shame goes against the grain of all our habits of avoidance and attempts at eradication. I know it’ll be super easy to slip back into trying to avoid recognising when fear/shame comes up, pretending it’s not really happening, distracting myself, and/or acting quickly to avoid the pain – usually in ways that override myself and give others what I think they want. I’m hoping – as with all of these blog posts – that writing it down will help new ways of being to bed in, as well as hopefully helping others who’re grappling with similar stuff. I see you!

What you can do when fear(others)/shame(self) hits:

• Notice the flicker, flame, or fire feeling (however it manifests for you: familiar bodily sensations, thoughts, feelings, habits, etc.). Name this as a fear/shame trauma response, remember how these work in the body and brain. Everything that is happening makes sense and isn’t your fault. Try to reframe it from something bad that has happened to an opportunity to get curious, understand it better, and practice new – kinder – habits.
• Pause and find somewhere you can be with it safely for some time (if this is impossible, promise yourself that you will do so as soon as you can, and do whatever you need to survive in the meantime). Slow down your breathing and talk to yourself kindly. Give yourself as long as you need. Try to spaciously feel the whole of what you’re experiencing in the moment, including all your senses, not just focusing on the fear/shame. Refrain from going into a fight, flight, freeze or fawn strategy to avoid it or act out of it.
• Welcome the fear/shame feeling with warmth and gratitude, recognising how it has helped you in the past and may well be trying to help you now if you can listen to it gently and curiously instead of grasping it or hurling it away.
• Soothe (if intense): If the feeling is too intense to stay with in this way, thank it and promise to return to it once you’re in a calmer, clearer place. Then go to activities which soothe your nervous system, or wait to address it when you can be supported through it, by a therapist or support group for example.
• Recognise (if possible): If you can stay with it, recognise how the trigger was about fear(others)/shame(self). Remember that it can be a fleeting memory or response to internal sensation as much as an external situation. No worries if you can’t identify the trigger this time. Allow any feelings that come up to be released.
• Explore once you are in a calmer, clearer place. Step out of binary fear(others)/shame(self) logic and consider all the options in relation to the triggering situation, perhaps prioritising those which combine protection and connection. 

I have also found it useful to do this as a preventative activity – just checking in with myself at several points during the day, perhaps whenever one task ends before beginning the next. I ask whether there is any fear/shame feeling around, and apply this process if there is. I keep this list on my phone to remind me of the process during the fear/shame feelings when it can be hard to access.

If you want to read about I do this stuff in real time, check out the plural version of this blog post, here.

Patreon link: If you liked this, feel free to support my Patreon, it will certainly help this self-employed person to maintain some income during these uncertain times.

Plural tag: This post was written by Beastie, with vital input from Jonathan.

The post Fear/Shame and the Anatomy of a Trauma Response appeared first on Rewriting The Rules.