Category Archives: Trauma

‘Have an adult tantrum’: 40 tips to help your mental health during lockdown

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My July 15th 2021 Blog entry from my newsletter was used as content on social media to help more people cope with Covid19. The post caught the eye of a journalist and I was interviewed for this article that was published a few days ago online at the ABC Australian News Website.
https://www.abc.net.au/everyday/things-to-do-help-mental-health-during-covid-lockdown/100388366

It is very important to do the things that help free the build up of stress and trauma in your body. Positive thinking and distraction is not enough. This is a real world wide trauma occurring and your body is reacting on a daily basis. With each restriction or lockdown the stress multiplies if it is not adequately released in an ongoing way.

Don’t wait until your body hits overload to do something about it. Do something everyday. The list in the article is a good way to keep on top of the creeping stress build up. A few people have asked me to create a pdf of this list so they can check items off. It is on my to do list.

Freeing your Covid19 Lockdown Trauma

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The previous post focused with a trauma lens on the effects of a lockdown to your health. It can be very traumatic. In this post we look at what to do to undo those effects, even during a lockdown.

As you feel the stress in your body build, some of it can turn into a traumatic response. Freeing the trauma response as soon as possible is ideal. So what can you do? You can’t think it away, it’s not a prefrontal cortex (cerebrum) problem.

Answer: You have to move and feel it away.

Freeing the Fight response – Boxing bag, Pillow Fights, Weights, Gym, Kicking, Martial arts, Tai Chi, Competitive Sport.

Freeing the Flight response – Walking, Jogging, Running, Trampoline, Rebounder, Up/Down Stairs, Swimming.

Freeing the Freeze response – Meditation, Bubble Bath, Long Shower, More Relationship contact, Animals, Hugs/Cuddles, Heavier blankets, Massage, Play, Dancing. Stretches, Singing, Music. Reading, Gardening, Journaling, Being in Nature, More Sunshine.

Notice there is nothing on this list about watching more TV, playing video games, eating more, drinking more, working more, shopping, drugs, smoking. These are avoidance techniques that create addictions. They provide an initial brief relief, but cause more problems longer term.

Anything that doesn’t acknowledge the trauma in your body and offer a healthy outlet, only builds the pressure inside your body, making it worse later. Keeping your mind and body in limbo, is dangerous to your long term physical and mental health.

In fact it is important to make sure you are covering all these aspects at some point on an ongoing regular basis, Covid or no Covid, and even more so, if you have been traumatised in the past.

So how do you know which activities on the list above to do first? Enter your mindfulness meditation. Close your eyes, go down and connect in, wait and your body will tell you what it needs to do next.

The more you can let go (of that thinking brain), the more you will know (from your body.)

Lock down #5 – Staying in Control

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When a traumatic event hits – where your locus of control resides,
will greatly determine if that event will have a long term affect on your health and life.

Today my home state of Victoria just announced another (fifth hard sharp, five day lockdown) in Melbourne Australia.

So it is important to turn the trauma lens this week, on the effects of a lockdown to your health.

You can have a trauma in your life, if you have been: Failed, Attacked, Threatened, Abandoned, Terrorised or Abused by other human beings, and that their actions have made you feel (even for a split second) that you could die or be seriously wounded or hurt. Even if that didn’t eventuate.

This split second fear occurs because you don’t seemingly have control over your life’s safety. You could die – and for a moment there is nothing you can do about it. That moment is what fires the limbic brain’s amygdala, switching on a fire alarm in your body, which activates the lower brain into fight/flight to attempt to save you. And it can be quite a strong response in the body creating extreme stress and anxiety responses for years to come.

Having a fifth lockdown is now compounding the trauma/stress created by the first four lockdowns. Especially if people’s income/business have been severely affected. Losing a lot of income can feel like a serious threat to ones survival. And it can feel as bad as facing death, if there are no savings to fall back on.

So if this registers as a traumatic event, the fight/flight/freeze system kicks in. The fight – protests, anger, abuse for the government, blame and attacking. The flight – worry, anxiety, panic, firing staff, moving to the country.
The freeze – negativity, depression, giving up, feeling lost, withdrawing from the world. To name a few.

If your locus of control is outside of your body, then the lockdown can affect you as above. But..if your locus of control is within your body, you have a much better chance of limiting any traumatic reactions now and in the future.

To strengthen that internal locus of control, body mindfulness meditation is a great way to acquire that skill. Ongoing practice, helps keep that skill strong and a buffer to outside future unforeseen events.

Because from the inside you can control your responses. Body Mindfulness practice gives you more and more access to your internal world. The more you can access your body from the inside, the less affected you will be by outside circumstances and the quicker you can recover, when hit.

By focusing what’s happening right now in your body, you get more present, and can think more calmly in this moment, leading to better wiser decisions and less reactions day to day – however long the lockdown lasts

Corona Virus – Will it traumatise you?

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“Research shows that whether or not a person develops PTSD has more to do with the person’s ability to cope with stress than the event itself.”

Susanne Babbel, Phd – Heal the Body, Heal the Mind (2018)

What the world is experiencing right now with this virus spreading is a very heavy traumatic experience for many people.

How do you stop from going nutty over the next few months? How do you stop from breaking down, or getting PTSD (Post Traumatic Stress Disorder) symptoms after the event?

This has been my specialty for 30 years in private practice. Helping people resolve underlying trauma that affects and limits their lives, sometimes for a lifetime (if not addressed).

How are you coping so far? What emotions are bubbling up in you that you are aware of? And what about the ones just under the surface? Stressful situations help to bring out what is already there that has probably been laying dormant within you for a long time.

This Corona Virus event doesn’t have to be traumatic – before, during or after the event is over.

Just because others are freaking or stressing out, doesn’t mean that you have to do the same. Sometimes the extra stress you feel is only because you feel you have to feel this way too, that this must be normal behaviour. It doesn’t have to be that way.

I will be offering (all free) mindful suggestions and meditations each week. And I’ll be posting them all with a short video. Video will convey the message much better. You will be receiving the benefit and experience of 30 years of deep trauma coping, releasing and healing tips, advice, techniques, tools and expertise. The Virus Buster will be the first, coming soon this week.

The limit of each mindfulness class this week will be four, to allow safe enough room between participants. (Half the participants showed up last week and that was completely understandable.)

At some point soon (highly likely next week) the classes will go online. You will be able to attend from anywhere in the world and the classes can be much bigger. I will be using the Zoom meeting software. It is free for you to use and fairly easy to run, once you learn. Youtube has a lot of instructional videos on how to use it. I am happy to help anyone where possible, that might need some help.

Zoom, Skype, Facetime, Messenger, WhatsApp and others will all become very important for continual social interaction during the Corona virus period.

The free instructional video for the Virus Buster mindfulness technique that I’ve been talking about, will be ready this week. I will follow this up with a free guided meditation to help you actually do it.

The Stress and Trauma of Modern Times

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“Mindfulness involves paying attention to something, in a particular way, on purpose, in the present moment, non-judgementally….You actually have to tell your brain that is your intention. It won’t know what you’re doing, and it will priorities its activities based on your emotions or your mental energy or your physical needs.”

Stan Rodski, The Neuroscience of Mindfulness, (2019)

Another good book released earlier this year on mindfulness. A psychologist/cognitive neuroscientist, talks about the basics of mindfulness.

Unless you take control of your thinking mind, it will run you. Your conscious awareness needs to direct your thinking mind to stop. It doesn’t need to stop for long to de stress your over cluttered thinking thoughts. But stop it must.

Without conscious attention to stopping, your brain will run on auto-pilot and continue to rehash all the unresolved traumatic events of your past.

This fast paced period of time in our history is stressing your fight/flight emergency system out. Most of our stress is from past traumas where our nervous system has not fully come down from the high alert state, created by one event or the high level of continued pressure from many events, in our current environment.

TV news is traumatic to your body. Video and satellite crosses and instant transfer of bad news from any part of the globe was never there one hundred years ago. Now it is on tap, through TV, social media, radio, newspapers etc. And your body responds as if it is a secondary traumatic event happening to you now.

Witnessing a traumatic event can be just as traumatic to your body as actually being in the event.

So it is very important to consciously each day have the awareness to switch off and stop at some point, or at a number of points.

De stressing daily is vital to your health.

Your body – the door way to greater health

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“The remnants of pain left behind by every strong negative emotion that is not fully faced, accepted and then let go of, join together to form an energy field that lives in the very cells of your body.”

(Eckhart Tolle, A New Earth, 2005)

Last week I quoted from Eckhart’s book that preceded The Power of Now. This week the quote is from the book that followed The Power of Now.

Everyone will have events in their lives where there are strong negative emotions that are hard to deal with. People find ways to cope with such events.

But coping is not healing and at some point those negative emotions need to be dealt with and released. If not, as Tolle says, they accumulate and join together to form tensions, pressures, pains, muscular restrictions, energy drains, limitations, stiffness, and then later, affect our thinking creating anxiety, depression and if still not dealt with, much worse, disease and even serious injury.

The good news is that you can do something about it for yourself by mindfully connecting to your body on a regular basis. Taking time to connect within allows you to contact the cells that are carrying that built up negative emotion.

By switching off distracting thoughts you open an inner door way within your body that allows you access to the community of cells that make up the different parts of your body. This crucial connection allows for a lot of self healing that scientists and doctors are still coming to grips with.

Learning to connect within, gives you unprecedented access to your physical vehicle as well as your past unprocessed emotions and traumas. Facing this past material is not always easy but it is worth the resulting freedom, reduced drama and enhanced health that is waiting on the other side of that old hidden pain.

This can be difficult to believe if you have been brought up thinking you have to always take something when you are unwell.

But if you learn how to face something now,
you most likely won’t have to take something later.

Your Body, Trauma and Confidence

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“Research is also now starting to make clear the long term impact of early childhood trauma on people’s relationship to their own bodies (Price, 2007; Van der Kolk, 2014). Body awareness, body attitude and body satisfaction may all be negatively affected.”
(Benjamin R, Haliburn J, King S, (Ed), Humanising Mental Health Care in Australia, 2019, p253)

How is your relationship with your body? Body Mindfulness work requires you to feel into your body and accept what is there. Some areas are easier to accept than others. Others remain blind spots, numb areas that you have great difficulty accepting and allowing. As you access and delve into your body further, you will begin to learn the landscape that you have created within you. This is very significant because your body is dictating a lot of your health issues, psychological problems and limitations in life.

Those numb dissociated parts of your body are almost certainly due to a past trauma that you couldn’t assimilate at the time. You had to block off the pain and emotion to survive. That immediately cuts off part of your real self. And if the trauma was really severe and/or prolonged, you begin to live a shadow of your real self, have poorer health and limited abilities.

Past trauma, even if you don’t recall it whatsoever, will be affecting you through your body. If the trauma is deep, you will highly likely be feeling deep shame, disgust or even hatred towards your body, (very true with sexual trauma) which greatly lowers your self esteem. In the past you would have needed lots of motivation to override this lack of confidence and self esteem.

Your poor intellect revving you up to override the deep body based trauma. This as you can probably imagine, is short lived. It can help in moments where you require a boost but is difficult to work with long term if it is not eventually addressed at the body level and released and cleared permanently.

Thus a regular body mindfulness practice is essential as part of your long term mental health, physical health and personal development.

Healthy Work – Finding your Sustainable Level

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“According to the World Health Organization, stress is considered a worldwide health epidemic. The American Institute of Stress links stress to the six leading causes of death (heart disease, accidents, cancer, liver disease, lung ailments, and suicide).”
(Joe Burton, Creating Mindful Leaders, 2018)

Working in a high performance, high stress major company, the stress will eventually takes its toll. After 20 years and in their mid 40s managers and staff start to burn out and if unchecked, in the worse case scenario, leads to one of those leading causes of death.

If you survive and don’t die then there are other issues that arise, frequent sickness, anxiety, depression, loss of direction, moodiness, lack of fulfillment, relationship breakdowns, unemployment, financial issues, addictions, family issues, ageing faster, and general poor health. Luckily many companies are now turning to mindfulness meditation to improve mental, physical and emotional wellbeing.

It sounds crazy that this is the state that our work culture is in. What leaders would design a company like that? Rather than push a person for the maximum output, hence into a zone of high prolonged stress levels, why not find the sustainable level of work?

How do you know when you are working at the optimum sustainable level? My gauge for this is to ask the following question…

At the end of the day when I arrive home – am I calm and relaxed?
If the answer is NO, you are overworking, and over time it will take its toll.

If you are self employed or have a decent boss, you are able to adjust your work week to work at a sustainable level. And by sustainable I mean that you can keep doing those hours and activities indefinitely, for years to come and not tire. That’s the beauty of sustainability, it’s repeatable over and over and over again without much wear and tear.

This is a big work secret to long term health, success and happiness. Find the level for you that is repeatable, over and over again. The added length of time, gives you the benefit of accomplishment – higher income, more experience, and fulfillment in being able to do the things that need time, without burring yourself out in the process.

I adjusted my number of work client hours years ago when I was seeing too many people in a week and almost burned out and collapsed a number of times. Once I asked the sustainability question my whole practice changed. I now see the exact number that I know I can keep seeing indefinitely for years and decades to come. It has worked beautifully now for about a decade.

Initially you seem to earn less, but the quality of your work goes up because you are not stressed out. So over your work lifetime you actually earn much more and also feel happier in mind and body.

You also get the benefit of having a great buffer that you can draw on when unexpected stressors and traumas hit you. Your body has room to absorb the impact and see it through with less reaction. I had some major ones (totally unjust) hit me like a ton of bricks over the last six years, major assaults, that would have adversely affected many people. But my body had room to absorb the impact and release it over time.

I’ll be talking more about this process in future articles.

Lost Connections leads to Depression

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The last class for 2018 is running tomorrow night. The Mindfulness classes will resume again on Tuesday Jan 15th 2019. So a shorter break than other years. 2019 will make it 9 consecutive years running of this class and as is tradition, the first class will be free for whoever books in until full.

I’m reading (technically listening to) a great book titled Lost Connections by Johann Hari. Where he covers the real causes of depression in most people. And the research all points to lost connections. For example, we have lost connections with:
* People – today we have fewer friends we can confide in,
* Work – more people doing less meaningful work,
* Childhood Trauma – people are not taking the time to go within and complete their past trauma to reconnect with themselves,
* Natural World – we are losing the natural organic rhythms of nature that we use to have centuries ago.

I recommend this book highly. It’s a damning indictment on trying to solve depression with prescription drugs.

A Body Mindfulness meditative practice helps you to reconnect with your real self. I’ve found that when you reconnect to yourself within – your body – you then naturally want to reconnect to other (better) people, spend more time in nature, do more meaningful work, eat better etc.

Coming home and reconnecting to you is the first biggest crucial step to eradicating depression. And this time of year is when it usually hits the hardest. I will be on leave for 2.5 weeks from Dec 21st (returning Jan 7th 2019) but I will still be able to see some people for individual sessions (in person or from anywhere in the world over Skype/Zoom) should you really need help with that inner connection over the Xmas/New Year break.

Changing your Deep Subconscious Auto-Pilot Habits

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“Our brain captures the strategies that work to keep us safe, connected and respected as possible in our early life environment, and then puts those behaviors on autopilot.”
(Amanda Blake, Your Body is Your Brain, 2018)

The behaviours you have that are on autopilot are hard to change because they have been buried deep down very efficiently. They are on autopilot so that they can run automatically when needed without thought.

When you need to be safe and connected, you don’t want to have to think it all through. Stopping to think for too long can be the difference between life and death, or connection and no connection with others.

So how do you change something that’s deep and not part of your conscious thinking intellect? You need to turn inward and put the intellect into the back seat for a while. Body Mindfulness work helps you to do this. You scale back the rate of thinking by focusing on your inner body, mostly from the neck down, away from the seat of the intellect. That brings you closer to the automatic patterns that you deemed early on as the best way to live.

I like Amanda Blake’s explanation of the there brains. The lower Cerebellum Brain is geared for safety. The middle Limbic Brain is geared for emotional connection with people and the Cerebrum (top brain intellect) is geared for Respect. This gearing or wiring are strategies that are on autopilot were created long ago, mostly in childhood.

Things change as you grow up and into adulthood. But very often these deeper autopilot patterns do not update. What burned them in place was so strong (probably traumatic) that you decided there is no way you are going to let that affect you in that way again. So that patterns is locked in deep to protect you. To keep you safe. To keep you connected and to keep you respected by people.