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.
“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:
“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.
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.
“They told me to try to get in touch with my feelings by writing poetry or something after I came back, and I just didn’t want to do that shit.” —Mark, Iraq War Vet
It’s often tough for men to find their way into “healing,” because a lot of the messaging of that world (both said and implied) says that in order to heal you have to become soft and harmless; that “healing” is the purview of femininity alone; that it is your masculinity itself that is the problem.
Perhaps contrary to what you’re told every day on social media, everything isn’t a trauma response.
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.
And it isn’t rooted in some holistic psych, deep attachment need that was never met, or a trauma response (not *everything* is a trauma response by the way). It’s biomechanics, and movement-based treatment approaches work great for that.
We know via brain scan studies that when people are presented with material related to a traumatic event, areas of the brain that are responsible for locating us in time and space become unstable and go offline.
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.
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.
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?”
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.
Everyone’s personal gift, at some level, reduces down to the ability to bring other people to life.
“I’m not actually afraid of anything, but I’m still freaking out.” I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve heard some version of that in the clinic. It’s way more normal than people think.
Our human systems have been shaped by the unforgiving nature of evolution, and nature has valued the connection to our embodied experience. It’s a mistake to casually toss it aside as fluffy New Age.
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.
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.
The body’s sensations can be the key to unlocking chronic stress, anxiety, as well as unresolved traumatic experience. Although these conditions are usually filed under “mental health,” they are also entrenched within the body as expressions of an ancient survival mechanism.
Sometimes it’s the way you process information (automatic thoughts, all or nothing thinking, overgeneralization, etc.) that leads to distress. Cognitive behavioral therapy works great for that. But sometimes distress arises from the body in the form of unarticulated physical sensations, and these are generated by an older, pre-language part of the brain.
When it comes to anxiety, sometimes it’s helpful to remember that, for all our innovation and genius, we are still just fancy animals.
Somatic Experiencing is a body-oriented approach to the healing of trauma and other stress disorders. It was developed by Dr. Peter A. Levine through his multidisciplinary study of stress physiology, psychology, neuroscience, indigenous healing practices, and medical biophysics; with over 45 years of successful clinical application.
I love this picture of the helmet from my motorcycle crash in 2018. There is so much to see in the image.
Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) is a form of therapy that can help people find new ways of living by changing their relationship to their thoughts. The cognitive model, which comprises much of CBT’s foundation, is rooted in the principle that the way we perceive situations influences how we feel emotionally. Further, the way we perceive situations is often based on underlying beliefs about ourselves and the world. These beliefs generate automatic thoughts (thoughts we accept without question), and those automatic thoughts are often unhelpful and untrue.
If I were to sum up my practice, this would pretty much be it. Change needs to be experienced directly through the body and mind together in order to be strong enough to grow in the individual.