As lockdown eases I’ve felt a similar easing in myself. I’m not as trapped in trauma as I have been for much of the last few months. The fear/shame feelings are not such a big part of everyday life. I haven’t had a major flashback in a while [update: except for the massive one I had two days after writing this post, ah well it’s a process]. 

However there has been an edgy, uneasy feeling of late. I fear that emerging any further from my own personal lockdown will mean ‘going back’ to old patterns I really don’t want to return to. There’s a sense of not being ready, certainly, to engage in more challenging situations until these new ways of relating to myself, others, my work, the world, have had a chance to bed in a little deeper. At the same time there’s also some frustration, a pull to engage more, to be ‘through this’: to be able to work on bigger projects, to deal with urgent situations, to approach things I’ve been protecting myself from in order to address this trauma, and to get a little stronger.

It’s back to fear and shame again of course. There’s both fear that I will over-stretch, overwhelm, and override myself again, and shame that I should be able to do more, go further, reach some kind of imaginary destination point of recovery or fixed-ness.

The in-between state

I’ve found it helpful to return to a chapter in Pema Chödrön’s book The Places that Scare You about ‘the in-between state’. She speaks of a time in the warrior’s journey of addressing our stuck patterns when we’re completely fed up with our old ways of being, but still wish that outer circumstances could bring us lasting happiness.

We know that our usual habits are no match for suffering, but we still want to go to them for comfort because we can’t quite trust our new ways yet. We struggle to hang out in the gap left by dropping our old strategies, and just to be with the agitated energy of that place without trying to get ground back under our feet. It’s hard to hold the uncertainty and paradox of it all instead of going back to binaries of good/bad, right/wrong, truth/lie, etc.

Bringing these Buddhist ideas into dialogue with the trauma literature I’ve been studying, I see that most of my recent struggles have been around a draw back to those old habits of fight, flight, freeze, and fawn, realising they’re just not working for me any more, but struggling to be with the edgy, agitated feelings left in their wake.

Flight and freeze

I’m tempted back to flight. At those times it doesn’t really feel okay to keep focusing on this inner work, despite everything I know about how necessary that is for me, for everyone around me, and for my outer work. I think I should be out there more, I should take on more, I should be working on a ‘big project’ again instead of these blog posts, I should get the decks cleared, I should read about something other than emotional trauma because the world is on fire.

When I try to push through with this it doesn’t work. I force myself to answer emails and I know I’m being less human and connected than I want to be in my replies. I start a blog post but it feels dead and unappealing: so different from the lively, fired up kind of writing I do when I wait till it’s really calling me. Working like this feels zombified and dehumanising to me and to others.

Flight doesn’t work for me any more. So instead I have to sit with the fear feelings that come up when I push through, and the shame feelings that come up when I’m not ‘doing’. I have to keep learning to be warm, kind and tender towards them – towards the parts of me that can’t ‘do’ like that any more, and towards the parts that struggle so much with ‘not-doing’ – instead of ignoring or overriding them.

When flight isn’t working, I’m tempted back into freeze. Instead of sitting with that appalling shame feeling I could just give up and fall into the black hole of scrolling social media or Netflix binging. But that doesn’t work anymore either. Like Pema says:

We’d give anything to have the comfort we used to get from eating a pizza or watching a video. However, even though those things can be pleasurable, we’ve seen that eating a pizza or watching a video is a feeble match for our suffering.

Pema Chödrön – The Places that Scare You

Every time I engage with any of my go-to comforting activities from that place of trying to avoid feelings or distract myself, I feel worse afterwards – and often during. The flickers of tough feelings become flames or even fires in the background in order to be noticed.

This doesn’t mean never doing any work, or anything gentle, of course. It means continuing to notice how I’m engaging in both work and gentle activities. It means returning to the gap – to sitting still – whenever I notice I’m treating myself non-consensually around work, or around the desire to distract from tough feelings. It means staying with the edgy emotions – along with everything else in that moment – until I know that I’m in a position to make a kind, consensual decision about what to do next, and returning to the gap if those emotions return, as many times as it takes.

Fawn and fight

In contact with others I notice a draw back to fawn and flight. When I don’t really feel okay about giving myself this time to focus on addressing trauma I feel like I should be engaging with others differently. I feel like I should say ‘yes’ to every request for my time and energy. I shouldn’t have boundaries around what kinds of contact feel okay – and not okay – for me if those conflict with what others want from me. I should have capacity for interactions that I still don’t feel ready for.

That old fawn pattern manifests as quickly responding to every email request with a ‘yes’, before I’ve had chance to tune into whether it’s something I want, or to get enough information. It manifests as not feeling able to honestly explain what I’m going through and the limits that might put around things I may previously have had capacity for (ironic given that it’s out here for all to read, but there it is!) It manifests as jumping back into contact with others the moment I feel I might be ready, rather than leaving it a couple more weeks to be sure.

A few weeks ago I went straight from solitude to a very busy walk where social distancing was impossible, without thinking about the impact such a sudden shift would have on my nervous system. I didn’t feel able to draw back, to find another way, or to figure out what I needed afterwards because of not wanting to be difficult or awkward for another person.

As with flight, the answer is to hang out in the gap with the feelings before responding, for as long as it takes, for as long as I don’t feel ready. If I override myself I will have a backlash of fear, especially when I’ve offered something more than I really feel able to give, or overstepped my own boundaries.

This also means staying with the shame of being where I am, with this very limited capacity, and having to let others know that: not always being the person I would like to be for them – in fact not even close. It feels hugely shameful to say that I can’t yet manage being in a busy area, or that I may have to cancel something if I’m badly triggered that day, or that I still can’t manage to be open and kind in some relationships in the ways I’d like to be.

As with the move from flight to freeze, there can be a move from fawn to fight: from what Love Uncommon calls the broken house to the fortress of solitude. When the fawn feelings are unbearable it’s tempting to go the other way: to go over difficult exchanges, or problematic emails, or tough relationships and judge the other people, even to be drawn to point out their behaviour in shaming ways.

Now that I’m outside of academic systems this comes up particularly around any engagement with people who are still embedded within them. I’m shocked by the tone of some editors and reviewers who are expecting huge amounts of free labour and still give their feedback in harshly critical ways ‘you must…’, ‘wrong’, ‘unclear’, etc. When engaging around assessing students – something I still do a little of – I’ve been in dynamics where the desire to follow academic procedures are clearly placed well above both student well-being, and my well-being.

At such times my head can get very noisy rehearsing stories about how and why others are wrong, what I should say to them, how to ‘win’. There’s fear that whatever I do or say they – and their systems – will override me anyway. There’s shame because I know my response is helping nobody and actually taking me further from the kind of connected and boundaried contact I’d really like to have with others.

If I can stay in the gap, at these moments, I can reach that place where it all dissolves and I see that their attempts to control me and shame me into behaving as they want, have made me want to control them and shame them right back. I can see the whole tragic drama and how I’ve become caught up in it. Then it can dissolve and something much more tender can emerge in its place. I’m humbled by the times I have managed to ‘drop the storyline’ I had going about such situations – as Pema puts it – and have been surprised by a very real, vulnerable, connected interaction where I’d assumed that was impossible.

Dwelling in the in-between state requires learning to contain the paradox of something’s being both right and wrong, of someone’s being strong and loving and also angry, uptight, and stingy. In that painful moment when we don’t live up to our own standards, do we condemn ourselves or truly appreciate the paradox of being human? Can we forgive ourselves and stay in touch with our good and tender heart? When someone pushes our buttons, do we set out to make the person wrong? Or do we repress our reaction with ‘I’m supposed to be loving. How could I hold this negative thought?’

Pema Chödrön – The Places that Scare You

Hanging out in the in-between

So with work/play, and with relationships with others, the answer is – still – to hang out in the gap, in the in-between, with all the agitated feelings that come with that: to welcome those feelings warmly into the big open space of the present moment, to stay with the uncertainty and paradox of it all.

Right now I’m trying to notice the desire to rush through this ‘in-between’ to get to some imagined destination where I can do all the work from that lively creative place, treat myself gently, and navigate all my relationships with others with the perfect balance of compassion and consent with them and with myself.

A big question, for me, is what it would be like to really allow myself to be where I currently am, instead of trying to get somewhere else: to let this be my life. It strikes me that a lot of my nightmares through this period have been of being trapped back in bullying schools and workplaces, and in homes with non-consensual relationship dynamics. I’ve done much in the past years to free myself from non-consensual outer systems, where others involved are not keen to shift those cultures and dynamics, but the inner system still defaults so often to non-consent. 

Allowing this to be my life – this commitment to consensual compassionate treatment of myself and others – involves freeing myself from those internalised non-consensual, controlling, systems, which is a much bigger ask, and requires a whole lot of time hanging out with these feelings, in the gap.

The major practice now – and perhaps forever – is looking out for those four Fs sneaking back in and – when they do – radically noticing the feelings, returning to the gap, refraining from any action until I can engage from a place that is consensual, compassionate, and able to hold the paradoxes. Sometimes that will be a small gap at the start of the day and then crack on. Other times I will have to return again and again to the gap as it keeps coming up. Sometimes I’ll make a choice to go into that four F response to survive the moment, because nothing else feels possible. Then at least I will commit to returning to the gap, and being with whatever feelings that brings up, as soon as it is safe enough to do so.

What I’m aspiring to with the four Fs is:

Flight: Only go to  work when I feel called to it, grounded in what I’m offering, and consensual with myself around it.

Freeze: Only go to gentle things when they really feel gentle, rather than being an attempt to avoid something else, or a form of gentleness I think I should enjoy rather than actually feeling called towards.

Fawn: Only offer things to others which feel right, rather than coming from a place of craving something from them, or shaping myself for them.

Fight: Only engage in contact/relationships where I’m being treated consensually, and endeavour to be clear with others what that involves instead of allowing non-consensual treatment. Resist being pulled into non-consensual behaviour back, recognising how hard it is to be consensual within non-consensual systems, and trying to be open to the full human being rather than this current behaviour.

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 a team effort.

The post Caught in-between: The messy middle of shifting stuck patterns 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.

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.

This post focuses on freeze and flight. You can find the other conversation – between fawn and fight – here. There’s also more from Max about the challenges of changing the Flight habit here.

Freeze and Flight (Max and Fox)

Max: Looks like we’re up first.

Fox: My first time writing on here as me!

Max: How’re you feeling?

Fox: Excited! How about you?

Max: Terrified, as usual. But I do think you and I have been doing some great work together. I like the idea of sharing that with other people in case it’s useful to them.

Fox: Shall we start by saying a bit about who we are?

Max: Sure, well in our inner landscape it feels like I have been at the front and you at the back for most of our lives right?

Fox: Yes because we learnt when we were young that flight was better than freeze. Flight is when you always go into doing mode, and freeze means you can just be. I guess we learnt from the world around us that we got most approval when we did well, worked hard, and achieved. And it wasn’t very valued to be in the moment, chill out, or play. Everything had to be done for a reason.

Max: Right. As trauma responses, people who flee – like me – try to act right away: do anything to sort it out and make it okay. People who freeze, like you, would go immobile, struggle to do anything at all, maybe hide away.

Fox: Mmhm. And as bigger life strategies, that could map onto what Brené Brown talks about as overfunctioning and underfunctioning. Overfunctioners throw themselves into work, have to be the best and succeed, don’t feel okay unless they’re producing something. Underfunctioners struggle with any of that stuff. They’re often scared of putting themselves out there in any way, and feel safer watching TV, reading books, playing computer games, that kind of thing. What’s it like being a flight type Max?

Flight potentials and pitfalls

Max: Right now I’m mostly in touch with how much it has hurt me over time. Looking back in my journals, the start of every summer of my adult life I made a list of all the things I felt I should achieve and produce over the vacation time. It’s exhausting just looking at them. My life was governed by alarms, to-do lists, and deadlines. I’m terrible at holidays: they stress me out. And life easily becomes a series of false hills. When you reach the top of one there’s always another stretching up above you. Ugh even when I actually go for a relaxing walk I have to get to the top of the hill!

Fox: Is there anything good about being a flight type: a flee-er?

Max: I guess I’ve always had a clear sense of purpose. I know people at the freeze end can really struggle with figuring out what they should do with their life. That’s never been a problem for me. And because I put my ‘flight’ instincts towards figuring out my struggles – learning and writing about love, sex, gender, and mental health from every angle – my doing mode has brought us to this point where we at least have a lot of knowledge and wisdom available to us.

Fox: As we go through a massive trauma time.

Max: Yep. I feel like – in a lot of ways – it was my way of being that put us here. My whole life I went so fast into everything with no spaciousness or slowness or caution, and got so badly hurt along the way. But at the same time I did also learn a lot of tools that help now that we are here. What about you though? What’s it like being a freeze?

Fox: It feels so funny because you’ve always struggled to understand people who default to underfunctioning rather than overfunctioning, and now we have a part of us who does that!

Freeze potentials and pitfalls

Max: I know, and one who is here more and more, thank goodness. We see you as the part of us that we were when we were very young: before all the messages about being good and productive kicked in, or even about needing to be a certain way for other people at all You seem so much more able than me to follow what you find fun or pleasurable.

Fox: I still feel like that little kid, even though I’m now in this older body with all the other occupants! It does almost feel like I went to sleep around 5 years old and just woke up a couple of years ago. I think we see me as like an animal or a child because I feel more free and wild. But I probably did pop up at times during our life, like when we just couldn’t overfunction any more – because things got so hard – so we lost ourselves in things like books or TV shows. But because it wasn’t very balanced, that kind of freeze wasn’t so good for us. It was about disappearing into fiction, fantasy, food: stuff that is comforting but isn’t great if you just lose yourself in it and then the world is still there when you’re done.

Max: Plus if your main strategy is flight, you can end up being really hard on yourself about the times when you do go into freeze. So the answer is not to eradicate flight and go all the way to freeze huh?

Fox: No because then we’d lose you, and you’re brilliant, and you got us here because of your survival strategy. In many ways you protected me and I’m so grateful for that.

Max: Thank-you littlest.

Fox: I think it’s about learning how to work together as a team. And I love that we’ve figured out that we’re two ends of a spectrum because it means that you and me are a team, and we didn’t realise that at first. It’s nice having a special relationship with you.

Max: I like it very much too. D’you want to say how it works?

Balancing flight and freeze

Fox: Yes. Well I think if you’ve been way, way, way towards one end of the spectrum most of your life then you probably need to swing to the other end for a while so each end becomes equally strong and forward. That’s what we’ve done anyway.

Max: With a certain amount of kicking and screaming from me!

Fox: Heh it’s not easy for you not being productive. But I think it helped you to see that when you pushed fast and forced yourself to work, in some ways you were hurting me – and all of the parts of us who don’t want to do things that way. 

Max: It was a lot about consent: realising I was being really non-consensual with myself, and other parts of us.

Fox: So now we try to really tune into where we’re at. And it often feels like I’m in charge at those moments because I find it easier to tune in, rather than just doing what you think we ‘should’ do.

Max: And we’ve definitely put you in charge of evenings and other relaxed time. You’re the guru of gentleness!

Fox: And we notice that when I have plenty of time at the front I don’t choose to just watch endless TV – although I do give us that if we’re really sick or struggling. Today I took us out to the rockpools. Often I do feel creative too. I’m just not doing it in order to produce something.

Max: Ugh tell people about the time you got me drawing.

Fox: Hehe that was so funny. I love Lynda Barry who is all about getting back to your child self who loved drawing and storytelling before they’d been told they weren’t doing it properly and all of that. So I got us all doing a Lynda Barry drawing exercise – drawing our monsters – and you found it So Hard. In the end we had to let you do yours in pencil first because you couldn’t handle it if it didn’t look good, even though it wasn’t for anybody else to see except us.

Max: Yep that’s me: Ms. Fun Sponge.

Fox: You’ve been getting much better lately though Max-y. You seem a lot more at peace than you were at the start of the year.

Max: I think I’ve learnt a lot from you. I see how much better everything feels when we flow with it rather than trying to force it. Some things we are doing less of, for sure, but I’m trying to see learning to treat ourselves in a more consensual and friendly way as our main job these days. So it’s okay to not be working on some big project right now. We are the big project. 

Paradox and balance

Max: I also notice paradoxes. All my life I had this holy grail of what kind of person I thought I could be – how productive – if I got up before 7. And I never managed to stick to it even with all the alarm clocks and stuff. You convinced me to finally stop setting an alarm.

Fox: And quite often these days we wake up around half past six!

Max: It’s wild. Also I have a sense that some of what we do produce – creatively – by waiting till it feels live and only going for it then, will be better quality than anything I ever produced from pushing it.

Fox: I guess this is an example. We’ll see what people think. It’s interesting that Lynda Barry, and Natalie Goldberg, and a lot of the people we’re working with as a writing mentor, also find that better writing and art come from a place of self-consent and going with what feels most alive and exciting. Audre Lorde talks about that too doesn’t she?

Max: Yes, we end up encouraging our clients not to write, and instead to focus on finding their younger parts – if they have them – who can still create from that place of delight and playfulness, not worrying about what it’s for, or whether it comes out ‘right’, or what other people will think. It can be intensely challenging though, can’t it, because it involves revealing our more fragile sides to ourselves, and potentially to others.

Fox: Something you particularly struggle with because you also tended to present yourself as bulletproof.

Max: It never felt safe enough for me to be open and vulnerable: I always felt I had to cover that stuff over. And creating in that way – this way – is vulnerable. It involves revealing our smaller, more fragile, sides to the world. Even ‘just being’ is vulnerable because it involves staying with the kinds of feelings I’ve always been running from by ‘doing’.

Fox: You’re doing great Max-y. It is a lot. Can I say something else?

Max: Of course.

Fox: I’m thinking… I’m good at being, but I’ve also made our ‘doing’ thing better. So I don’t reckon it’s just about balance in the sense that now we have me who can ‘be’ and you who can ‘do’; me who can be gentle and rest, you who can be strong and push forward. It’s more like we both become better at both. Like you can now be peaceful sometimes, and when you are ‘doing’ you can let it come as it wants to more easily. And I can now ‘do’ sometimes, in fact I’m really excited about the kinds of projects I might do, as well as helping us know when we need gentleness and what that might look like.

Max: That’s spot on Fox. Enough from us for now? Shall we give our fawn and fight some time to talk.

Fox: Oo yes I can’t wait for this one!

You can find the second part of this conversation – between fawn and fight – here. There’s also more from Max about the challenges of changing the Flight habit 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 Fox and Max.

The post Balancing fight, flight, freeze and fawn: A plural perspective 1 appeared first on Rewriting The Rules.

The general approach to shifting stuck patterns and habits is:

• Notice the patterns when they kick in
• Gradually shift them by doing something different
• Make that an everyday practice so that new habits can bed in over time

Adapting practices

I’ve written here about some of my current ways of doing this in my everyday life. While the practices offered by therapeutic approaches, Buddhist mindfulness, religious faiths and so on may be very helpful to point us in the right direction, I’ve found that any of these practices applied too rigidly or harshly doesn’t work great. 

Pema Chödrön’s comparison of training a dog is helpful here: you get a much better trained, happier, and more flexible dog if you train them with rewards which work for that particular dog (e.g. cuddles, treats, or walks) within a broader understanding of how dogs work. If you just punish the dog whenever they do something you don’t like, and try to force them to conform to what you want, they may eventually do what you want them to do but they will be unhappy and inflexible when situations change. They may potentially become so stuck they can’t do anything if your training is inconsistent as well as harsh.

When endeavouring to change our own stuck patterns, then, it’s great to adapt practices to suit us. I tried – for years – to meditate, but struggled like hell to notice my stuck patterns and bring myself to the present, which is pretty much the point of meditation. However, bringing myself back came far easier to me when I allowed every glimpse of a bird to remind me to return to the present (I live in a place with a LOT of seagulls). It came even easier when I allowed myself to visualise the part of me who had gone back into a stuck pattern, and invited other parts of myself to help that part to come out again, often by talking with him directly rather than sitting in silence.

Three zones of stuck patterns

Something that came together for me today was that we need to draw ourselves back from stuck patterns in three ways. Again this is influenced by ideas from Pema Chödrön, and also Love Uncommon’s emotion thermometer.

It’s easy to feel we’ve done ‘well’ at catching a stuck pattern if we notice the first flicker of falling back into it and manage to say ‘nope’ and bring ourselves back out again. We can feel like we’ve failed if we wake up to ourselves and realise that we’ve been back in our stuck pattern for the last hour or so without realising it. And we can feel the absolute worst when our pattern has plunged us into full-on reactivity: an intense overwhelming response where we may melt down or shut down entirely.

I experienced all three of these yesterday. 

Noticing the flicker

In the morning I was being a boss at noticing when flickers of uncomfortable feeling arose. Instead of pushing it down or acting out of it by rushing into doing something, I paused, took myself to a gentle place, and asked myself what the feeling might be about, assuming it was a perfectly sensible response to the situation. Then I gave myself time to tune into what seemed like the best thing to do next with my day, of all the options, instead of trying to force anything.

Falling into the pattern

Later in the day I felt keen to do a work task: working on the blog posts that I shared yesterday. However once I got into this I started to feel self-doubt about whether they were any good, and frustration with how long it was taking to edit them and get them up. Instead of pausing and noticing, I pushed on because I didn’t want to feel those feelings and I just wanted to get the job done. By the end of a couple of hours I felt pretty rotten and it took a while to realise what I’d done to myself, and to bring myself to a kinder place. I took myself for a walk and had an internal conversation about how it was inevitable to fall into stuck patterns sometimes Then I had some gentle time doing something enjoyable when I returned home.

Overwhelm

In the evening I tried to confront a situation I’ve been finding very difficult lately: one which triggers really old, deep pain. I forgot everything I’ve been learning about how evenings are my most fragile time, how important it is not to push on when I’ve already had one tough thing happen in a day, and how I need to go particularly slowly and carefully around the ‘big ones’. 

I got drawn into trying to come up with a solution to this big, difficult, ongoing issue, and my failure to manage to solve it plunged me into an intense flashback: a combination of panic and toxic shame where I couldn’t stop myself from continuing to try to figure out a solution. I pulled myself back by naming what was happening, doing a minute of intense exercise followed by deep exhales to try to change my bodily state, and telling myself terrible old jokes to make me laugh (the latter worked best!) Then – once I felt a bit calmer – I put myself to bed with comfort food and my favourite current TV show, and later had some more soothing self-talk about what happened.

Working in the three zones

The point here isn’t that it is ‘best’ to notice the flicker and pull yourself back at that stage. Inevitably sometimes we won’t manage to do that and will fall into old patterns (we have practised them thousands of times, remember). And sometimes we will fall all the way into reactivity or flashback. Finding our own ways of drawing ourselves back from each of these places is the key. We could see each of them as an opportunity in that way.

We could conceptualise it like this, as three zones that we can go into with stuck patterns: the flicker of feeling that we’re about to go into them.The innermost circle is our everyday zone where we’re in an okay place with occasional flickers of feeling when our stuck patterns threatening. Our task if we’ve fallen more fully into a stuck pattern is to bring ourselves back to the innermost circle. Our task if we’ve gone into overwhelm or reactivity is to bring ourselves back through regular stuck patterns to the innermost circle.

So in each of the three zones the task is to notice what’s happened and to draw ourselves back from enacting our stuck patterns. But the way we find to do this will likely be different in each zone. 

• For the flickers of feeling it may be a fairly brief pause, allowing the feeling and understanding that it’s a sensible response, and reminding ourselves of our aim to do things differently now. 
• For stuck patterns playing out more vividly, perhaps we need a longer time out to shift out of the pattern. We could do a practice to really get in touch with the underlying feelings, and/or we could talk/journal with ourselves about what happened and why it makes sense given the stuck patterns we’ve learnt and how ingrained they are.
• For overwhelm/reactivity it’s generally about taking ourselves right away from the triggering situation, not trying to deal with it right now. We might try soothing ourselves and being as kind as possible, which may take some time depending on how intense the overwhelm was. Pete Walker’s list is helpful if you experience this overwhelm as an emotional flashback (big plunge into fear and shame). I also love this four elements idea that I recently heard about from Elan Shapiro. Earth stands for grounding, air for breathing, water for salivating, and fire for visualising something safe and soothing: all things that help to calm our nervous system.

Summary

Overall it’s important to:

• Recognise that we will inevitably fall into all three zones at times rather than seeing one as better/worse than another
• Practise slowing down enough to notice when we’re in any of the three zones
• Play with what works for us to do something different in each of the zones – and therefore to shift out of the stuck pattern. It can be useful to inform ourselves about the literature, for example on mindfulness or handling an emotional flashback, but it’s great to find our own ways because these are more likely to work for us, and stick.

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 James (with bird input from Fox).

The post Zones of stuck patterns appeared first on Rewriting The Rules.