"I don't do feelings"
I’ve worked with many people over the years who describe themselves this way; who begrudgingly came to some form of therapy but didn’t want to get all feely-wheely with it.
For these people, it’s been helpful to think of emotions like this:
Core emotions (love, anger, etc) express universal biological rules handed down through evolution, because they have proved useful across the ages of human experience. Each emotion offers us a unique impulse to act. Each one points us in a direction that has worked to handle the universal challenges across human life. These responses have stood the test of natural selection, and Nature is really tough when it comes to keeping things around within a species.
Additionally, a function of emotion is the amplification of what’s important. It contains valuable information. Following feelings down to their core gives us usable insight into what’s meaningful and true.
What makes modern emotional life complicated is that we are often disconnected from the experience of deep, core emotions. Instead, what often makes up most of our emotional experience is more superficial secondary feelings and our defensive structures (the things we feel instead of the scarier other thing);and those emotional states don’t inspire the same type of action, clarity, and aliveness of core emotional experiences.
Even when the feelings are painful and frightening, we experience increased vitality and meaning when we meet them sincerely and without defensiveness (this takes skill).Visceral, intentional experiences of core emotions tend to bring access to new personal resources, new energy, and new (often better) sets of behaviors in response to the feeling.
So if you’re someone who’s been dismissing emotional experience because it just feels like an inconvenient block to your productivity and development,maybe consider getting with somebody who can help you reconnect to the core of what you feel and allow the gifts of both information and nature to become more known to you.
Mourning and Mental Health
“If we don't know how to mourn and rebuild, we are incentivized to keep the storms of our lives raging indefinitely.” -Heidi Priebe
Mourning plays such a big role in therapy, and it so rarely gets talked about as the sign of growth that it often is.
“If we don't know how to mourn and rebuild, we are incentivized to keep the storms of our lives raging indefinitely.” -Heidi Priebe
Mourning plays such a big role in therapy, and it so rarely gets talked about as the sign of growth that it often is.
It’s so important because it means something is being let go; defenses are changing and something is moving that wasn’t allowed to before. This can only happen when we feel like we are capable of tolerating this movement and the feelings it produces. This means we have grown.
When we refuse to mourn what we’ve lost, it takes up emotional space inside us and drains our vitality as energy is siphoned off into maintaining our defenses of denial and avoidance. And of course we do this, because some losses are too overwhelming to face in real time; that’s why they get compartmentalized in the first place.
We are also often not taught how to mourn (vs wallow or ruminate), so the overwhelming feeling associated with the loss can persist indefinitely, because it feels like we don’t have the tools to face it. Locked in a stalemate. Therapy can be helpful here because it allows the person to contact the losses, but not alone and overwhelmed, as they likely were the first time they experienced them.
The healing that comes post-mourning can be profound, because we’ve created emotional room for new experience. And the energy that was formerly being drained by denial and avoidance can now be returned to the person and channeled into living, hopefulness, and genuine relationships.
So mourning is not only a signal that you’re backsliding into lower states of mental health.It’s often a cue that something essential is changing for you, and that change is making space for a part of you to be liberated and allowed to rejoin you here in your present and future experience.
Expectant Waiting and Therapy
I don’t have faith in a lot of the things I believed when I was younger, but there is a way faith still exists for me.
I don’t have faith in a lot of the things I believed when I was younger, but there is a way faith still exists for me.
I don’t talk about it much, but I grew up going to a Quaker school from age 5-15, which meant sitting in meeting for 20mins a day.
In Quaker meeting, there isn’t an authority figure interpreting belief to you — everyone just sits in silence and can share things that move them if they choose.
They call this silence “expectant waiting,” which is essentially holding the door open to let something to speak to you — and this is incredibly similar to the position I take as a therapist.
The therapist’s task is not to just analyze and report findings back to the client, telling them “the truth” about who they are, but to open a space where important experiences can be encountered by the two of you in an exploratory way.
By definition this means you don’t know where the process will go or what you will find. Skill here is not in preemptively knowing everything but in being unflinchingly available to receive and explore what shows up.
So it’s this faith in “expectantly waiting” — trusting that something meaningful will arrive when two people meet and set their goal to be as authentic as possible that’s still real for me.
It's a Map, Not a Prescription
Before google put one in everybody’s pocket, having a relevant and accurate map to help you when you were lost was a big deal.
We’ve mostly forgotten what that was like, but consider how quickly the freak out comes on when you don’t have cell service and need to know how to get somewhere.
A map helps us navigate places we’ve never been or don’t know well enough to travel on our own; they’re drawn by people who have been there before, made mistakes, and eventually found their way.
A map is also simpler than the real world, and that’s its value. It doesn’t get better with more information beyond a certain point, because relevant focus is key.
It’s like that with treatment too. We need to find out what things need to make it on your map to get you where you want to be. Every detail doesn’t need to be there, but we need to have an appreciation for details when they do have a place.
Maybe the way you move and control your body puts certain tissues under stress all the time. We need new maps for those movements.
Maybe the way your body responds to and processes stress/life events is hard on you. We need new maps for how that terrain is negotiated.
I’m not the world’s expert in one small corner of healthcare that I own down to every little detail — my value is in seeing connections between parts of your experience and opportunities to change them that may have missed, and then drawing you a map.
You don’t want some hyper fixated singular expert drawing your map. They don’t know enough about how the landscape fits together. You want someone who deeply understands the living relationship between parts helping you find your way.
So that’s at the core of our work together — I help you make a map and we work together to make sure it actually overlays on your life in a meaningful way.
My MRI Was Clear, So Why Does It Hurt?
The majority of the people I work with have been spat out of the medical system for having clusters of symptoms that don't fit traditional diagnoses.
A bunch of them have gone to doctors, got images taken of their painful body part, little showed up, and the pain doc just sorta shrugged and said, “I don't know, maybe try therapy?”
Which isn't half wrong but doesn't provide a clear path forward.
When you have pain but don't have an identifiable cause in your imaging (or sometimes even if you do, but that's another post), why do you still hurt?
People often ask me, “is it in my head?” and my response is always, “no, but it's in your brain.”
Pain in NOT in your painful body segment but in how your brain perceives what's happening there and how problematic it is.
To understand this better, think of the brain like a prediction machine. It learns based on your experiences and its job is to keep you safe. But the problem is the prediction software isn't perfect, and it can get reprogrammed in unhelpful ways by our experiences.
Chronic pain is one of the ways the prediction software gets hacked and is now protecting us from normal everyday things. It's gotten too sensitive.
So the goal of rehab then is to help the brain come to more accurate conclusions about what's dangerous and what's not by sensing its environment more clearly.
Well-done corrective exercise allows the brain to sense the body and how it moves/controls itself more clearly.
Needles and manual therapy help the brain sense an area more clearly.
Somatic therapy helps the nervous system sense its internal and external environment more clearly.
We take whatever combination of these approaches and stack them together in a way that helps your brain figure out how to change its predictive processing errors and ease up on setting off the pain alarms when it doesn't need to.
It's a little different for everyone, but the process of good therapy and rehab is systematically applying and carefully listening to what's helping your system write new, helpful software that suits how you want to live.
The Mechanism of Treatment Is Stress
I can boil everything I do with people down to delivering the right stress, at the right time, to the right part of their system.
But let's get clear about the word. Stress is just something that asks something of you. It's a situation that mobilizes you to respond, and it only becomes “bad stress” when there's a mismatch between what's being asked and what you're able to effectively respond to.
But when there's a match between the demand and the response – that's exhilarating and what makes life worth living.
Where I think a lot of wellness-y approaches go wrong is they think the “healing” is in the rest. Healing is not in rest. Recovery is in rest, which is important but not complete.
Healing comes from successfully engaging with demands that at one point used to overwhelm you, followed by successfully disengaging from it.
In physical rehab, we use recovery techniques to give short-term pain relief and then appropriately stress the troubled area with movement and exercise. In somatic therapy, we help the nervous system register feelings of stability and comfort, and then we touch the closest edge of the difficult material while staying grounded.
Recovery + Stress.
When you can both effectively rise to a new demand, not get stuck or defeated there, and then shake it off and come back out – that's when you will feel healed in a deeply sensed, visceral, know-it-in-your-bones way, because you just proved it.
Regret Is Ok
It’s all right to have regrets.
I’ll be the first to say that I have — in medical terms — a shit ton.
Regret has become unfashionable in the current “live your best life” wellness cycle… NO ONE admits to having any, and to do so is as if to admit a host of ugly character flaws.
But when people insist they have no regrets, I seriously wonder where they’ve been their whole lives.
To admit regret is to admit that we are fallible, to humbly acknowledge that there are powers in the world that are beyond us; and that sometimes the world we were expecting to see was regrettably far from reality.
Regret is an invitation to experience that disappointing and dissonant reality; something that calls us to a greater sense of accuracy and understanding that there is no sincere engagement with the world where we will not, at some point, be fully and immeasurably let down.
The important question of regret is whether or not we allow it to bring us to a stronger sense of our self, to a less deceptive sense of our world, or if we experience it only as a wound that makes us retreat from further engagement.
Regret is what allows us to step into our future with more sincerity and presence, and to accept the possibility that there’s a future out there that can be lived better than our past.
If There's No Relationship, It Doesn't Matter
This phrase applies to so much of the work we do together, some obvious and some less so.
Starting with the obvious, trauma, in some way or another, is always relational. Whether that's being harmed by someone you thought you could trust or not being able to enjoy physical contact the same way after your concussion; there's some element of the way you relate that is crucial to the healing process.
A lot of good has come from the self-healing movement, but the reality is wounds that were created inside a relationship need to be worked on in relationship.
We can do all the meditations and journal prompts, but something else happens once we are in that moment with someone else and an old survival pattern activates. It takes practice to chip away at the pattern and make something new.
This also applies to the body and movement. The brain doesn't understand individual parts the way our intellects do. While one body part may be the painful one, it's part of a larger pattern of movement – and it's in that part's relationship to the pattern that's the cause of your pain.
If we just go in there and do something to your knee, but don't show your knee a new relationship to your hip, low back, foot, etc. the likelihood that your body is going to know what to do with that new knee is low.
Research has continued to show that the method rarely matters compared to the relationship you have with your therapist.
That doesn't mean that methods don't matter, but if there's no relationship, it doesn't matter.
Big vs. Stable Change
Don't get me wrong, I work hard to get people out of care as fast as possible, and sometimes big, fast changes can be stable, but there is a critical difference between a dramatic flash in the pan change and a long-term, stable one.
Don't get me wrong, I work hard to get people out of care as fast as possible, and sometimes big, fast changes can be stable, but there is a critical difference between a dramatic flash in the pan change and a long-term, stable one.
The difference is how much your system can integrate and hang on to. There are many ways to “trick” your system into feeling less pain or feeling more grounded and relaxed, but they often revert in a short time.
I remember doing a demo for Equinox trainers several years ago, and I got a volunteer to increase his range of motion dramatically in several joints. People ooh'd and ahh'd, but I warned them against being so impressed. I asked the volunteer to do some jumping jacks, and then we retested his movement. Almost everything went back to its original measurement.
12 jumping jacks broke the porcelain doll of “big change” we just made.
That doesn't make what we did wrong, it just wasn't complete or significant enough.
(side note: next time you see an impressive before and after table test on IG, remember that 12 jumping jacks just might blow the magic act 🤷🏻♂️)
Whether we are addressing chronic pain or your body's response to stress and anxiety, ultimately we're teaching your system to do something different. In therapy, we're not adding or subtracting anything from your body like in surgery or pharmacology, we are stimulating the system to learn and adapt.
And like all learning, it takes repetition and significance.
Of course depending on what we're working on, the timeline of change will be different. Resolving a shoulder tweak that’s only a few weeks old is different than reorganizing a stress, anxiety, or post-traumatic response, but the goal is to find the fastest rate at which your system can integrate change.
And hey listen, sometimes we get a big, stable change right away, which is great. However, there are ways we can check up on the stability of that change, and THAT’S what guides our process together. Not some Houdini act that disappears on you 12 jumping jacks later.
Self-Regulation
“Self-regulation” is a term that’s become a casualty of the internet being the internet, and its meaning isn’t clear and specific anymore.
Here’s the way I think about it:
“Self-regulation” is a term that’s become a casualty of the internet being the internet, and its meaning isn’t clear and specific anymore.
Here’s the way I think about it:
In simple terms, self-regulation is just, “what goes up must come down.” Stressors happen, we dial ourselves up to meet them, and then we deactivate back to relaxed readiness.
We feel best when we repeat this UP/DOWN cycle throughout the day in rolling waves. Our biology is designed to contract and relax like this.
But we tend to have trouble when we are overwhelmed by stress or in the wake of an intense life event. We either go UP and get stuck “UP” (anxious, restless, agitated) or go DOWN and get stuck “DOWN” (low motivation, unable to feel joy, numb).
So the first step is to figure out where you’re getting stuck and what things push you into that stuck place. Then we learn to recognize the signs of the process (physical sensations, thoughts, behaviors) and design ways to bring some regulation back into the picture.
Restoring that fluidity of the stress regulation system is the goal — not simply protecting ourselves from getting activated. Our biology LOVES to be activated by stressors that mean something to us, and then to be able to disengage and deactivate after encountering them.
Understanding vs. Changing
“I did a lot of psychoanalysis on my anxiety. I got a PhD in psychology. I understood a lot about my anxiety. And I was still anxious as shit.” — My First SE Supervisor.
“I did a lot of psychoanalysis on my anxiety. I got a PhD in psychology. I understood a lot about my anxiety. And I was still anxious as shit.” — My First SE Supervisor.
I’m not anti-analysis by any means, but this quote speaks to the disconnect that can exist between understanding and change — and there’s some brain stuff to explain that.
Within the brain, our rational thinking/understanding area (dorso-lateral prefrontal cortex) has no direct connections to the powerful emotional center connected to behavior (amygdala). But the area associated with the ability to be self-aware and feel what we are feeling (medial prefrontal cortex) does.
What does this mean? It means that simply understanding a trigger or emotionally reactive pattern is often not enough to change it.
But something like body-oriented therapy where we consciously sense how experiences feel, what happens in the body when they show up, can help us connect some dots.
Ultimately the goal is better emotional regulation. When we are frazzled, the emotional brain takes over and we tend to seek out immediate stimulation and gratification; which rarely are things in our own best interest.
Don’t misunderstand and think the goal is shutting down the emotional brain. Avoiding these feelings makes us vulnerable to being overwhelmed by them when they do show up, often derailing our progress.
The process is different for everyone, but generally it’s about finding a way to become focused — to allow the emotional brain to be experienced while learning to stay calm in response to thoughts, images, and sensations that make us want to shut down and distract ourselves.
It’s not like flipping a switch, but with guidance and practice, the brain will adapt and be able to integrate understanding with regulation.
Self-Knowledge
Self knowledge is not completely possible. We don’t live in a body or mind where it is achievable — our nervous system is designed to block out infinitely more information than it lets in to awareness. The body and mind have many effective (and necessary) ways of protecting our conscious selves from pain, and often it can be difficult to access those parts of ourselves. They have to be opened carefully in junction with developing new skills and abilities to handle that pain.
Self knowledge is not completely possible. We don’t live in a body or mind where it is achievable — our nervous system is designed to block out infinitely more information than it lets in to awareness.
The body and mind have many effective (and necessary) ways of protecting our conscious selves from pain, and often it can be difficult to access those parts of ourselves. They have to be opened carefully in junction with developing new skills and abilities to handle that pain.
The hope that a human can achieve complete honesty and self knowledge is an understandable but childlike yearning; mostly powered by not knowing most of what’s been unearthed about behavior and motivation via scientific inquiry.
Self knowledge is not the clarity of knowing exactly how everything works inside us. It’s not a perfect transparency but an awareness of the self as an convergence — a living edge between what is known and unknown.
What we can grow to understand is how we occupy this moving edge between the known and the unknown with increasing authenticity and skill.
But a complete, ordered awareness of the self is not possible, and the pursuit of one reduces us in our attempt to achieve it; because we are forced to downplay the enormity of what we can’t know about ourselves in order to make room for the proud “I know myself” proclamation.
The real foundation of the self is in humbly paying extreme attention to ourselves and how we intersect with the world — watching the next step, the next moment, the next word; learning that we are not entirely what we think we are nor entirely what we are about to become.
Release vs. Reorganization
There is such a thing as disorganizing release. This applies to both physical medicine as well as therapy.
“Release” (manual therapy, catharsis, needling, etc.) can actually be destabilizing to both our bodies and minds when done inappropriately or at the wrong time.
There is such a thing as disorganizing release. This applies to both physical medicine as well as therapy.
“Release” (manual therapy, catharsis, needling, etc.) can actually be destabilizing to both our bodies and minds when done inappropriately or at the wrong time.
The sudden experience of increased movement in our bodies or interior landscape can be more than our system is able to integrate in a given moment, and this is not good treatment.
Ironically, this can feel good to both the patient and provider because removing tension feels good, catharsis often feels big and important, and it’s easy to get sucked into the addictive cycle of using disorganizing release as a management strategy.
But management of experience ≠ metabolism of experience.
Reorganization takes some time and exposure to produce a new and more resilient relationship to the problem. It doesn’t need to take forever, but it requires a few more steps, and it’s helpful if your clinician understands these parameters while providing the environment and guidance through the reorganizing process.
Eye Movements and Neck Pain
A woman recently came into the clinic with chronic neck pain that would blow up into full neck spasms several times a year, taking her out for a day or two at a time. She had seen every type of orthopedic provider and had every treatment modality performed (manual therapy, neck adjustments, taping, neck/back exercises, ultrasound, laser, etc) but hadn't seen much improvement.
A woman recently came into the clinic with chronic neck pain that would blow up into full neck spasms several times a year, taking her out for a day or two at a time. She had seen every type of orthopedic provider and had every treatment modality performed (manual therapy, neck adjustments, taping, neck/back exercises, ultrasound, laser, etc) but hadn't seen much improvement.
When evaluating her neck, we checked her range of motion relative to eye movements and saw a pretty obvious connection. When looking at an object closer to her face, her neck ROM went down by about HALF and pain increased. When looking further away, less pain/stiffness.
We also saw that her near point of convergence (the closest something can get to the eyes before becoming blurry) was further away than we would like to see. After some convergence exercises, her ROM and pain both dramatically improved, and we built a home program for that.
Eye movements can be the cause of neck pain because the brain takes the information coming from the eyes and cross-references it with what the neck muscles are saying about where we are in space (the vestibular system gets a vote too, but that's a topic for another day). All of this info is used to stabilize us and keep us oriented in space.
If what's coming from the eyes doesn't match what's coming from the neck, the brain sees that as a potential problem, does a bunch of math to make our visual picture look consistent, and tightens up the neck to prevent any potential lack of control due to the fuzzy awareness about what's exactly going on there.
Long story short, this girl didn't have a neck problem. She had a sensory mismatch between what her eyes and neck were saying about where they were in space due to some poor convergence mechanics, and this why blowing up her neck to hell and gone with a million different treatment modalities -- even neck exercise -- didn't help at all. We had to get the sensory info to line up, and then the brain was able to let the neck go.
Not every neck case is connected to eye movement, but when the normal stuff hasn't helped much, it’s worth a look.
Too Late For Toaster
There is great value in learning your specific, physical responses to stress, before things spiral out of hand. This is important because the earlier you catch your system flooding, the more options you have to bring it back to balance.
There is great value in learning your specific, physical responses to stress, before things spiral out of hand. This is important because the earlier you catch your system flooding, the more options you have to bring it back to balance.
Hence, “too late for toaster” written in the upper corner of the page. My client (who drew this with me) found that her system, when under low-to-moderate levels of stress, could be regulated by taking a moment to imagine herself in a toaster; gently warming and relaxing her body. That might sound weird, but the body communicates through images and sensations.
But the week before, she experienced an intensely stressful event and was frustrated that the image was no longer having the effect it once did. “Yeah because it’s too late for toaster,” I said.
Once we reach certain levels of activation, we need increasingly strong deactivating measures to return to our range of balance. It’s not impossible, but it’s rough on the system.
So it can be helpful to learn the more subtle steps your nervous system takes as it starts to get uncomfortably energized; instead of only becoming aware once it’s already “Too Late for Toaster.”
As always, feel free to reach out if you’re having a tough time riding the waves of these upended times. Learning to self-regulate can be a powerful stabilizing practice.
Is This Present Like the Past?
When we say “resolve trauma,” it is not to forget past events and the lessons that came from them, but to help the pre-thinking, body-based systems of perception more accurately ask, “is this present like the past?”
When we say “resolve trauma,” it is not to forget past events and the lessons that came from them, but to help the pre-thinking, body-based systems of perception more accurately ask, “is this present like the past?”
Often in the wake of painful stressors, the nervous system begins to generalize features of the experience; reacting defensively against anything that even remotely looks/feels like the past experience. This is a good survival strategy and necessary for growth and learning.
But not all survival strategies are good life strategies. Survival-based perceptions are quick and powerful but also frequently inaccurate. It is also extremely energy expensive to keep the body constantly primed for defense, and this is because it has lost the ability to accurately assess the level of safety moment-to-moment.
“Resolving trauma” means to connect the conscious thinking mind and sensing body to re-learn how to safely evaluate our environment. We unwind the defenses and let the compressed survival energy vibrate out of the system. As it’s happening, we use the conscious mind to stay present and recognize that it is no longer then but now, and now is different from then.
With that connection, the body and mind experience, in a felt way, that the present is different enough from the past to establish a new relationship to defense.
Don't Crash Your Coffee
Don’t Crash Your Coffee is an invitation to notice how many times a day, without the high stakes environment of actual crashing, we “crash” everyday things due to a lack of focus.
This was what sealed the deal for me when it came to getting involved with Yamaha’s motorcycle training program. Don’t Crash Your Coffee is a lesson from the school that speaks to how we can use everyday moments to train our focus.
What do we mean by crashing? In the world of riding a motorcycle very fast, lack of focus and the abruptness of input into the machine that comes from that is the number one reason people crash.
So Don’t Crash Your Coffee is an invitation to notice how many times a day, without the high stakes environment of actual crashing, we “crash” everyday things due to a lack of focus.
We grab the coffee pot mindlessly and spill some on the counter. We smash our password into the keyboard and misspell it 4 times in a row. We grab something out of the closet and knock 7 other things off the shelf.
All of those things, when done within the context of riding, result in a crash.
Whether you care about motorcycles or not is irrelevant. It’s just a way to recognize how easy it is for all of us to slip out of our moment to moment experience and the consequences that come from that.
Truthfully, you don’t need to be some ultra serious meditator who commits 2 hours a day. You can improve the quality of your life drastically just by not crashing your coffee.
Especially when we are really struggling with something, that’s when this change of awareness is crucial. It’s how we learn to come back to ourselves and begin living something that feels like a choice again.
Everyone's Gift
Everyone’s personal gift, at some level, reduces down to the ability to bring other people to life.
Everyone’s personal gift, at some level, reduces down to the ability to bring other people to life.
It’s not woo, despite sounding dangerously close.
Consider human evolution. Some say that the Universe is a friendly place, but the human system has been most greatly shaped by a natural environment that has been trying to kill it and eat it every day for millennia.
Humans aren’t that strong. We’re not that fast. Before tools and fire, we sat huddled in caves at night knowing that just about anything could snatch us up and tear us to pieces if it wanted to.
That shaped our hardware. We need to coordinate. We need numbers. We need as much aliveness on our side of the survival equation as possible.
So when you really see or hear about that person coming to life because of that thing you did, or what you made, or how you said what you said — there are physiological pathways older than we can imagine telling us this is what we were made to do.
And I think the more we start to really pay attention to what we are doing when we feel most like ourselves — and when those around us seem most like themselves in response — that we’ve found something worth shaping ourselves around.
Is Anxiety a Noun?
We generalize and say you have “anxiety” or some other stress related disorder, when in reality you have a dynamic interplay between, sensations, emotions, perceptions, and thoughts that create the meta experience. This can be dramatically different between people, and the differences are not random or trivial.
The ability to sense our internal environment and make choices about what to do with that information is at the core of healthy functioning. This can be more difficult than it sounds, because acute events and/or chronic, unprocessed stress can alter how we sense our internal (and external) state.
We generalize and say you have “anxiety” or some other stress related disorder, when in reality you have a dynamic interplay between, sensations, emotions, perceptions, and thoughts that create the meta experience. This can be dramatically different between people, and the differences are not random or trivial.
A place to start is to turn your attention inward and see what part of your body draws your attention first. It will usually be a place of discomfort, because we all have a negative bias (it’s actually a survival skill), and take a second to register what it feels like directly.
Notice the difference between sensation-based and emotion-based descriptions. “I feel pressure in my chest” vs. “I feel anxious in my chest.” Anxiety can feel like a lot of things to a lot of people, so I encourage you to start with sensation-based descriptors to map your internal experience.
If you encounter an uncomfortable area of your body, feel it for a few moments, and then see if you can become aware of the opposite experience somewhere else. What part of your body feels the best, or at the very least, less bad?
See what happens when you develop this dual consciousness of the two experiences. Notice how the sensations change moment to moment. Feel how your system may tighten and relax in subtle ways as you stick with the sensations; instead of constricting or dissociating away from them. It’s through these cycles of conscious contraction and release that the nervous system balances itself.
If you notice resistance to practicing dual consciousness, your system could be telling you that dissociation plays an important role in organizing your stress/anxiety symptoms. That’s ok, it’s just information. Continue to notice and see what happens next.
Be Careful of Catharsis Addiction
Culturally, we’re often told catharsis is the way to move past emotional difficulty and process stress. It makes sense - the tools we use to manage our emotional states often result in a build up of compressed energy. So it makes sense to blow the lids off, say/shout what needs to be said, act out, and discharge the compression. However, this ironically doesn’t often lead to a long term change, and the research is mixed at best when it comes to this as a big picture solution.
Culturally, we’re often told catharsis is the way to move past emotional difficulty and process stress. It makes sense - the tools we use to manage our emotional states often result in a build up of compressed energy.
So it makes sense to blow the lids off, say/shout what needs to be said, act out, and discharge the compression. However, this ironically doesn’t often lead to a long term change, and the research is mixed at best when it comes to this as a big picture solution.
This is because rapidly arising, forceful, cathartic movements of the body and/or emotion don’t allow for real metabolism of experience; which is what we need to adjust internal dysregulation. Catharsis often then becomes another technique to manage our state rather than to resolve our ongoing threat response.
After catharsis, we are likely still filling up with compression for the same reasons and at the same rate as before, but now discharging it in a new way. The cycle of intense buildup and intense discharge can have its own addictive properties. Catharsis doesn’t often result in more self organization due to it being powered by mostly disorganized impulses (which are ok to have).
If someone’s been stuck in a freeze or shutdown response for a long stretch of time, it could absolutely be helpful to experience cathartic mobilization as that frozen state begins to thaw; but if we go much beyond 1-2 rounds of that, we’ve now likely traded “shutdown” for “catharsis” as the go-to management strategy. -
What’s needed is actually a slowing down and stretching out of our activation responses while remaining present inside the body; so that the compression can be slowly metabolized over time. Then we can change the way the nervous system orients itself in and more accurately evaluates its environment, allowing for appropriate and present focused responses