Free Books

The first three free books I’ve created are largely based on the writing I did last year as I navigated learning about trauma (personally, and in general), and considering how my relationship with my (plural) self, and other people, might work (consensually) under this new understanding – all during a global pandemic! So there are now three free books on these topics of trauma, plurality, and consent.

In future I hope to add free books of my best writing on gender, sexuality, love, and mental health, along with one about writing itself.

I thought I’d announce each free book over the coming weeks for people who follow my blog or twitter but don’t regularly check out the website.

Trauma

The second free book is all about trauma. What do I mean by that? As I say at the start of the book:

In this collection the focus is on trauma as the impact of what happened to you. As Steve Haines points out in his great little overview Trauma is Really Strange, bodily trauma responses such as mobilising into fight or flight, or going immobile or dissociating, are the same whether we’re talking about developmental trauma from the past, a recent traumatic event, or the cumulative impact of stress.

When we consider what causes us to be traumatised, I like this definition used by Bonnie Badenoch in her book The Heart of Trauma:

‘Any experience of fear and/or pain that does not have the support it needs to be digested and integrated into the flow of our brains’

This helpfully highlights the point which many trauma experts agree on that there are two elements to traumatising circumstances:

1. A key event, or accumulation of events, which is frightening, shameful or otherwise painful to us (whether or not it would be to other people in similar circumstances, it’s about the meaning for us)
2. Not receiving the support we need in order to process the event or events (which usually means having somebody to hold us and hear us in our distress, reflecting it back to us in ways that reassure us that it is understandable and help us to tolerate it)

The book considers personal forms of trauma as well as cultural forms, and the interconnection between the two.

We hope you enjoy this first free book. More about the other ones to come…

The post Free book 2: Trauma 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.

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.

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

This is important given that many of the standard things that we ourselves – and even therapeutic professionals who are not trauma trained – may well assume are a great idea, are actually pretty risky. Particularly that applies to anything that involves staying with our experience – like mindfulness, the cathartic expression of emotions, or tuning into the body. We can think we’re doing something helpful when actually it can be keeping us locked into trauma responses.

When I’m talking about trauma responses here I’m following Steve Haines, whose book Trauma is Really Strange is a great overview of the research. He says that the body and brain respond in a pretty similar way whether the trauma we’re talking about is a sudden trauma (like surviving assault), developmental trauma (or cPTSD), and/or cumulative stress (like the marginalisation stress of ongoing discrimination, microaggressions, fear of hate crime, etc. that members of oppressed groups face).

Difficulties with including the body

Although I’ve read a few of the classic trauma books over the last few years, I find that the body/brain stuff is the part of it that’s most slippery for me and I struggle to hold onto it. This may be because neuroscience isn’t part of my everyday thinking and writing. That’s because many of the thinkers I follow tend to distance themselves from biological psychology. They do so because such approaches often attempt to explain everything at a biological level, reducing human experience to evolved patterns and neurons. Such approaches often essentialize complex human experiences like sexuality, gender, or mental health struggles, purely to the biological level. 

The recent writing on trauma – however – is more biopsychosocial. The book I’m drawing on most here – David Treleaven’s Trauma-Sensitive Mindfulness – is an excellent example of how we might weave together understandings of body/brain, lived experience, and social injustice.

A more personal reason for my difficulty with the bodily – or somatic – aspects of trauma is that I haven’t generally found it easy to be in my body. This makes sense from a trauma-informed perspective because bodies often don’t feel very safe to occupy when you’ve experienced post traumatic stress. Many of us remain in our heads. My experiences of somatic experiences like yoga and body scan meditations is of a struggle to be present to physical sensations.

Why body knowledge is so vital here

These days my body is making it very difficult to continue this habit of detachment because it is telling me loud and clear that something is wrong. I’m experiencing things like full body twitches, a vice-like feeling across my chest when I get stuck in old patterns, panicked breathing during flashbacks, and disturbing pains in parts of my body that have been hurt in the past. 

Strange as it may sound, I’m grateful for these feelings because they make it virtually impossible for me to override myself and keep doing things that hurt me as I have previously. Also such feelings give me a sense that I’m legit in claiming post-traumatic stress, not that I should need that, but given the level of cultural and personal denial about trauma, it does help.

Understanding how the body and brain operate when we’ve been traumatised is useful because we can then remind ourselves of what is happening internally when a trauma response hits. Given the high level of victim blaming that trauma survivors of all kinds experience, it is very easy to internalise self-blame, becoming angry with ourselves when we have these experiences and assuming that we should be able to easily think our way out of it or fix ourselves.

Understanding the science of how the nervous system works will – hopefully – help us to see why figuring out and rationalising aren’t generally helpful reactions when we’re in a trauma response. It will also help us to avoid practices that actively harm us when traumatised, and point us towards ones which are more helpful. 

In his book, David Treleaven gives a nice overview of the literature on trauma and the body, and pulls out some good suggestions of what’s helpful given this. I’m going to summarise his material here which will inevitably be a big oversimplification of what is a hugely complex area and still a work in progress.

Trauma and the Nervous System

The autonomic nervous system is the part of the nervous system which supplies the internal organs. It regulates bodily processes like breathing and heart rate without our conscious effort. Once the autonomic nervous system has received information about the body (interoception) and the external environment (exteroception), it responds by stimulating body processes or inhibiting them. The sympathetic nervous system is the ‘accelerator’ which usually stimulates processes such as mobilising the fight/flight response to danger. The parasympathetic nervous system is the ‘brake’ which usually inhibits processes, promoting rest, digestion, etc. Together these systems regulate how we expend and/or conserve energy.

Stephen Porges’s polyvagal theory explains trauma in relation to three subsystems of the autonomic nervous system which function in our involuntary responses to threat. The vagus nerve is the longest nerve of the autonomic nervous system. The three subsystems are the ventral vagal complex, the sympathetic nervous system, and the dorsal vagal system.

Ventral Vagal Complex

The ventral vagal complex is the front branch of the vagus nerve. When it is active we’re able to be open, connected and present, relaxed and calm. We can also access the social engagement system meaning that we’re able to tune into – and communicate well with – others.

Sympathetic Nervous System (Fight/Flight)

When trauma hits, the sympathetic nervous system kicks in. This is the fight/flight response where adrenaline and cortisol are released to give us the energy and quick reactions needed for a crisis. Blood flows to the muscles and the focus is only on processes vital for survival, rather than digestion, rest, etc. This explains why we may not be able to hear as well, salivate, or cry in this state.

Dorsal Vagal System (Freeze)

If we can act on the fight/flight response and get to safety then our arousal will go back to normal. If not, our dorsal vagal system kicks in. This is the most primitive of the autonomic nervous system subsystems at the back of the vagus nerve, which extends to the stomach and lower gut.

When this happens our heart rate plunges, we can’t breathe, and we become immobile or faint. This is the animal freeze response which happens when fight/flight aren’t possible. It makes it possible that a predator may leave the animal for dead, and the endorphins released also mean that there will be less pain and consciousness if the worst happens.

Peter Levine’s work on somatic experiencing suggests that we become stuck in trauma if we’re unable to discharge the sympathetic nervous system activity – as animals do – after we’ve been traumatised. This is why we tend to cry and tremble after something shocking or stressful: we need to discharge the fear. However, cultural norms against expressing emotion work against this. 

David gives a poignant example of a family crossing a road when a car comes towards them too fast. They run to get out of its way. On reaching the other side one little boy starts to cry and tremble, but his parent tells him off for doing so. The boy grips his jaw, holds his breath, and tightens his chest to prevent himself from sobbing. When this happens repeatedly, it isn’t possible to release the sympathetic response to trauma and it becomes lodged in the body, leading to post traumatic symptoms because we’ve been unable to integrate our experience.

Trauma and the Brain

Turning to the brain, again oversimplifying, we can understand this as being divided into three parts. The first two parts are what neuroscientist Joseph Le Doux calls the ‘emotional brain’: the parts that are responsible for survival and overall wellbeing. These are the early reptilian brain which controls all the things we can do when we’re born (e.g. sleeping, eating, cruing, breathing, urinating, defecating), and the limbic/mammalian brain which controls emotions and memory including the fight/flight/freeze response. 

The neocortex is the ‘rational brain’ which is the part humans have which controls language, abstract thought, empathy, and making choices towards an imagined future. The frontal lobes of the neocortex develop by the second year of life giving us executive control over our bodies, behaviour and emotions so that we can navigate the complex social world, for example making decisions that may be better for us long term even though they bring short term pain or lack of pleasure.

In post traumatic stress, the coordination between the emotional and rational brain becomes out of balance so that the rational brain can’t suppress the emotional brain even if you want it to: the emotional brain keeps signalling that you are in danger and must act urgently, and no amount of insight or rationalisation can override this.

Under normal conditions of potential danger the amygdala in the limbic system sounds the alarm that there may be a threat. The hippocampus registers this and tells the neocortex the time sequence of the event: the beginning, middle, and end. The prefrontal cortex in the neocortex assesses the situation, makes decisions, and calms us down if the amygdala gave a false response.

In post traumatic stress the integration between these three systems goes wrong, meaning that we keep responding as if a threat was taking place. The rational brain is bypassed, and the hippocampus is disabled so that no message comes to the neocortex that the stress is over. The stress hormones continue to circulate and the survival system keeps going indefinitely, explaining our continued high anxiety and hypervigilance as we keep scanning for danger.

Implications for Working with Trauma

So post traumatic stress occurs when events exceed our capacity for integration, and when we’re unable to release sympathetic nervous system activity. Therefore we need to help our nervous system to process trauma by realising that this is normal, by feeling safe enough in the present (connected to our body, environment, and/or other people), and by allowing the emotional and bodily response required for integration, such as grief, shaking, etc.

Staying in the window of tolerance

David describes the ventral vagal social engagement response as the window of tolerance between hypoarousal (the dorsal vagal immobilisation response) and hyperarousal (the sympathetic nervous system fight/flight response). In hypoarousal we might experience emotional numbness, absence of sensations, our cognitive processes dulled, and little physical movement. In hyperarousal we might experience heightened sensations, emotional reactivity, hypervigilance, intrusive thoughts and images, and distorted cognitive processes.

A big part of the work with trauma is learning how to tell when we’ve gone into hyperarousal and/or hypoarousal and bringing ourselves back into the window of tolerance. This is why Love Uncommon’s emotional intensity thermometre is so helpful. Practices which put us into hyperarousal or hypoarousal, or keep us there, aren’t helpful with trauma.

Learning how to shift attention 

David explains that people with post traumatic stress reflexively orient towards trauma relevant stimuli whether internally or externally: we’re tracking constantly for signs that something is wrong or that something bad is going to happen again. When we imagine we’ve experienced such a sign we go into a vicious cycle of fear and freeze, as the panic immobilizes us, everything constricts making us feel more frightened, and this constricts us all the more. Peter Levine describes it like this:

• The physiological sensations of trauma continue to activate the mind’s fear response
• Which, in turn, activates the physiological response to danger
• Which is the root of the physiological sensations of trauma

This sounds very familiar. For example I recognise that when I feel the physical sensations of fear and shame I often start to hypervigilantly scan my traumatic memories for things that I could have done differently in the past, search the present for anything that might be wrong, or imagine future possible traumas so I can be prepared for something hitting that I fear would overwhelm me. All those strategies intensify the bodly trauma sensations, resulting in even more desperate hypervigilance and scanning/planning.

So it’s useful to learn to shift our attention, when we feel the flicker, flame, or fire of such experiences, back to a stable anchor. This reorientation will help us come back to a more regulated state. What the anchor is differs for different people. Some find that focusing on the breath is helpful, for others that can be retraumatising. The same is true for bodily sensations, self-touch, visualising something pleasant or calming, or focusing on what you can sense with one or more of the senses (sight, sound, smell, taste, touch). The vital thing is finding what works for you. Often it helps to focus on feeling grounded in the body, and orienting to the environment. Both are also helpful reminders that the traumatic situation is over.

It can be very helpful to work with a trauma-informed practitioner because it can be hard indeed – at first – to unlearn old trauma habits. A practitioner can help us to notice when we’re drifting towards reactivity, or dissociating. They can slow us down, ground us, and the social engagement itself can help us to remain in the window of tolerance as we’re connected with another person.

Babette Rothschild talks about mindful gauges which can help us reestablish self-regulation, including bodily sensations, moods, feelings, and thoughts. This is about learning what the key signs are – for us – which tell us we’re going into a hyper- or hypo-aroused state. For me I’m noticing that my thoughts become noisy and churning, feelings of fear and shame come up, and I have a clenched, constricted, tight feeling across my chest making my breathing shallow. Things that can help me come back from that place include slowing my breathing, soothing self-touch, movement, kind self-talk, and bringing my attention gently to feelings and/or sensations, if that feels okay. 

Reflections

Feeling not figuring

Personally I found this material very helpful to understand quite what a profound impact being discouraged from expressing emotions has on kids. I was so struck by David’s description of the little boy gripping his jaw, holding his breath, and tightening his chest to prevent himself from sobbing. I’m also thinking about the link between this kind of reaction and shame around bodily functions: how clenched the entire body can become around tough feelings, physical sensations, and ‘embarrassing’ bodily functions like wind/gas, urination, defecation, and menstruation. 

Recently I caught myself automatically going into clenching and carrying on, having hurt my finger in a cupboard door. I deliberately slowed down to let myself feel the pain and feel my feelings – both for the physical pain and for the automatic self-blame and push to continue what I was doing that came up. I’m trying now to pause and notice both physical and emotional pain, allowing time to experience and express it, instead of continuing the old habit of pushing it down. I still think the Pixar movie Inside Out is one of the best depictions of the potentially profound psychological impact of disallowing certain emotional states.

I also found the trauma material helpful for the explanation of why we can’t just think our way out of a trauma response. That’s definitely been my go-to way of trying to cope in the past, and it just gets me caught up in endless loops of self-blame when I can’t seem to figure it out or think any differently. Now I’m trying to focus on strategies that ground me in the body and/or in the environment around me. ‘Feeling not figuring’ has become a mantra for when I’m in that place: gently being with the feelings rather than trying to make sense of anything at that moment.

Welcoming the trauma response and what it has to tell us

I found it useful to learn that trauma responses often involve us reacting to interior signals as if they were exterior. Our nervous system is sending us warning alarms and it feels like we’re in actual danger, but we may well not be right now. All triggers land with the same intensity whether there is physical threat or emotional threat, and whether that threat is large, small, or just a reminder of a threat that happened in the past. The body and brain are not making these distinctions.

It’s good to remind myself that I’m safe enough in this moment and that this is what’s going on in the body. I was left with the question, though, of how to know whether the trauma response was telling me something important or not. I mean obviously I wasn’t in life or death danger as it sometimes seemed to be suggesting, but had it come up because I was facing a situation which could be emotionally dangerous to me?

Here I find it helpful to return to Buddhist teachings which suggest being with all experiences that come up in a warm, welcoming way. I’m finding it helpful to try to embrace the trauma feelings warmly and tell them they are welcome, rather than trying to avoid them, get rid of them, or figure them out, as I once would have done. It helps with this to remember that I’m grateful to them for trying to protect me. They are enabling me to notice, now, situations which could be risky to me, which I might’ve ignored in the past. 

If the feelings are very overwhelming I recognise that having pushed this response down so much over the years means that it now has to scream to be heard. I promise the feeling that I will return to what it’s trying to tell me when I’m feeling clearer and calmer – once I can access the rational brain again – and I try to focus on soothing my nervous system for a while.

If the feeling is not so intense then I turn towards it and take it seriously. I try to be understanding of why whatever just triggered me might’ve done so, and I commit to putting some time into reflecting on that thing, rather than dismissing it or going to a habitual response (e.g fight, flight, freeze, or fawn).  

Kindness and creativity

I also found it very helpful to read about how trauma takes you out of the social engagement system. I often blame myself harshly for how hard – if not impossible – I find it to be kind and empathic when I’m in a trauma response. This exacerbates the response further with fear and shame about whether that means I’m really a ‘bad person’. Now I can remind myself that I’m unable to access the social engagement system in that place.

I think this also explains why it’s extremely hard to be creative when trauma is very live – something else I’ve given myself a hard time about in the past. Now I can see that the main key to returning to a place of kindness and creativity is moving out of the trauma response. I can focus on doing the things that help with that.

However, again, it’s not about pushing yourself to get out of the response – which can be counterproductive – but rather trying to be with it warmly, along with everything else that is here in this moment, until it has passed.

Finally, the understanding about how the hippocampus is bypassed during trauma felt useful. I like Sarah Peynton’s work where she suggests that we can usefully time-travel back to traumatic times in our lives and experience them in safety, releasing any feelings, and putting a time stamp on the memory.

Of course this needs to be done slowly and carefully, perhaps with external support, but it feels good to have a way of relating to past memories which have haunted me, or been hard to approach, previously. I enjoy this creative way of addressing trauma, and the plural emphasis in Sarah’s work on accessing a kind inner witness to accompany you back.

Further Resources

Here are some links to videos by some of the main trauma researchers – and others who touch on these themes – which I’m planning to watch in order to continue these explorations:

• Peter Levine: How trauma gets stuck in the body and how to work with it, Somatic experiencing.
• Stephen Porges: Polyvagal theory.
• Bessel van der Kolk: How to detoxify the body from trauma, How to start feeling safe in your own body.
• Babette Rothschild: 8 Keys to Safe Trauma Recovery.
• David Treleaven: Trauma sensitive mindfulness.
• Sarah Peyton: Children, trauma, empathy, and neuroscience.
• Gabor Maté: The connection between stress and disease.
• Irene Lyon: Titration explained – never rush trauma healing.
• Rae Johnson: The embodiment of courage.
• Tada Hozumi: Cultural somatics & insecure cultural attachment.
• Alex Iantaffi: Somatic check-ins.
• David Berceli: Trauma Releasing Exercises.

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.

The post Trauma and the Body Basics appeared first on Rewriting The Rules.

The last couple of months I’ve been reading everything I can get my hands on about trauma, particularly cPTSD (complex post traumatic stress disorder). This post is my attempt to summarise what I’ve learnt so far. First and foremost this is for myself, so that I can bed this knowledge in, and weave it together with my existing understandings of how people and relationships work. But hopefully the summary of what I’ve read so far will be helpful as a starting point for others who see themselves in this idea of cPTSD. 

Largely I’m drawing on Pete Walker’s book cPTSD here, but also on Judith Herman’s classic Trauma and Recovery, where she first came up with the idea of cPTSD. I also find Steve Haines’ graphic guide Trauma is Really Strange, David Treleaven’s Trauma-sensitive Mindfulness, and Sarah Peynton’s Your Resonant Self helpful. I’m very grateful to my co-creator, Alex Iantaffi, for their podcast on cPTSD – and for our conversations over the years – which helped me to find this literature.

Why is this useful to me?

When I was in my twenties I read every book I could find on depression, and went to see the authors speak whenever I had the opportunity. Several times I remember going up, in some desperation, to the speaker at the end of the talk and describing my experience, in the hope that they would say ‘absolutely, that’s a legit kind of depression. Welcome to the club. Here’s how to cure it.’ Actually what they said was that they’d never heard of what I was describing and it certainly wasn’t anything like their experience of depression. I was left feeling confused and ashamed.

The experience I described was something I’d been going through for years: a swift plummet into an utterly hopeless place where I felt panicked and utter hatred towards myself. Sometimes it became so desperate that I self-harmed, which seemed to alleviate it. Sometimes it eventually lifted by itself. It often only lasted for hours, although it could last days, and it happened against the backdrop of a generally highly self-critical way of treating myself.

This is the way I depicted it when I tried to draw it, some years later.

I was confused because ‘depressed’ seemed a good way to describe this horrible place, but the sudden plummet was different to the long periods of dark moods described in depression memoirs. I could get out of bed. In fact I couldn’t allow myself not to, driven as I was by this highly self-critical perfectionism. And although I often longed to eradicate myself for being unacceptable, somehow for me that came out in the form of beating myself – literally and metaphorically – rather than in the form of suicidal ideation.

Between then and now I’ve read a lot about mental health, reflected critically on diagnosis and treatment, and trained in forms of psychotherapy that generally see suffering as a more universally human – or existential – experience. 

However, reading Pete’s book on cPTSD was the first time I read a perfect description of the plummet, tied to a legit mental health label. What I’ve experienced my whole life is called an ‘emotional flashback’, and it’s a sign of having cPTSD.

What is cPTSD?

cPTSD is also called developmental trauma. Steve Haines’s book suggests that one-off traumatic events, developmental trauma, and stress in life which becomes overwhelming all work in similar ways through the body and brain. They have similar impacts on the nervous system, and result in similar somatic experiences, flashbacks, dissociation and the 4Fs.

My understanding from Pete’s book is that cPTSD – or developmental trauma – occurs when we internalise a sense of ourselves as unacceptable as a child due to how we’re responded to by the world around us. He talks of a shift from a child believing ‘I make mistakes’ to ‘I am a mistake’ (behaviour to identity). The shaming we experience from others – whatever form that takes – becomes an inner sense that we are shameful. Such children develop a vicious inner critic voice which they’re always trying to please. Judith suggests that the imagining that we are bad, wholly responsible for our trauma and could learn to do better is preferable to the alternative that we were helpless and weren’t being protected or cared for in the ways we needed by others.

Often emotional expression is punished or shamed, meaning that children don’t learn how to regulate their emotions or to experience them in a positive way. They can also find other people’s emotions overwhelming and frightening too. There is often a sense of not being loved or liked by those around them, and/or of love disappearing suddenly, and/or of it being very contingent on only behaving in some ways and not others. Because it’s too risky for kids to believe that those around them are in any way dangerous they tend to protect those people by taking all the responsibility for what’s happening on themselves.

According to Pete, cPTSD is characterised by the following kinds of experiences:

• Emotional flashbacks
• Being highly critical of ourselves and/or others
• Toxic shame
• Abandoning ourselves
• Anxiety and/or struggles around social situations or relationships
• Loneliness and/or feeling abandoned
• Dissociation (feeling checked out and/or distracting yourself/numbing with food, drink, worrying, working, social media, TV, etc.)
• Feeling bad about ourselves from low self-esteem to self-loathing
• Big mood changes and struggles with feelings
• Difficulties with relationships 
• Being easily triggered into the 4Fs

The following kinds of somatic (bodily) experiences are also common: 

• Hypervigilance, constantly scanning our lives and worlds for any sign of danger, convinced it will happen again, trying to figure out how to avoid it
• Shallow breathing
• Feeling adrenaline a lot of the time
• Feeling physically ‘armoured up’ and braced for trouble: muscle tightening, back pain, etc.
• Wear and tear from how much we’ve rushed at everything and/or armoured up
• Struggling to be fully present, relaxed, and grounded in our bodies
• Sleep problems
• Startle responses, twitches, etc.
• Digestive problems
• Forms of self harm which jolt the body out of the painful panicked desperate out-of-touch with self place that trauma puts us in 

OMG Pete, it’s like you’ve seen into my soul!

Emotional flashbacks

Emotional flashbacks are like standard flashbacks – where people respond as if they’re right back in a traumatic memory – but without the clear memory of what is being replayed: just the emotions and bodily responses.

Emotional flashbacks involve sudden drops into debilitating fear and shame. It’s like we’re right back in the overwhelming feelings that we experienced as a child, and we are: our nervous system has literally been put right back there. We often feel small, fragile, young, desperate and helpless in these moments. We may panic and flail or we may shut down and give up. We generally feel like we’re unacceptable and bad. Everything feels way too hard, being seen feels excruciating, and it feels like a matter of life and death. We go into survival mode and fear we will not survive.

Pete suggests that often retraumatising experiences as adults – such as deaths, losses, or going through something similar again – put us into extended periods of flashback. This is what I’ve been experiencing recently.

Also flashbacks can be triggered by all kinds of things – internal and external – which we may or may not understand at the time. In the past couple of months, for example, I have been triggered into flashback by: a stranger looking away when I smiled at them; a message from someone asking something of me which I didn’t want to do but didn’t feel able to say ‘no’ to; a bad dream; a memory of someone being critical of me; trying and failing to write this blog post; and not being able to decide what to watch next on TV that would be both distracting and soothing enough (the answer was This is Us).

These things seem so small, but the point is that they plunge you back into the place you were in as a child. One of the books I read suggested that evolutionarily the sense that we were being abandoned by the people around us as a child was life and death, because without their care we’d be eaten by woolly mammoths or similar. I’m always a bit suspicious of evo psych explanations, but this makes some sense of why a stranger looking away from me can feel like a life or death scenario. Pete says kids learn to register the looks on the faces of those around them and connect them with being punished or rejected. It’s certainly a powerful one for me in relation to shame: being monitored by others, or others being so disgusted/embarrassed that they don’t want to look me in the eye.

The 4 Fs

The 4 Fs are the four different responses that all animals go into when something traumatic happens: fight, flight, freeze, and fawn. Fight is when we attack back. Flight is when we try to escape. Freeze is when we go still and frozen. Fawn is when we try to appease our attacker to get out of the situation.

In cPTSD one or more of these generally become our entrenched survival strategies: the ways we learn to relate to ourselves, others, and the world. We use these strategies to try to meet our yearning to experience the kind of love we always wanted, to avoid getting abandoned, and to try not to feel the overwhelming feelings. Needless to say they are not helpful strategies for achieving these aims, but even pretty smart people will continue to employ them regardless…

• Fight involves learning to control others and to demand things from them, to blame others for any relationship problems rather than ourselves, to try to fix them and/or to criticise or attack them.
• Flight involves perfecting ourselves, trying to make ourselves worthy of love, and/or working very hard.
• Freeze involves hiding, retreating, keeping intimacy at a distance, dissociating and distracting.
• Fawn involves people-pleasing, focusing on others’ needs rather than our own, trying to make ourselves into what we think others want us to be.

All four strategies have something that’s helpful for us, if we can cultivate them all and go into them all appropriately. Fight enables us to be assertive and hold our boundaries. Flight to disengage and to be industrious and endure things. Freeze to retreat and be mindful and present. Fawn to love and serve people, to compromise and listen.

Pete suggests that they can be best seen as spectrums: Fawn to Fight, and Freeze to Flight. If we’re at one end of the spectrum we need to cultivate the capacity to be at the other end. For example as a fawn/flight my tendency is to do whatever it takes to keep people happy with me, and to go into ‘doing’ mode (for example writing long blog posts about cPTSD). I need to work harder on fight (assertively holding my boundaries) and freeze (valuing just being and not always needing to be productive). For other people it would be the opposite. A good balance is to be able to be vulnerable/open and assertive/boundaried; to be able to do and to be.

Repeating patterns

The fucker of cPTSD is that it sets us up to repeat the very kinds of situations which caused the cPTSD in the first place, because our survival strategies fetch us up there time and time again. This can lead to further trauma, which can retraumatise us and tighten those survival strategies even more. Pete calls it ‘the awful gift that keeps on giving’. This can mean – like me – that we end up with cPTSD and the regular garden variety PTSD.

Judith refers to people sometimes driven by desires to return to familiar dangerous dynamics with the hope of putting them ‘right’ this time: perhaps an attempt at healing. She also says that trauma puts people in double binds where they both want to withdraw from relationships and seek them desperately.

For me one example of this is where my ‘flight’ desire to work really hard has put me in situations where whatever I do is not enough to meet the external/internal criteria for success, and I’m further shamed or bullied for not measuring up, which makes me work even harder. Another example is where my ‘fawn’ desire to please others and get their love means that I shape myself to fit others, and end up having to pull away because I’ve given up too much of myself, fueling further shame. It can be that I specifically seem to pick the kinds of people and situations with which these strategies are most likely to fail – because that is so familiar to me.

Why do something about it?

Perhaps this should be a no-brainer, but sadly it’s not. When the thing you struggle with is feeling toxic shame and believing yourself unacceptable then it’s pretty hard to allow yourself to (a) acknowledge that it’s real, and (b) allow yourself to get support around it. 

Also those 4F strategies are often entrenched in ways that get in the way of addressing this. Fighters are going to keep believing that everyone else is at fault and not them, flee-ers are going to be far too busy to make time for healing, freezers are going to struggle to stay present with themselves when distracting and dissociating is more comfortable, and fawners can’t stop hoping that they can find someone who’ll prove to them that they are okay really, if they can just be pleasing enough.

I feel fortunate in a way that my particular combo of flight and fawn has eventually led me here. I’ve become so focused on working hard to figure out how all this stuff works and be better for others that I end up reading all these books on how people and relationships work, and synthesising it for other people in ways that (hopefully) gets through to me too. However knowing this stuff still doesn’t make it easy to do the things I know I need to do, because they go against the grain of these survival strategies so much. 

Here’s some reasons to do something about it if you need them:

• This stuff is probably getting in the way of you getting good, loving relationships of all kinds even if it feels like the way to get them.
• It’s also probably making you abandon yourself and treat yourself non-consensually.
• You’d probably feel a lot better if you could lift out of that toxic shame and inner criticism.
• It’s not great for the other people in your life. You’re probably hurting others with these strategies, especially if you’re unaware of them (for all my fellow fawners).
• You’ll get a lot more done and do it better with all the energy you free up (for all my fellow-flee-ers).

What to do?

Pete says you need to work to become an ‘unflinching source of kindness towards yourself’. Sound good? He also warns us to let go of any ‘salvation fantasy’ that we’ll never have another flashback, to focus on progress not perfection, and to recognise that some flashbacks will probably happen as we try to shift our survival strategies and do the things that are less familiar to us (like fighters listening and recognising how they’ve hurt people, flee-ers trying to just be, freezers getting out and about, and fawners asserting their boundaries). He likens this to going to the dentist when we have a sore tooth: we need to go to a bit more of a painful/scary place in order to not be in such a painful/scary place.

Pete talks about education, grieving, and relationships as three key aspects of the process. I would add safety as an important initial one. These things could be seen as linear stages – one following from the other – but probably we all oscillate between them. For example, feeling the feelings might help us to recognise what feels safe-enough – and not – for us, which may lead to us making more changes there. Or addressing our relationships might bring up more information which we then want to go and find out more about.

I think every person will develop their own versions of this work, bringing these ideas and practices into dialogue with other understandings or spiritual practices they already engage in, for example, or the things that they find soothing, or the kinds of relationships which are most supportive for them. It will also depend on what you have available to you, of course, in terms of time, money, resources, and other people. 

Don’t be afraid to develop your own version of safety, education, grieving, and relationships. I’ve said a bit here about how they work for me to give you an example.

Safety

Something that Judith emphasises but Pete doesn’t go into much is the importance of being in a safe-enough place to address this stuff. It’s incredibly hard to do this work if we’re still in dangerous situations where we’re being re-traumatised frequently or playing out our 4Fs on the daily. A good first step would be to ask yourself how you can create a safe-enough home, relationship situation, and work-life to do this process, and what support you might need in order to do it. 

Safe-enough means safe-enough for you to be able to look at some painful stuff, feel some tough feelings, and shift some stuck habits. It is also means safe-enough for others around you. For example you might well be particularly prone to getting triggered in certain kinds of relationships and need to pause or slow down these down while this is going on. You need to be careful that the people you’re asking for support from can offer it consensually, and are held and supported enough themselves in order to be able to give it.

For me this creation of a safe-enough container has involved slowing down work significantly, deciding to live alone for a time, taking time out from any erotic/romantic relationships because my stuff tends to play out in these particularly, accessing a therapist and support group to help hold me through this, avoiding big group socialising, embracing quiet nights in because I realise I often feel overwhelmed at the end of the day, cultivating morning rituals which get me into the day gently, and communicating with close people about what kinds of contact I’m capable of – and not – through this period (however long it lasts). 

To some extent that’s about decreasing the amount of triggers coming in to a manageable level, although the aim isn’t to avoid triggers long term. That just makes our life very small indeed, as I found out in my twenties when I employed this strategy and wound up too scared to leave the house a lot of the time. It’s about retreating a bit and slowing things down sufficiently that you can learn how to navigate triggers and flashbacks when they occur, so you’ll become more capable of doing so, and able to expand out again eventually.

We need what Pema Chödrön calls a ‘cradle of kindness’ to do this work in, which is real fucking hard to develop when you’ve learnt that you’re an unacceptable person and you can barely hear anything through the noise of the inner critic. Anything that you can do to cultivate kindness for yourself will make it more possible for you to do the other parts of this process. Check out the literatures on self/community care and self-compassion for help with this.

Anybody helping us through this also needs to be safe-enough and kind-enough. Judith emphasises that because survivors have been so disempowered then they have to be in control here. Any therapist or other supporter has to be an assistant to the person on the journey they are on, trusting their process, not taking control from them, telling them what to do, or trying to fix them.

Educating ourselves

This part is about learning about cPTSD from the outside-in: reading books, watching vids, listening to podcasts, or whatever works for you. We can then apply what we’re learning to our experience and apply the various approaches to find out what works for us. For me it’s also about bringing this literature into dialogue with the Buddhist teachings I’m already familiar with, and the plural selves literature.

It’s also about learning about ourselves from the inside-out. Mindfulness type practices, journalling, and therapy can help us to notice how flashbacks or the 4Fs tend to work for us. We can slow down and notice what happens when we get triggered, what kinds of things trigger us: the anatomy of a flashback. It’s great if we can eventually start to get curious and take each tough experience as an opportunity to learn from, instead of something to avoid or beat ourselves up for.

Grieving and feeling the feels

Grieving is big here. We need to grieve for the stuff that put these habits in place back in the past, and for the ways it has impacted us and others, and constrained our lives, since then. A major part of that grief for me – and perhaps for all of us – are the ways in which those early traumatic experiences set me up for yet more traumatic experiences in the future. 

The early tough experiences – for me – were mostly emotional rather than physical or sexual, but because they resulted in patterns where I struggled to experience my feelings, felt everything was my fault, and learnt to put myself back in dangerous situations rather than asking for help, they set the scene for the physical and sexual forms of assault that I did experience in later life, and how much I minimised the impact of those later traumatic experiences.

Pete talks about four different kinds of grief: angering, crying, speaking/writing, and feeling. These are all useful and may be available at different times. Sometimes you can feel rage at what’s happened to you and the impact of that. Sometimes you can let out tears and mourn. Sometimes you can speak or write about it to ventilate the emotions that way. Sometimes you can just stay present to whatever your internal feelings are via the sensations in your body without having to let them out, or repress them, or tell any stories about them. Because the origins of cPTSD often involve our feelings being disallowed or punished we often feel afraid or ashamed of them. The process of reconnecting with anger and sadness can help unlock our capacity for the kinds of self-protection and self-compassion that we’ve struggled to give ourselves.

Grief can involve time-travel: another thing I want to blog about separately at some point. We are grieving for ourselves past and present. Present trauma responses can put us in touch with earlier feelings and we can feel for them both simultaneously. Linked to this I’ve found it helpful to feel grief for the intergenerational nature of trauma: the ways in which the traumatic stuff that happened to us was generally the result of patterns put in place by other peoples’ trauma, and the ways in which playing out our own trauma has impacted on others: perhaps tightening their own trauma habits. That can be a lot to face, but for me it can result in a lifting of feeling isolated, a recognition that we’re interconnected through this, and that our attempts to shift this stuff can have a much wider benefit than lifting our own individual suffering.

The main thing to emphasise with all of this is the importance of going slowly. Being such a good flee-er I always want to barrel into this stuff at a hundred miles an hour in order to have it all sorted. This is coupled with being a fawner who wants to sort it out quick so I can go back to being better for others than I’m being while so much of my life is taken up with this process. 

But one of my big lessons is this will not be rushed. In fact rushing it tends to have the opposite effect of re-traumatising you such that it’s even harder to do this work, and may well take even longer to reset some of this stuff. Love Uncommon has a helpful suggestion for navigating this territory. She suggests taking your emotional temperature on a scale of 1-10. Feelings up to 7 or so are ones to move towards and stay with in the ways Pete describes. Feeling from 8-10 are too intense – maybe a sign you’re heading into flashback territory – and it’s better to go into soothing activities to bring them down a notch, or maybe wait till the next day or whenever you feel back in the 1-7 zone.

Steve Haines and many of the major writers on trauma – Peter Levine, Bessel van der Kolk, Gabor Maté, Babette Rothschild – emphasise the role of the body in trauma, and the importance of somatic practices for releasing trauma and navigating trauma responses. Steve says that it is all about ‘meeting the body’. I’ll mention a few of these practices in the next section on flashbacks. As with their emotions, people with cPTSD often struggle to be in contact with their bodies very well, so this is both an important and challenging area.

Relating with others

Pete has a great concept in his book that cPTSD work is about simultaneously reparenting ourselves, and getting reparented by committee. We may well have spent our lives using our 4F strategies to try to get the kind of love, protection, and kindness that we so long for, and this may well not have worked out so well. Now it’s about learning to get those things on the inside (developing self-protection and self-compassion as mentioned above), and developing relationships which can help us to feel loved, protected and nurtured on the outside, through being open and real with others rather than employing those old strategies. 

For a lot of people a therapeutic relationship can be a safe-enough container to start that work – if we’ve struggled with relationships in the past. Support groups can also be great, so can relationships with companion animals, although it’s worth getting support around that too of course. 

Also it can be helpful to develop several friendships slowly over time, ideally with others who are up for doing this kind of work, so that we have a network of mutual support rather than one or two intense relationships where we’re likely to find ourselves drawn back into trauma patterns. Basically it’s all about going slow and steady and learning how to relate in sustainable ways which are kind towards ourselves and others.

Coping with flashbacks

As Pete says, we will keep getting flashbacks. At first one of the hard things is that old stuff – like realising we’ve over-ridden our self-consent or letting someone treat us badly – may well trigger flashbacks, but new stuff – like treating ourselves consensually or holding our boundaries – may also trigger them, because this is new territory and we’re going against our survival strategies, which feels scary. Damn this is hard.

What I’m finding is that if I can slow things down a lot then I can notice the flickering of the kinds of feelings involved in a flashback (fear and/or shame usually). It’s a bit like the aura people describe before a migraine happens. The feelings are around but haven’t set in yet. If I can catch it quickly enough then I can do something I call circling. It’s like the water circling a drain rather than going down the plug-hole (which would be plummeting into a flashback). That metaphor works for me anyway.

Here’s a list adapted from Pete of how you might be able to circle rather than sink with a flashback, and how to lift out if you’re in one. 

• Name that you’re having a flashback/pre-flashback feelings. I find it really helpful to say this out loud. To another person if I’m with a friend, or to myself – in my kindest voice – if not. If it’s pre-flashback I try to stay with those feelings and remember what they are, that they make sense (whether or not I understand what triggered them right now), and that I don’t have to plummet. I can circle for a while until the feelings shift.
• Remind yourself that you’re not in danger and/or that you can leave any dangerous situation if you are in one. For me this is about getting myself to a safe-enough place. This means getting home if I’m out. It means getting alone – or with a safe-enough support person – if I’m in a dynamic with somebody else where we’re triggering each other. Once there getting as warm and cozy as possible is great. Blankets, hot water bottles, and hot drinks can all be excellent. Remind yourself that you’re in a safe-enough place to get through this.
• Remind yourself that this will pass. It often feels like this feeling is all there has ever been and all there ever will be: that it is the default that you always return to. This happens because when you were younger it probably felt very permanent. As with the idea that you are safe, it may be hard to believe the impermanence when you’re in a flashback, but you can at least say this to yourself and remember that such feelings have passed before.
• Practise feeling safe in the environment. People often find it useful to focus outwards, for example saying everything you can see in the room of a certain colour, or going through each sense saying what you can see, hear, smell, touch, etc. I find it can help to look at things in my room and remind myself where they came from or what they mean to me.
• Practise feeling safe in your body. Returning to feeling grounded in the body is also really helpful. Here people can find it helpful to hold a particular object and really feel it, to feel every part of themselves, to put their face in cool water, to do a minute of vigorous movement/dancing to shake it out.
• Respond to any critical thoughts with kindness if you can. Over time developing a kind inner-parent voice to talk you through this stuff is really helpful. Reaching out to friends who get it can help to access a voice like that if you’re struggling yourself. However, it’s worth talking in advice about which people in your life you can offer that with and receive it from and how it’ll work, so you feel reassured in the moment that it is okay to ask, and what any limits might be. Generally it’s best to avoid people who you can get caught up in mutual trauma responses with easily.
• Allow any feelings or grief. See the different ways of experiencing/expressing this mentioned earlier.

Trauma denial

It is hard writing this post. Even though I’ve wanted to write it for some time, there’s been an equal and opposite sense of blockage to writing it. What’s that about? Judith Herman’s book gave me a useful perspective on this. Culturally, and personally, we’re trained to deny and minimise trauma and its impact.

Judith points out that each time psychology, psychiatry, and psychotherapy have begun to take trauma seriously, it has been shut down by people denying that it’s even a thing, and suggesting that those who are traumatised are making it up or exaggerating its impact. When Freud first published a paper pointing out that most of the people with mental health struggles he was working with had experienced childhood and/or adult sexual abuse and assault, he was ignored and shut down. He went on to shift to a theory that suggested his patients had fantasised those things: they couldn’t possibly actually had happened. This is pretty terrifying now that we know the statistics on the prevalence of abuse and assault.

After the world wars there was a movement to take ‘shell shock’ seriously as a mental health condition. This was shut down with a cultural belief that soldiers who struggled in these ways were just morally inferior, or seeking attention, in some way. Judith writes about how veterans in the US are still treated: how the culture simply can’t face the horror of what they’ve been through – or their role in putting young men through that often for dubious reasons – so it pushes them back into ‘normal life’ and doesn’t allow them to tell their stories or express their feelings. 

Judith also points to the backlash of victim blame and minimisation the follows each movement to take domestic abuse and sexual violence against women seriously. I also think about how common it is for those in positions of privilege to deny or minimise the trauma experienced by those who are marginalised in any way. Judith says that each time psychology has had a wave of researching and theorising about trauma, it has been followed by a wave of silence, as if even the scientists and therapists can’t face the extent of it and it’s ongoing impact. I certainly experienced this myself as I studied psychology and psychotherapy. There was very little about trauma on any of my courses, and I certainly learnt several theories which were skeptical about the whole idea.

The cultural denial of trauma itself could be seen as a form of intergenerational trauma in itself. And it is internalised. One of the key features of cPTSD that Judith and Pete describe is constantly doubting whether you’re really traumatised, whether what happened to you is bad enough, whether you’re really just a bad person. 

This makes it confusing territory to think and write about indeed. It’s possible that the things that happened in your life were actually way worse than you’ve ever given them credit for, because a feature of trauma is downplaying and minimising your trauma. But simultaneously it seems possible that they are not as bad as you’re now thinking they were, because you want to reach some arbitrary standard of ‘bad enough’ to legitimise how hard you’re finding things.

As Pete says, this can be particularly hard for those whose traumatic experiences don’t match the ones that are usually ‘counted’ by wider culture or online checklists. One of the important things about his book is that it includes emotional abuse and neglect as pivotal in cPTSD, whether or not they go along with more physical and sexual forms of trauma. 

I would add that we should include those that happen outside the home as well as within it. School bullying is normalised and there is still the sense that the most vulnerable people – children – should put up with treatment which might well be the subject of workplace dismissal or police investigation if it happened to adults (although of course it is often overlooked in workplaces and relationship settings too). This is true whether that takes the form of ostracisation, shaming and hatred, coercion and control, unwanted touch/physical violence, and/or sexual harassment. 

The trauma literature can also focus too heavily on individually traumatising experiences, leaving out the collective trauma of being in an oppressed or marginalised group and/or forms of historical trauma. I’m now focusing my reading on authors like David Treleaven, Tada Hozumi, and Alex Iantaffi who bring trauma-informed perspectives together more explicitly with social justice thinking.

Here’s some useful counters to denial of trauma in yourself / from others:

• You don’t have to locate the causes of your cPTSD in order for it to be legit. Some of it may well have occurred before you can remember, or be lost to memory now.
• If you’re experiencing trauma responses like emotional flashbacks, dissociation, bodily responses, or going into fight, flight, freeze and/or fawn responses, that’s enough evidence that it’s there and it’s worth getting support around it.
• People respond differently to events. It’s okay for you to be traumatised by something which didn’t traumatise another person who a similar thing happened to. Steve Haines uses the example of an everyday person being punched versus a boxer. Traumatic experiences also land differently in us if they’re taken seriously and supported by those around us when they happen, or if they aren’t.
• It’s a spectrum, not an either/or. Few of us escape childhood with zero trauma, and pretty much everyone develops survival strategies (like a tendency to fight, flight, freeze or fawn). We mostly have things that particularly trigger us from the past, and become reactive or activated when that happens. The ease with which we are triggered, and the intensity of our reaction, varies between people, and maybe within the same person over time. If we’ve recently been retraumatised we’ll probably be a lot more fragile and prone to trauma responses. Wherever you are on the spectrum, it’s fine to take your trauma seriously, and to work to ease/shift your responses.
• Working on this stuff will make us better for ourselves, each other, and the wider world, and that requires taking it seriously.
• There’s a strong urge to deny/minimise trauma in wider culture which gets inside us and inside others (particularly those who might fear they had a role in your cPTSD). Anyone who says they have been hurt or traumatised is usually told that: It wasn’t that bad (or as bad as stuff that’s happened to other people); It shouldn’t have impacted them as profoundly as it has; They are probably making it up or making too much of it; They probably brought it on themselves (these are the basis of rape myths, for example). It’s understandable if you find yourself thinking these things yourself.

cPTSD superpowers

I’ll end on an upbeat note with the list of superpowers which Pete lists as potentially coming from working with cPTSD (and a few of my own):

• We understand trauma really well, in ourselves and others
• We’re capable of deep intimacy, emotional intelligence, and really feeling the feels
• We can live an examined life, make good choices, follow our own path and rewrite the rules
• We’re not covering over or hiding this stuff any more
• We can handle pain and suffering
• We have increased joy and it feels So Good when it’s been so unfamiliar
• We see complexity
• We’re badass: we’ve done all that we did in life even though we had cPTSD

This is the quote from Pete which will stay with me the most:

‘Shame and self-hate did not start with me, but with all my heart I deign that they will stop with me.’

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 Tony and Beastie.

The post Trauma and cPTSD 101 appeared first on Rewriting The Rules.

The research on trauma and mental health suggests that a huge part of the way we generally got into them was non-consensual treatment at the hands of other people and/or the world around us. So whatever we do to recover, heal, or otherwise address our issues, it has to be done differently: from a place of consent, care and friendliness for ourselves instead of a place of fear, shame, and harshness.

The master’s tools

Audre Lorde famously wrote that ‘the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house’. This means that we can’t dismantle systems and structures of oppression using the same kinds of mechanisms and tools that were used to put them there in the first place. If we try to do it that way we generally re/create corrupt systems rather than finding our way to some genuine alternative. 

We can see many mental health struggles as a set of inner systems and structures which were put in place when we were treated non-consensually during our lives, often in childhood, but also through traumatic experiences which happened later on. Most of the main therapeutic approaches agree that when we’re taught that we have to be a certain way in order to receive care and protection – or to avoid punishment or rejection – we develop survival strategies in order to cope.

Trauma and survival strategies

It’s these survival strategies – in the form of habits and patterns like addictions and compulsions, fear and anxiety, depression and distancing, anger and acting out – which we end up addressing as adults, when we realise that they’ve become a problem. They may be rooted, for example, in physical, sexual or emotional abuse or neglect at home, in particular traumatic events that happened to us, in the discrimination and hatred we experienced due to being part of any marginalised group, and/or in being repeatedly sent back into unsafe situations such as bullying or otherwise hostile school environments.

In our current culture few of us escape such experiences entirely. Few girls reach adulthood without experiences of sexual harassment and assualt and without learning the ways they will be denied agency and regarded as second class citizens throughout their lives. If you are part of an oppressed group you will soon come to realise how differently you are treated: how your body, labour and life are valued less. School is a pretty non-consensual situation for even those who escape the more obvious forms of trauma there, much of which is normalised. Most families pass on messages that children should override their self-consent in order to conform to normality, hide their feelings and/or meet others’ expectations. 

All of this occurs within a wider culture which rests on teaching people that they are lacking and should be different to how they are in order to ensure docile and productive citizens, and in order to sell everything from drugs to diets, fast food to fashion, soft drinks to spirituality.

Treating ourselves non-consensually in the name of recovery

The problem is that – once we become aware of our mental health struggles, our habitual patterns, or our unhelpful survival strategies – the way we go about trying to address them often mirrors the very way they were put there in the first place. We try to fix ourselves, we push ourselves too far too fast, and we force ourselves to do all the things we’ve been told will help, punishing ourselves we don’t find ourselves improving as quickly as we felt that we should.

This has been brought home to me recently in a few ways. I’ll share my own experiences here and then give a few further examples where this might apply.

Trauma work

First I’ve been struggling particularly in the last year or so with what I’ve learnt are called emotional flashbacks: quick plummets into fear and shame which result in feeling very small, fragile and incapable of anything. I realise I’ve experienced these at greater or lesser intensity throughout my life, but the literature on cPTSD has helped me put a label to them. After reading a few books on trauma I fixed onto an idea – also common to many schools of therapy – that it could be useful to use current triggering experiences to connect back to earlier memories of traumatic events, and to revisit those in some way to loosen their grip.

Being somebody whose survival strategy tends towards the overfunctioning end of the spectrum, I grasped this idea and ran with it. One day, for example, I decided to write down all the traumatic memories I could think of in order to start revisiting them as a regular practice. Needless to say the result of this was not in any way pretty. I’m learning that the only way to do this kind of work is slowly and gently. If you try to push through, or force it, you end up retraumatising yourself and doing nothing to loosen the grip of the habits you’ve developed in order to survive.

Mindfulness

Another example is mindfulness. As regular readers will be aware, I’ve always been skeptical of the mindfulness movement from a social justice perspective, and a lot of my work involves attempting to weave Buddhist thinking and practices together with social understanding and engagement. 

However, I definitely bought the Buddhist mindfulness idea that it was generally a good idea to put time aside every day to sit, to notice your thoughts, and to keep bringing yourself back to the present. I figured that should be helpful to enable me to become more present to everyday life, to learn how not to get carried away into reactivity when hard stuff happens, and to notice forms of oppression acting through me and working to dismantle those as much as is possible.

What I actually found was that my fifteen minute meditation at the start of every day ranged from – at best – sitting with my noisy mind carrying me away for fifteen minutes and feeling a bit bad that I hadn’t come back to the present at all by the end to – at worst – taking a fifteen minute journey into precisely how bad I felt about myself.

I’m now reading an awesome book by David A. Treleavan called Trauma-Sensitive Mindfulness which brings mindfulness into dialogue with trauma-informed therapy and social justice. It’s helped me to make sense of these meditation experiences. As someone with regularly recurring cPTSD symptoms, meditation like this can be counterproductive unless engaged with in a trauma-informed way. In fact many – if not most – people experience some mild to major re-traumatising when they try to just sit with themselves without having any awareness of how trauma works. In pushing myself to meditate every day like this, with the idea that it must be good for me, I think I’ve been making things worse, and certainly not better.

Staying with feelings

A final example is staying with feelings: something that I’ve always been a big advocate of, as you can tell from my zine of this name. But engaging with the work of blogger and trauma-informed counsellor Love Uncommon showed me a vital missing piece of these practices. It’s only a good idea to stay with your feelings when they are in the manageable range. When they have reached a high intensity – or tipped into reactivity – then it is far more helpful to soothe yourself until they are manageable again. As with the other points, trying to stay with feelings when they are overwhelming is often retraumatising and unhelpful, making the feelings more scary and harder to stay with, rather than less so.

A similar thing is true for conflict and staying with each other’s feelings. A lot of people have the sense that the best thing to do in conflict is to stay and hash it out. But if any of the people involved has tipped into high intensity reactivity – or a trauma response – then that is a really bad idea. Far better to take time out, self-soothe, and cool down, perhaps making a time to return to whatever the conflict was about when everyone is in a good place to do so. Staying when one or more of you is in a place of trauma is again a recipe for retraumatising yourselves, acting out your survival strategies in ways that tighten rather than loosening them, and making further painful conflict between you more, rather than less, likely over time.

Other examples

Other examples where people often take a non-self-consensual approach to addressing their mental health struggles would include forcing yourself to go to a form of therapy or support that doesn’t feel right for you, staying with a therapist who doesn’t feel good, insisting to yourself that you must ‘be better’ by a certain point, anything which rests on the idea of ‘pulling your socks up’ or ‘getting over it’, and engaging in any form of self-help which is based on the idea that you are broken and need fixing rather than that you are okay as you are and deserve support. 

I’ve also had some interesting conversations with people recently who’re moving away from abstinence and restriction approaches to addressing addiction, self-harm and self-soothing to models where you allow yourself all the things you want, but engage with them consciously and intentionally with curiosity. One person said that any habit that harms us is oppression acting through us, so we cannot and must not respond with further self-harm and oppression.

It may seem paradoxical that some people experience way more radical shifts when they move towards the latter model, but it makes sense from the perspective that progress is only possible when we stop treating ourselves in the way that put the survival strategies or unhelpful habits there in the first place.

The role of fear and shame

Another part of this clicked for me after reading Pete Walker’s book on cPTSD (yes I am becoming a trauma nerd). He puts a lot of emphasis on the fear/shame feeling combo as being the key feature of emotional flashback and also – I realise now – a low level everyday backdrop to life for most of us with these kinds of past experiences.

Related to the idea that we can’t help ourselves using the same non-consensual approaches that hurt is in the first place, is the idea that fear and shame will not get us out of fear and shame. When we’re struggling we often try this kind of approach. We feel that we are bad people for struggling in these ways so we try to shame ourselves into addressing them or sorting ourselves out. We try to frighten ourselves into action by pointing out all the terrible things that might happen if we continue to employ our survival strategies.

There’s a whole additional post to be written about how fear and shame-based strategies don’t work for changing other people’s behaviour in a world where these seem to be the go-to strategies everywhere. Justin and I recently podcasted about this in relation to the fearmongering and shaming responses we’re seeing in response to the Covid-19 pandemic.

Fear and shame tend to make people frightened and defensive, and therefore more – rather than less – likely keep right on doing the things you don’t want them to do. The same is true with ourselves when we’re struggling. Like what could be a worse strategy for trying to cure ourselves from fear and shame than giving ourselves a load of fear and shame about our fear and shame. Think about it.

So what can we do?

So what I’m saying here is that if we treat ourselves in the ways that put our survival strategies, habits, or stuck patterns there in the first place this will solidify and tighten them, rather than dissolving or loosening them. 

What is the alternative? Well it is a massive challenge within our current cultural context because it involves us treating ourselves – and each other – in the radically different ways which intersectional feminists from Audre Lorde onwards have been encouraging us to do: valuing ourselves and others equally, practicing self-care, sitting with the places in which we are oppressed and victimised and the places where we oppress or hurt others. 

Such thinkers also point out that individual and systemic shifts need to happen alongside each other, given our interdependence. It’s hard – if not impossible – for individuals to change their inner landscape if the non-consensual outer landscape remains the same, and the idea that we should be able to do so harms us more. Engaging with others to share our experiences and work collectively is vital if possible.

For me a key starting point is self-consent. I’m trying to slow down my everyday life sufficiently to notice every time I’m drawn to override my self-consent. This is proving easier to notice now that many attempts to do so result in an emotional flashback plummet into fear/shame (trauma humour). But I’m also trying to notice the micro-moments of overriding my consent, the flickers of fear/shame that come up when I do that. I try to pay attention to what happened to elicit that response, to bring self-compassion to the situation to understand why that was my response, and to consider ways in which I might engage with whatever happened differently, in ways that don’t override my self-consent.

Slowness is another key here. This just can’t be done fast. Speeding up inevitably involves pushing through and getting overwhelmed. It’s helpful to tune into when I’m stepping out of my comfort zone into my stretch zone, and ensuring that I pull back into the comfort zone before I hit overwhelm. I was having a lot of quiet nights in before they became the default.

If fear and shame are a big part of the problem, then the solution is the opposite: cultivating protection and care to counter the fear and shame. Pete Walker talks about reparenting yourself and reparenting by committee. Other authors talk about cultivating a compassionate witness within yourself or befriending yourself, often alongside receiving a safe-enough and kind-enough therapeutic relationship to model what this might be like. 

I’ll be writing more about how I’ve gone about this from a plural perspective, but basically it’s anything you can do to be kind and protective towards yourself rather than shaming or frightening yourself, and to treat yourself consensually instead of non-consensually. 

Useful questions to ask yourself are: ‘what do I usually/habitually do under these circumstances?’ and ‘what would the opposite of that look like?’ You may find that there are several different ‘opposite’ options to play with. They may also be the ‘opposite’ of the experiences that resulted in your stuck patterns or survival strategies.

At this point you can bring those other practices back in. For me it’s not about stopping addressing traumatic memories, meditating, or trying to stay with my feelings. All those practices are immensely valuable, but only if done consensually, gently, gradually, and in ways that feel good rather than bad, and stretching rather than overwhelming.

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.

The post The master’s tools and mental health: We can’t get out of our struggles the same way we got into them appeared first on Rewriting The Rules.