A Mother’s Love – Part 4

Hello there.

It is fabulous to see that you have chosen to join me here for this next instalment of my blog.

If you are new here, I would like to extend a very warm welcome.  I hope you enjoy your time here with me. And if this is a return visit for you, I feel really honoured that you are choosing to journey alongside me again.

In my last instalment I talked to you about insight being the key ingredient needed to form the foundation of lasting positive change.  And in this month’s ramblings, I would like to address the issue of insight and indeed new knowledge alone, being far from enough to make a significant difference.

My choice to make this the focus today, is in part informed by my own journey – I wish someone had highlighted to me early on in my journey that there was a very obvious trap just lying there waiting for me to fall into it (and spoiler, I did).  And, in part, it’s also being prompted by my current client work.  I am finding myself repeating very frequently – do not fall into that hole!

My experiences of having my eyes opened in the session with my friend Sue, set me off on a path of discovery.  Now I knew a little bit, I wanted to know what else I had been blind to.  So I set about raking through all of my historical experiences with a fine tooth comb.

I learned a lot about myself over the next few years, and managed to understand why it was that I felt and behaved in the way that I did.  The exploration was incredibly valuable; it helped me feel like I wasn’t just ‘mental’, there were actual reasons for my feeling so vulnerable and reactive in the world.  But, and it’s a big but, all of this new knowledge didn’t really make an ounce of difference to these feelings of vulnerability and reactivity.  I had all the insight, but other than just trying to suppress my feelings, which is how I had dealt with this issue for years already, I felt like I had very few other strategies to use to help me create the change I so desperately desired.

I say very few strategies because, at this time in my life, I was a practicing body therapist, a shamanic practitioner, I had a regular yoga practice, I was an experienced meditator, and I knew a lot about the use of nutrition to support good mental and physical health.

So, I had a lot of knowledge, and I knew how to do a lot of stuff.  ‘People’ were also telling me that all of these things ‘should’ help me to feel better. But I didn’t, at least not to a level that felt worth it for all the effort I was putting in.  I still felt deeply caught up in an inner turmoil that I didn’t know how to get out of.  I was doing all the stuff, but I was still regularly getting triggered and feeling deeply flawed as a result.

Part of the issue, was that I was hurling strategies at the problem in a frantic bid to fix myself.  The key word here being frantic.

When you experience trauma (both big T and little t varieties) and emotional neglect, the result can be a nervous system that believes the world to be an incredibly dangerous place, and has an early warning system that most military defense systems would be envious of.  Our nervous systems can become hyper-reactive, permanently scanning the environment for signs of threat, and often finding it in the words that people say, or the tiny micro-expressions on their faces, or their lack of response (the list goes on and on of relational cues that we can experience as threatening), not to mention the environmental stimulus that can be totally overwhelming too.

When you find yourself in this state, you will be riding a near permanent Five-F rollercoaster; the nervous system responses of fight, flight, freeze, flop and fawn.

And this is where I was at!  My nervous system was already ‘frantically’ trying to defend me against all sorts of unconscious threats.  The last thing it needed was for me to get even more frantic in my bid to resolve the issue.

I knew all the stuff I could do to help myself, but I didn’t necessarily know exactly how they were supposed to help, and I certainly didn’t know what to look out for in order to evaluate the efficacy of the strategies I was trialing.  And I was largely going about them in a bit of a blind panic too.  I just wanted the sh*tty feelings to stop.

The result was very much a chaotic scattergun approach, throwing anything and everything I could at my situation and feeling like nothing was working.

I knew why I felt the way I did, but that had zero impact on the level of distress I experienced.  I tried mindfulness and came to the conclusion it didn’t work for me, because I saw no difference.  I tried meditation, minimal impact. Yoga temporarily made me feel balanced, but the impact was very short lived. I shaped up my diet and lifestyle and, while I felt good physically, I still felt like a hot mess emotionally.

I clearly had not come across the ‘right’ solution for me – cue more frantic searching.

And in my frantic state – I was just giving my nervous system even more messages about being unsafe.  I was never going to feel better while ever I approached my healing in this way.

The other issue was, that I permanently thought the answer lay in gaining more knowledge.  If what I was trying wasn’t working, I clearly needed to learn more.

This was a massive trap! One that, in my work as a psychotherapist now, I regularly see people getting stuck in. I got busy in pursuit of knowledge and it felt like I was doing the work needed to heal, but I wasn’t applying the knowledge and strategies in a way that was either consistent or useful.

I wish that someone had sat me down and told me that in order to heal, what I was aiming for was to layer up some new programming for my nervous system, in order to teach it that the world maybe wasn’t as threatening as it believed.  I also needed to examine the limiting stories that I was living my life by and replace them with some new stories that were more supportive of thriving in the world. And finally, I needed to learn the incredibly difficult skill of being kind to myself, because you cannot heal a mind and body that you dislike.

As with much of my story, this insight came to me after quite some time of trial and erroring it.

The time an effort I put in to finding new and innovative ways to grow after trauma could, realistically, have been better put to use understanding my existing successful strategies that I used to keep myself regulated (at the time I didn’t even know I had any) and deepening into these using some very simple principles.

In fairness to me though, I didn’t know at the time that healing is not a journey equivalent to becoming a skilled rocket scientist.  And everything that I learned back then is now applicable to the job that I do now, so it doesn’t feel like wasted time. I’m just sad that I could have felt better for longer.

Okay, so if you are sitting here reading this and thinking – if it’s so frickin simple Rachel, please do share the info!  Don’t worry, I will.

I want to caveat it first though, before I do.  I want to make it clear, that although the principles of healing are simple, the process of learning about yourself and learning new ways of being in the world, is rarely easy.

The other thing I want to make clear, is that there are many people out here in the world that will tell you their system for healing and will tell you that if you just follow their formula, you too will feel amazing.  I am going to try to refrain from replicating this approach.  Largely, because I have followed many of these guru like claims and found myself disappointed that I was clearly not good enough at following their instructions, because their approach did not appear to be working for me.  I want to try and avoid anyone feeling that kind of crappy about themselves if I can.

Each and every one of us is unique in our make up, so there is no way that every single person who is reading what I have to say here, will fit into any one-size-fits-all approach which I may put together.  However, when you break down many of the one-size-fits-all approaches out there, you will tend to find that there are some very basic building blocks at the foundation of them all.

This is what I will aim to distill here…

1. Get to know yourself. Learning the true origins of your distress and the reasons you feel a hot mess will liberate you to start to feel a little bit of compassion for yourself.  But your quest to get to know yourself should not end there.
2. Get to know your nervous system. That doesn’t just mean learning about the different models out there, which help us understand how the nervous system works.  You need to get intimate with the workings of your own unique system.  You need to understand your window of tolerance, your triggers, and the things which help you move from being in a triggered state and back into the tolerance zone again.  And understand that there will be things you are already intuitively doing which support you to do just this. The problem is, that when you are doing these things unconsciously, you don’t get to choose to use them consciously, when they are helpful.  You really need to get to know yourself at this kind of depth.
3. Understand that nervous system regulation and retraining boils down to three basic concepts:
   1. Learn how to be present and how to tolerate some discomfort.
   2. Use your breath to teach your nervous system there is no current active threat.
   3. Use sensory and somatic experiences to soothe your nervous system and provide it with cues of safety.

Again, these all sound simple, but there are myriad strategies that you can use to achieve all three of these principles.  You need to learn about your nervous system, in order to make wise choices about which of the plentiful strategies available might work best for you.

4. Understand that programming you received earlier in your life is informing your every move. Learn what stories you tell yourself about the way the world works and then seek to change the ones that are either no longer useful, or possibly even destructive in your current life. Stories run the world, do not underestimate them.  Wounded stories create further wounding and healing stories create present and future healing.
5. Do not underestimate how your current nervous system programming is going to get in the way of you achieving all of the above. That programming is there for a reason – to ensure you survive.  A survival system is unlikely to respond well to you saying, yeah we just don’t need to be doing that survival sh*t any more.  You need to layer up new strategies alongside the old ones so your nervous system has some better options to choose from than the ones it currently has.
6. Learn to give yourself some grace and kindness – you cannot heal a mind and body that you dislike. This is not a linear process, it is unlikely to go smoothly. Understanding this from the off can save you from giving yourself a lot of grief.  And I don’t say this lightly.   This can be the hardest part of any healing journey.

Okay, I feel like that might be enough for today.

I have a bunch of materials stashed away in the depths of my computer about getting to know your nervous system, so, I’m wondering – is there any appetite among you my fellow journeyers for a free mini-workshop on this subject?

If you would be interested in this, please do drop me a line at rachel@ramblingpsychotherapist.co.uk and let me know.  If there is enough interest I will put something together to run in September (I’m aware we are just on the verge of holiday season right now, so September feels like good timing).

As always, thank you for sticking with me until the end.  If you feel moved to share your experience of reading this, please do reach out.  It’s always nice to say hi.