A recent clash with a very difficult individual took me into a full on emotional tail spin: it felt more than just a minor irritation like a dark cloud failing to pass by like they usually do. A few days later I’m still playing through in my mind the latest outrage this person feels (they are one of those select people who can start an argument in an empty room) at some imagined misdemeanor that has apparently been committed. It took me a while to calm down enough to recognise why my usual strategies weren’t working; my hyper vigilance was on full alert, the radar scanning the near (and far) horizon. It’s somebody being unnecessarily rude, bullying and wanting to lash out, and reminds me of the emotions I️ had as a child around seeing anger of others. A few days on after surviving the earthquake of criticism the ground has subsided, but the aftershocks manifest themselves into periods of anxiety, poor sleep and retreating into my shell.

So, the first article was around the origins of trauma and how it manifests itself. This one is around my strategies for dealing with trauma; a personalised set of approaches a lot that involve self-awareness and self-reflection along with some that need the support of others that usually work, along with the notion that “this too will pass”.

1. Understand what’s going on and dealing with worry

The first blog on trauma is informed by some of the theory and trauma literature I️ came across on the psychotherapy training course at Metanoia. For me it’s something like “owning my history”; knowing that I️ suffered trauma as a child, accepting that, in a strange way a bit like having a proper diagnosis of what is wrong; a friend who is a doctor told me recently that she told a patient some terrible news about a terminal illness, but that he was grateful and in a weird way pleased, as he finally knew what was wrong with him. Part of the difficulty is being able to accept what happened if we have faced trauma and to be able to deal with the shame of it.

I️ tend to think of the severity of a fall out in 3 different levels:

My experience these days is that most of the anxiety is at Level 1 and something I can work through; what the writer and Buddhist and psychotherapist Bruce Tift calls a kind of mild “disturbance”, that there has been a ripple of annoyance or isolation, or upset but we can rationalize it and accept it will pass relatively quickly. He posits that there are so many books and experts that try to sure us encouraging us to achieve some future positive state, but what if we are already free? What if even our intense anxiety is not actually a problem but instead (as he writes) “an intelligent response to the perception of groundlessness”? There are also some useful tips on what I call Level 1 worry in the dealing with worry article.

Thomas Moore (who wrote the wonderful book Dark nights of the soul) wrote: “first you see, then you know. First you have to be present to what is going on, and that requires at least a modicum of interest. You have to be interested in yourself, almost as an object. Things are happening to you that you don’t initiate, and you have to look at those things carefully and closely. This kind of self-interest may then turn into a positive kind of self-love, and that is the beginning of healing. If you can discover your essential beauty, in spite of all your problems and imperfections, you are on the way toward well-being. A preliminary step is simply to accept yourself with all your failures and imperfections. You must get the ego out of the way—the thought that you are so exalted that in your refined state you would be perfect. Acceptance is the beginning of genuine and honest self-love, a requirement for perceiving your own beauty.”

2. Every day prevention; practicing self-compassion

I have found through my own learning and working with clients with their challenges in coaching, that how I treat myself in difficult times is crucial. Many of us are familiar with the concept of compassion towards others. Being compassionate towards ourselves is for many of us, somewhat harder to talk about and live. Self-compassion involves acting the same way towards yourself when you are having a difficult time, fail, or notice something you don’t like about yourself. Bruce Tift says “the choice is whether were going to approach ourselves with fundamental aggression or with fundamental kindness…when we love all of ourselves (including our fears and dark places), we stop attacking ourselves, because we now understand that were attacking our own vulnerability”.

Instead of just ignoring your pain with a “stiff upper lip” mentality, you stop to tell yourself: this is really difficult right now, how can I comfort and care for myself in this moment?” Instead of mercilessly judging and criticising yourself for various inadequacies or shortcomings, self-compassion means you are kind and understanding when confronted with personal failings. Typically, it is seen as having three main components:

(1) being kind and open to one’s own suffering

(2) an awareness of sharing experiences with others: a common humanity and

(3) practicing mindfulness approaches

There is more information in the article on self-compassion.

My own practice is more and more through using meditation to steady myself and be present. I listen to meditations on apps like Insights Timer and particularly like approaches from self-compassion writers like Kristen Neff. One of her meditation mantras repeated in a mindfulness session I like is: “may I️ be safe, may I️ be peaceful, may I️ be healthy in mind and body and may I️ live with ease”. I have put together several home-made meditation recordings to listen to and have made some for clients I work with which they have found very helpful.

3. Talking it through

Perhaps we all understand the power of talking is that we need to express to a trusted soul what’s happening inside our minds and bodies and experience the balm of it being understood.

Sometimes it’s just bearing witness; they don’t have to solve it for us, but truly empathise and hear the struggle we are facing. A few close family and friends who really get you and can be there to really listen, and when it’s bad, not make it OK. Typically, in my experience they have had some experience of it themselves and understand from personal experience what you are facing.

In terms of professional therapy support, that is an option for really going into depth about our early years, and how we became the people we are today. My initial experience of therapy many years ago really helped to understand destructive patterns in myself and in relationships with others.

4. Unleashing emotions through creativity and exercise

I️ have written in previous articles about the power of dissociation, where the brain takes over and stops us accessing our true feelings. For me it’s about breaking that stranglehold and learning to feel and know these feelings won’t crush and overwhelm us.

There are lots of ways of unleashing emotions if we struggle with talking them through; what I reflect on as a significant life lesson of learning to feel….

Creativity is the act of turning new and imaginative ideas into reality. Creativity is characterised by the ability to perceive the world in new ways, to find hidden patterns, to make connections between seemingly unrelated phenomena, and to generate solutions. Julie Burstein in her TED talk believes that creativity grows from broken places, from issues and challenges that we face in our lives

• Find your own way of releasing creativity: for me it’s been going back to playing the piano after years away from playing really helps; it’s a shortcut through to your feelings, and 30-40 minutes a couple of times a week really helps; I️ can almost feel something coming out of me like a toxin when I️ have finished l
• Journaling what’s happening for us. I do it periodically, especially as a way of reflecting on something that gone well, or something conversely that’s not gone well that I need to process
• Go regularly into nature; not only does this help connect us to something bigger and spiritual it puts us as individuals into perspective

Finally, an acceptance and recognition that anger is natural. You may not like it but it has its place and, depending on your temperament, it may be a constant in your life. Anger arrives on its own schedule and for its own purposes, and its schedule may be different from yours.

For the last 10 years I have exercised pretty much every day in some form or other, which I’m convinced also helps manage or sometimes even dissolve any lingering emotions about something that upset me. When you are doing it, you are pretty focused on it whether its running, swimming or cycling, and at the end of it everything seems just that bit more manageable.

5. Long term work on mindset/spirituality

The writer Lee Stringer who wrote the story of his life on the streets of New York, where he was hooked on alcohol, cocaine, and crack said “it has occurred to me since that perhaps what we call depression isn’t really a disorder at all but, like physical pain, an alarm of sorts, alerting us that something is undoubtedly wrong; that perhaps it is time to stop, take a time-out, take as long as it takes, and attend to the unaddressed business of filling our souls.” So maybe in some strange perverse way we can work on seeing our dark nights not always as problems but more as opportunities for change. What are our minds and body trying to tell us?

Thomas Moore uses Carl Jung’s work on the idea of the shadow in us: “in your darkness you may discover a part of you that is essential to your being, but unfamiliar. The darkness doesn’t exactly come from outside, but is a revelation of something in your nature. In your black moods and dark fears, you find an essential part of yourself. However, you present yourself to the world, on some level you are a dark person. You have thoughts you don’t usually tell people. You are capable of things that your friends may know nothing about. You are probably more interesting sexually than the world realises. You probably have some anger and fears that you don’t tell people about. You may have secrets from your past that make you more intriguing than your persona would suggest. Certainly, your potential for darker thoughts and behavior is rich”

Moore suggests taking a Zen-like approach. When you feel blue, be blue. Don’t feign cheerfulness. Speak for the mood. The more you allow it some autonomy, the less identified you are with it. It can come and go like a cloud, without your being attached to it. If external circumstances are responsible, enter into them but don’t become obsessed

Overall reflections

I do find, when I’m in the middle of a difficult patch (which don’t come too often these days, thank goodness) that I feel I haven’t really moved on and am caught in the words of Freud in a “repetitive compulsive” cycle. More often than not though, when I am in an OK place, I know that I have climbed more ladders than slipped down snakes over the years, that the difficult times come much less often and don’t last as long.

I also take heart from some of the latest work in the world of neuroscience, that with enough time and resilience, we can do at least a partially good job of re-wiring ourselves!

The other thing is as we get older and wiser, we have more awareness of the things we love doing, what we feel neutral about and what we really dislike. Whilst there are lots of approaches out there that exhort us to stretch ourselves and learn new experiences (and I’m all for that) there is also something about knowing your “window of tolerance” that allows you to stretch and try new things or get better at things you do currently, but not to overstretch too much. I am perfectly at peace for example, about not speaking at another major conference, or indeed organizing one: something I wont do for the rest of my life!

I hope I have provoked some thinking and ideas about approaches to dealing with trauma and would encourage you to ask some fundamental questions of yourself;

• How do you handle anxiety when it comes along?
• What works for you and what doesn’t work- do you know?
• Has it changed as you have got older?

Can you be with the whole of your psyche? Let It R.A.I.N

I came across this article, written by Rick Hanson an American psychotherapist  and based on the work of Michelle McDonald, a Mindfulness Teacher, which I thought was a great technique:

Why?

When you’re young, the territory of the psyche is like a vast estate, with rolling hills, forests and plains, swamps and meadows. So many things can be experienced, expressed, wanted, and loved.

But as life goes along, most people pull back from major parts of their psyche. Perhaps a swamp of sadness was painful, or fumes of toxic wishes were alarming, or jumping exuberantly in a meadow of joy irritated a parent into a scolding. Or maybe you saw someone else get in trouble for feeling, saying, or doing something and you resolved, consciously or unconsciously, to Stay Away From That Place Forever.
In whatever way it happens, most of us end up by mid-adulthood living in the gate house, venturing out a bit, but lacking much sense of the whole estate, the great endowment of the whole psyche. Emotions are shut down, energetic and erotic wellsprings of vitality are capped, deep longings are set aside, sub-personalities are shackled and silenced, old pain and troubles are buried, the roots of reactions – hurt, anger, feelings of inadequacy – are veiled so we can’t get at them, and we live at odds with both Nature and our own nature.

Sure, the processes of the psyche need some regulation. Not all thoughts should be spoken, and not all desires should be acted upon! But if you suppress, disown, push away, recoil from, or deny major parts of yourself, then you feel cut off, alienated from yourself, lacking vital information about what is really going on inside, no longer at home in your own skin or your own mind – which feels bad, lowers effectiveness at home and work, fuels interpersonal issues, and contributes to health problems.
So what can we do? How can we reclaim, use, enjoy, and be at peace with our whole estate – without being overwhelmed by its occasional swamps and fumes? This is where R.A.I.N. comes in.

How?

R.A.I.N. is an acronym developed by Michelle McDonald, a senior mindfulness teacher, to summarize a powerful way to expand self-awareness. (I’ve adapted it a bit below, and any flaws in the adaptation are my own, not Michelle’s.)

R = Recognise: Notice that you are experiencing something, such as irritation at the tone of voice used by your partner, child, or co-worker. Step back into observation rather than reaction. Without getting into story, simply name what is present, such as “annoyance,” “thoughts of being mistreated,” “body firing up,” “hurt,” “wanting to cry.”

A = Accept (Allow): Acknowledge that your experience is what it is, even if it’s unpleasant. Be with it without attempting to change it. Try to have self-compassion instead of self-criticism. Don’t add to the difficulty by being hard on yourself.

I = Investigate (Inquire): Try to find an attitude of interest, curiosity, and openness. Not detached intellectual analysis but a gently engaged exploration, often with a sense of tenderness or friendliness toward what it finds. Open to other aspects of the experience, such as softer feelings of hurt under the brittle armor of anger. It’s OK for your inquiry to be guided by a bit of insight into your own history and personality, but try to stay close to the raw experience and out of psychoanalyzing yourself.

N = Not-identify (Not-self): Have a feeling/thought/etc., instead of being it. Disentangle yourself from the various parts of the experience, knowing that they are small, fleeting aspects of the totality you are. See the streaming nature of sights, sounds, thoughts, and other contents of mind, arising and passing away due mainly to causes that have nothing to do with you, that are impersonal. Feel the contraction, stress, and pain that comes from claiming any part of this stream as “I,” or “me,” or “mine” – and sense the spaciousness and peace that comes when experiences simply flow.

R.A.I.N. and related practices of spacious awareness are fundamental to mental health, and always worth doing in their own right. Additionally, sometimes they alone enable painful or challenging contents of mind to dissipate and pass away.

But often it is not enough to simply be with the mind, even in as profound a way as R.A.I.N. Then we need to work with the mind, by reducing what’s negative and increasing what’s positive. (It’s also necessary to work with the mind to build up the inner resources needed to be with it; being with and working with the mind are not at odds with each other as some say, but in fact support each other.) And whatever ways we work with the garden of the mind – pulling weeds and planting flowers – will be more successful after it R.A.I.N.s.

Time Structuring

I liked this framework and article from Relationships explained.com about how we spend time with ourselves and other people using time structuring theory in Transactional Analysis.

Time structuring is piece of theory which allows us to think about how intensely we spend time with other people. Eric Berne, the founder of Transactional Analysis, believed that human beings need to structure time and relationships with other people in some way.

He assumed that we have an inbuilt drive to create structure out of chaos in relationships, just like our brain organizes sensory input in terms of objects and meaningful categories. He suggested six possible ways that people might structure their time and relationships: withdrawal, rituals, pastimes, activities, psychological games, and intimacy.

The order of the possible patterns is important. The emotional intensity in our relationships increases step-by-step as we move from withdrawal to intimacy. While we may feel lonely and unstimulated by withdrawal, we move to a highly charged and emotionally open state when we’re intimate with another person (also have a look at psychological hungers in relationships for a discussion on intimacy).

However, by the same token, the emotional risk increases when we move from withdrawal to intimacy. During withdrawal we are emotionally very safe, and no-one can hurt as we are not in contact with anyone. When we are intimate with another person we open ourselves to the other and whatever they bring into the encounter, good or bad. Unfortunately, a lot of us needed to learn how to protect themselves in relationships as children, which limits our capacity to be emotionally close as adults (see script).

We therefore tend to spend less time in intimate encounters and more time in safer social situations than is perhaps good for us, since our relationships become superficial and empty of real attachment or investment, and so fail to nourish or stimulate us. However, we all need time in each one of the different social situations: for example, we need time to withdraw and be with ourselves. Or, when we get to know somebody new, we may want to spend some time just “pastiming”, either because we don’t feel safe yet with the other person or because we don’t actually want to get to know them any better.

Here’s some more information about the different ways it’s possible to spend time with people:

Withdrawal

Withdrawal is spending time out of contact or out of relationship. Some people will physically withdraw and be on their own.

Other people withdraw on the inside and are physically present, but emotionally absent. However, we all need time to be with ourselves and regroup, so some withdrawal time is necessary for all of us.

Rituals

These are highly structured and stylised ways of interacting. For example, a greeting like “Hello, how are you?” and a response of “Thanks, very well, and how are you?” is a ritual. Two people are interacting, albeit in a very structured and pre-programmed way.

The good thing about rituals is that they give us a lot of structure and security and a possible way in to more intense contact. On the downside, they contain little emotional value: you could exchange hellos with a complete stranger without much, if any, emotional contact.

Pastimes

This is the dinner party level of interaction. Here we make polite and easy conversation and there are culturally agreed topics we can talk about, knowing we won’t get into hairy situations with our partners in the exchanges. In Britain we might talk about the weather or the food or your last holiday, but you certainly wouldn’t start talking about the difficulties you are having with your partner or your mother.

There is a bit more of an exchange involved, but it’s still pretty safe, because both parties will avoid any controversial or painful topics. This level of interaction fits with casual acquaintances and people you have only just met. It might be amusing for a while, but most people will get quite bored with it rather sooner than later.

Activity

This is probably where many of us spend a lot of time with others. Activity stands for “goal directed activity” with others, say attending a meeting or playing tennis. It is time we spend doing things with others, rather than just being with them.

Activity may include work, or at home it could involve running a household or looking after the children. It’s shared time, and may include having a lot of fun, but it may also mean we are avoiding really being with the other and meeting them fully.

Psychological Games

This is a chapter in itself! You can read more on games, if you haven’t already done so, under the section games. In short, games are a sequence of interactions with others which involve a hidden agenda and which end up with both parties experiencing familiar bad feelings.

Games can be seen as a failed attempt to be intimate with another person. However, both parties do not take the full risk of being open and authentic with each other and the result is a repetitive pattern of interacting from set roles.

Intimacy

This is an authentic encounter with another, a moment of shared openness, trust and honesty. Intimacy means emotionally intimate, not necessarily sexually intimate (unfortunately, a lot of sex isn’t necessarily emotionally intimate). It also doesn’t necessarily mean nice and peaceful.

An intimate encounter may be an angry argument, but conducted from a place of respect and openness to one’s own feelings and those of the other(s). Intimacy gives us the highest level of emotional intensity, but also involves taking the greatest risks (one could be rejected or ridiculed when showing one’s true self and being open – something that most people would find emotionally very painful).

In a lot of our relationships it’s the moments of emotional intimacy that are missing and which are so important to us all. Intimacy means attachment and letting somebody into one’s heart and soul. It means we are allowing the other person to impact us and change us. If relationships don’t work it is often, maybe even always, caused by lack of shared intimate time.

If you want to know more about how to apply the concept of time structuring to your life and your relationship, have a look at applying time structuring.

Psychotherapy Resources

I have trained in different forms of Psychotherapeutic and Psychology theory over the last few years including foundation Counselling training, Constellations Family systems training and Group analysis. I have also part completed integrated psychotherapy training at the Metanoia Institute.

I am writing some of my own and collecting articles around aspects of Psychotherapy and Psychology which may be of interest, in a similar way to the many Coaching articles I have written.

Please select the resources you are interested in from the menu on the right hand side