Maybe you find yourself getting behind. You tell yourself you’re going to tackle those projects, but you flip on the TV and next thing you know hours have passed. You get mad at yourself and vow to start again tomorrow. Creative ideas percolate into your mind but don’t seem to take root. Even easy things overwhelm you at times.

Maybe you start “shoulding” on yourself, trying to bully yourself into action. But you end up feeling worse and then comfort the pain with food, substances, shopping, or TV as you shut down to avoid that little frantic feeling inside. You may get angry at others rather than feel the uncomfortable feelings inside.

Most people would diagnose this dilemma as procrastination or even depression. But let’s look deeper. Let see what is happening when we view your life from the point of view of the body and nervous system. A very different picture emerges as we look deeper. Procrastination may mean that the body is simply trying to avoid reliving a stress or trauma in order to keep from being overwhelmed.

Trauma

When a life event overwhelms your body’s ability to escape or defend itself, the uncompleted impulse to protect gets trapped in the nervous system. Like icebergs lurching through the nervous system, they weigh you down and take up your energy. But once you turn the power of your conscious attention on the body, these patterns can melt and drain out of the body. These unprocessed traumas take up space and effect the way you think and feel and even see the world. They show up as procrastination, anxiety or irritability. You may have experienced some of these common challenges:

• Digestive problems
• You don’t enjoy things that used to bring you pleasure, colors and tastes seem dull.
• Your pain doesn’t seem to get better
• You find it difficult to really relax
• You can’t get to sleep or you could sleep 18 hours a day making it difficult to get out of bed
• You procrastinate and the last-minute-rush-to-meet-a-deadline pulls you out of the doldrums, leaving chaos and conflict in your wake
• Basic daily tasks start piling up
• You struggle with depression, anxiety or panic
• You may feel numb or blank and have memory problems
• Fearful memories may intrude and trigger anxious feelings from ordinary events

These seemingly unrelated issues have one thing in common: The body’s natural ability to cope has started to go numb to reserve its resources. Peter Levine discovered 4 phases that wild animals go through when they face danger and it formed the basis for his Somatic Experiencing process for healing trauma.

When At Risk, How Wild Animals Protect Themselves:

Fight – the sympathetic nervous system ( S N S) mobilizes to protect itself, muscles tighten, heart rate increases, breathe gets shallow, thoughts race, and vision focuses laser like on the danger. You may experience these same feelings and call them irritation or anxiety.

Flight – when an animal is unable to defend itself, the sympathetic nervous system ( S N S) triggers them to run to safety,

Freeze – When the animal is unable to get away, it goes into state that appears to be frozen in immobility, like playing possum, but inside it is in red alert, ready to flee given an opening if the predator gets distracted or moves away to defend its meal. For the prey animal, It’s like having the brakes on while the gas is floored. Many people walk around in this state without realizing it.

Shut down – when the prey animal knows there is no way out, the parasympathetic nervous system (PSNS) slowly dials down sensations to make death painless and gentle.

Your body goes through the same four phases, but you don’t come across many tigers in your daily life. The stress and challenges of modern life are much harder to fight or flee from. So they stay stuck in the body, taking up resources, trying to fight a battle that can’t be won, but also can’t let go of either.

By the time you get through the travails of modern life, such as medical and dental procedures, sports injuries, car accidents, bullying, job stress or death of loved one, your body has many stored experiences where you were unable to fight or flee. You can’t fix the problem and you must endure it. And to complicate these challenges, the stories you tell yourself, draw the double bind even tighter, preventing the body from letting go.

The body tries to offer us protection through immobility responses and patterns of shut down. Many people flow in and out of these states, diagnosing themselves with anxiety, or depression, bipolar disorder, procrastination, or anger management problems. When in reality, the body performing based on 500 million years of evolutionary survival skills: Fight, flight, freeze and shut down.

Getting off the Merry Go Round of “Shoulding on Yourself”, Blame and Guilt.

You start by trusting and befriending your body. You listen and follow subtle body sensations. These sensations are wise messengers, ready to free us from the stories and patterns that keep us repeating the same frustrating patterns over and over. Instead of listening to the Inner Critic via the neo cortex, you can simply notice what sensations or numbness rises up and then simmers down. This practice launches your body into a healing response that completes and releases these old patterns.

This deep form of trusting the body may be very new to you. You don’t try to breathe a certain way. You don’t try to relax. You don’t try to distract yourself with work. You don’t do visualizations or affirmations. You simply observe the body with curiosity and compassion. When you do this, an ancient and wise organic intelligence starts to work. Your body wants to feel good naturally.

From time to time you look around the room at what brings your eyes pleasure. This simple act of looking around helps you stay in the present where your body’s wisdom is most powerful.

After a time, a deep breath will come in naturally. You may yawn. Your eyes may water. Your stomach may gurgle, as you come out of immobility, or stuck fight / flight patterns. You may feel a sense of flow, tingling or aliveness start to dawn, and you naturally look around and see how the world looks. Like Sleeping Beauty (another trauma story!), with a little kindness and affection, you emerge from your waking coma to re-enter your life again, a little more whole, a little more engaged.

Connect and inquire

When gently working with these patterns, you may feel a heaviness in your body, a restlessness or a tense muscle. These sensations may be one of the stored icebergs coming into awareness so you can start healing. It could be old emotions, an injury, a fight or flight posture. It doesn’t matter. We do not need to know what it is. Your job is easy. Just observe and see what happens next.

1. With gentle and loving awareness, connect directly with the body sensation from the inside.
2. Remind yourself that it has an important message. It is there to solve a problem or keep you safe.
3. Gently inquire to see what the body says with its language of sensation. Soften the mind and its drive to analyze.
4. Wait with openness and curiosity for whatever arises next. If your body is in a shutdown state you may feel nothing, which is very important to notice and explore. Map out the numbness in your body. Then give it lots of time to unfold. You might notice very subtle sensations like inner trembling, a shift from cool to warm or tingling. These are very positive helpful responses after numbness.
5. When you connect and observe, you change your relationship with your body and nervous system, potentiating the body’s ability to heal.
   When you’ve done a few minutes of this, look around the room, see what interests you, what gives your eyes pleasure. You may notice a little more calm, a slight sense of well-being, feel less critical of yourself. You may have a little more energy.

Peter Levine reminds us that wild animals are rarely traumatized, because they automatically allow these physiological processes to help them return to normal after a narrow escape from death. You may experience your body shaking, trembling, your arms and legs moving. Your mind tells you “stop doing that, it’s weird!”

But these natural responses are signs that the body is blowing off stress, shaking off the frozen energy of trauma and stress. This natural process allows the body to return to a relaxed state. When you are unable to process trauma shock, the brain continues to release high levels of adrenaline and cortisol. Then this survival energy becomes trapped in the body. In the case of procrastination, your body cannot sustain such high levels of activation, so it provides the calming relief of a partial shutdown state.

Make it Gentle and Easy

The benefit of observing the body, is that you do not have to remember or even know the initial cause. You don’t have to re-live or re-tell any traumatic events. Simply noticing and inviting little pods of body memories to come to your attention, allows them to dissipate.

Using these simple methods allows you to connect with the innate intelligence of your body, and override the analyzing mind for a time.

It can be helpful to do this with an understanding friend, or a therapist, to help you stay focused.

So if you struggle with procrastination, gently remind yourself that you can start to unravel this frustrating pattern. It does not have rule your life, chase away loved ones, or keep you isolated. You can make a difference, and you can start by being understanding and listen to your body.

You can allow your body to reclaim its natural energy, aliveness and well-being. All this, just by quietly listening and feeling.

An excellent resource if you want to learn more: Peter Levine’s book Healing Trauma: a Pioneering Program for Restoring the Wisdom of Your Body contains a simple explanation and guide to befriending your body and releasing trauma. You can do this alone or with a caring support, with the help of a CD containing exercises to help you gently reclaim You!

Call us if you’d like to find a better way to deal with procrastination, anxiety, stress or depression

The post Is It Really Procrastination? appeared first on Oregon Somatic Therapy.

It turns out that the Inner Critic’s “perspective” arises from our nervous system simply trying to protect us. Only it’s not very helpful when our confidence suffers for listening to a litany of criticism. We mistake these thoughts for ourselves. Then we get on the Inner Critic’s thought train and ride all the way to Miseryville. For some, the Inner Critic creates paralyzing anxiety.

What causes this?

In the course of everyday life, challenges and stress accumulate. If we’ve had sudden losses, a medical or dental procedure that leaves us shaken, painful experiences in childhood, our nervous system becomes more vigilant. We have difficulty easing down from this heightened activity level of the nervous system.

Our bodies stand ready to take emergency action. The mind follows suit telling us that something is wrong. Enter the Inner Critic, warning us to play it safe. Cajoling us to stop what we’re doing to prevent further loss or pain.

But this voice of caution is driven by old and incomplete information from the past, and fear about the future.

When I was a kid, Mr. Magoo, a cartoon character who was so sighted that he’d walk off cliffs, step in front of cars, and yet he escaped harm’s way by sheer good luck. He portrayed the Inner Critic’s worst nightmare: to trust that the world is a safe place and to step into the unknown!

If we asked the Inner Critic, we’d probably learn that reducing our anxiety would be foolish!

How to make peace with critical thoughts? And the Inner Critic.

We can go directly to the source that underlies the Inner Critics vigilance – the body and nervous system where stress is stored. We can use the mind to consult the body by simple observation and curiosity about body sensations. These fears, stored in the body, are more readily released by observing the body’s language: sensation.

Here’s an example from my own life. Dental procedures often unhinge me. It’s not painful, just scary. At the last visit to the dentist I tried something different. Rather than trying to be strong, I asked the assistant to hold my hand, even though it felt a little ridiculous (enter the Inner Critic telling me “how childish!”).

As I felt the stress rising in my body, I took little breaks from the drilling when it got too overwhelming. And when it was all done, I sat in the chair and surrendered to my body’s need to shake. I did this by turning my attention to my body and away from thought. I noticed the tension holding my body rigid. I waited and watched, looking inward to body sensation. Soon a little quiver started in my upper back and that gradually moved to shaking in my right arm. After a while it gently subsided.

It was the first time in years that I walked away from the dentist feeling pretty good. Wild animals do this instinctively to shake off stress, and thrive though they face life and death risks regularly.

What else can we do?

We can use our eyes! When we let our eyes look around to see what gives them pleasure, it’s like a circuit breaker cutting off juice to the Inner Critic. When I work with clients’ recovering from accumulated stress and trauma, they can find this simple activity challenging. We get used to scanning or looking rather than Seeing. Seeing brings us in contact with the here and now. Scanning for what’s wrong only feeds You Know Who.

What do your eyes see right now that gives them pleasure?

I remember reclining in the dentist’s chair, looking at the same old things in the sterile office until I remembered this simple tool. So I really looked and freed my eyes to See. I found soothing blue colors in the undersea poster on the ceiling. Beholding the colors and patterns, I felt a distinct shift toward relaxation. I didn’t think it would work and was surprised!

Try it right now yourself. Just look around notice how your eyes might first scan quickly. Then they start looking. And then you might notice a slight shift inside as your eyes start to drink in the room or the view.

Feeding the Three Hungry Wolves

Imagine we have three “wolves” inside of us. When we feed them:

• the wolf of fear, the mind ricochets with danger and worry .
• feed the wolf of happiness, we are energized and busy.
• feed the wolf of well-being, we live in a place of ease, ready for what life offers.

We need all three wolves. When we need to flee or fight, we want that wolf to be well fed and ready to defend. We also need to be able to connect with others and enjoy our lives. And when we have a belly full of well-being, we help the other two wolves stay healthy and engaged and enlarge our capacity to be in the here and now.

If accumulated stress has rewired your circuitry, feeding the wolf of fear, your circuit breaker may need a little more capacity. For our nervous systems, the circuit breaker is the mind’s ability to observe.

When the wolf of fear uses all our bandwidth, the Inner Critic takes over our thinking. Here’s what you can do to move toward well-being:

• Start noticing which wolf is in charge!
• Then gently shift your focus to what your eyes see. Name a few things that you notice.
• Notice what your eyes enjoy seeing.
• When your attention lands on something pleasing, describe it to yourself, as if you were telling someone who was fascinated by your perceptions.
• Feel the shift that begins like a whisper in your body toward either neutrality or perhaps even settling.
• Notice how your body breathes out for a few cycles.

These few simple steps can decrease fear thoughts saturating the mind with stress chemicals. The more often you play with these simple steps, like training a beloved pet, your body enhances its capacity for well-being by practicing it.

You may have a thermostat at home and on the cold days you can turn the thermostat up to make your home more cozy. In the same way, you can turn up your well-being thermostat by dialing in these simple steps.

And best of all, the only side effect is more relaxation and less fear.

The post Dancing with Your Inner Critic : Question Your Thoughts appeared first on Oregon Somatic Therapy.

“My brain is deeply flawed.

And no offense, but so is yours.”

I loved this quote from the Guinea Pig Diaries by AJ Jacobs, so much that it inspired this article.

I spend a bit of time watching my brain at work these days. I used to believe what my brain told me. But I’ve come to notice my neocortex (the wrinkly outer layer of the brain) jumps right over rationality and “what is,” to forecast danger, predict disaster, and intensify worry. . . all in the name of keeping me safe. Thank you very much neocortex, but my everyday life doesn’t need your dark cloud!

Our brains developed like a patch work quilt over millions of years to solve problems such as outsmarting the local predator or out-maneuvering the clan next door who wants to take over my cave. Our brains evolved to solve Paleolithic problems, not the stresses of modern life. I don’t know anyone who’s run into a grizzly bear or a mountain lion in a very long time.

Double Binds, Fight or Flight and Black & White Thinking

When I have a tight deadline, my neocortex helpfully calculates the chance of completing the task on time. Unfortunately it also calculates the number of people I’ll let down if I don’t make the deadline as well as the smaller number of people who will be hurt or disappointed if I make the deadline but push them to the sidelines with my race to the finish line.

With the likelihood of failing in at least one side of this double bind, my neocortex orders up a cocktail of adrenaline and cortisol to kick start the sympathetic nervous system’s fight or flight plan, so I can multitask my way to the finish line. Unfortunately adrenaline causes the brain to see reality as black and white, people as enemy or friends, them or us. Complex tasks become dilemmas.

A Client with Test Anxiety Getting off the Worry Train

Here’s an example of a client troubled by test anxiety. His keen intellect served him well. As one of those Mensa types he could out think most of us, except when he had to take a test. To qualify for a new position he needed to take a series of proficiency exams. After studying, he aced every practice tests. However, when observed by the proctor at the other end of the webcam, he’d freeze. After failing the exam for the third time, he came in for help with his test anxiety.

His brain stepped aboard on the “worry train” which took him right out of town to Anxietyville until he learned to observe body sensations.

Experiencing Healthy Pleasure

In our first session, we chatted about what he loved about being an engineer. I asked him to describe body sensations like the confidence and passion he experienced at work. Being a question he’d never considered before, it took him a few minutes to name and describe what he was feeling. He caught on fast. We chatted for about 10 minutes about his pleasure in his work. When I saw his body and mind were settled and enjoying the experience, we moved to the problem that brought him to see me, the test anxiety.

Next I asked what happens in his body when he’s sitting in front of his computer, with the proctor watching him. “My stomach gets this terrible knot. My chest feels like a tight band keeps it from moving and my hands feel cold and numb.” His mind naturally wanted to analyze these body sensations to explain the rather than simply observe them.

Observing Without Analyzing, Employing Curiosity

When he settled back into curiosity rather than analysis, he continued tracking body sensations. He noticed something different start to happen. After tracking quietly for a few minutes, he reported that “my right shoulder is tingling. My head is getting very hot. My stomach is feeling cooler. My eyes feel tears. This is crazy.”

With a little encouragement, he continued to observe rather than analyze. After a few more minutes he looked up with a bit of a puzzled expression and said “I don’t feel anything. The uncomfortable feelings are gone.” His body processed the anxiety and let it dissolved naturally.

I invited him to take in his surroundings and he notice how things looked. He was surprised that things looked sharper, clearer and he noticed more of the decorations in the office. Next I invited him to savor the feeling of ease and peacefulness in his body, and describe the body sensations he noticed.

Your Body’s Organic Intelligence

He experienced the body’s organic intelligence. This same body IQ wild animals use to discharge the stress of being hunted. Their built in wisdom can keep them from being a predator’s next meal by naturally discharging stress and trauma, as the client had just done. Animals do this naturally, unlike our human brains which easily catapult us into the past or the future, rather than living in the present.

Tracking Body Sensations

After a couple more sessions to prepare for his next exam he felt ready to take the test. When he sat facing the screen for the 4th time, the tension and anxiety came up, but he observed body sensations rather than freezing up. As he tracked, the tightness and fear sensations crested like a roller coaster and released their hold on him. He passed his exam.

Behind the scenes with the Therapist.

To learn more about how Somatic Experiencing® works and get a glimpse into what is happening on as the process happens

Negativity Bias of the Brain

Our brains are hard wired to look for danger, threat and risk without any effort on our part. For example, think back over the last year, and remember a compliment someone gave you. Then remember an insult or cutting remark. Which came to you effortlessly? Many people have no trouble with the insult.

And if you struggle with anxiety or depression, you probably have an active Inner Critic which blithely tells you everything that’s wrong with you, such as: “you don’t look right,” “eat right, sleep right, think right, dress right,” “no one likes you,” or \your prospects for the future are bad. . . .”

Don’t believe everything you think.

Most of us wouldn’t treat our worst enemy the way our brains boss us around! Most people believe their thoughts are real and that self-criticism will somehow motivate them to be better people. It would be great if this strategy works. But it makes most of us tense and unhappy. Problem solving rather than self-criticism gives better results!

Don’t believe everything you think.

Dr. John Gottman, has researched relationships in his marriage lab for 25 years. He discovered that couples in happy long term relationships treat each other gently with the “slow start up” because they manage the fight or flight responses. Dr. Gottman noted that it takes seven positive comments or behaviors to outweigh one negative comment. It’s just more energy efficient to be kind to our mates if we want our relationships to last.

Things to Try at Home

Things you and do to awaken your body’s organic intelligence:

• Check out these tools on our website
• Start noticing your thoughts instead of thinking and believing them. Be curious and ask “Is it true . . . I should . . . lose weight? She should be nice to me? I should have a better job?” Who wouldn’t want these things of course! But when we think these thoughts most people feel more tense, more anxious, more irritated, more depressed. And they may not even be true.
• SoulCollage® gives you a fun, relaxing and powerful way to outsmart your analyzing brain. Check out my next SoulCollage® workshop
• Read or listen to a great book published in 2009 by Rick Hanson, Buddha’s Brain: The Practical Neuroscience of Happiness, Love and & Wisdom
• HeartMath Institute researches how supporting heart intelligence enables the parasympathetic nervous system to bring natural ease and well-being into the body. They have discovered for example, that inhaling speeds up the heart and activates the sympathetic nervous system (fight or flight) and the exhale activates the relaxation response in the parasympathetic nervous system. This change in the heart rate turns out to bring inner peace and even health. Stress and trauma decreased this heart rate variability. They sell a little biofeedback device that helps increase and anchor these natural healthy responses in heart rate.
• Somatic Experiencing® therapy also works by reviving the natural stress immunity of our body’s organic intelligence. Give Suzie a call 503-224-3318 or email suzie@suziewolfer.com this gentle cutting edge approach for working with stress, difficult emotions like anxiety, depression, panic or anger and feel better naturally.

The post Don’t Believe Everything You Think! Question Your Thoughts appeared first on Oregon Somatic Therapy.

Here are some steps you can use to get back in the flow, and let overwhelm and tension find their way out of your body. You can do this in just a few minutes, even at a stop light! Just keep your eyes open!

Connecting with the Here and Now – Orientation

• Let your gaze leave this article. And let your eyes look around wherever, and at whatever, they want – just 20 seconds or so.
• As you LET this happen, you may notice that your eyes get interested in something. Your inner and outer attention starts to shift to the here and now, connecting with something that interests your eyes.
• When you notice this subtle shift, notice what it is your eyes are interested in. Really look as if you’re never seen this before and you’d like to take it in so that you could tell someone about it.
• This is orientation as “connecting to the environment through the senses”, literally, coming back to our senses.
• Next, tune into body sensation.

Listening to your body’s language – sensation

• Let your attention softly go inward. Let the awareness come to you, rather than searching.
• As sensations arise, simply name them. Notice your mind wanting to interpret or analyze and return to sensing. “Yes, there’s that tightness, that heat, that numbness . . .”
• If you have a lot of energy, notice how that shows up in your body, and book mark the storeis and thoughts for a moment.
• If you have little sensation, notice that. And simply be curious.
• Then notice what other sensations come next. Simply wait for them to be revealed. Once your body knows you are listening, it will respond.
• Your attention will initiate a sequence that the mind cannot anticipate. And this is golden. Something new can happen.

New Pleasing Sensations

• When you notice there is a little lull in new sensations, switch over to exploring and noticing what feels good. Many people find this a little more challenging since our brains are 80% oriented to detecting problems, rather than detecting pleasure! Wait and watch with curiosity. It will come to you.
• Name and describe the neutral or pleasing sensations in your body. Imagine telling a friend how it feels: a sense of stillness, a pleasant warmth, feeling of flow, strength or relaxation, a sense of power or elation.
• Practice keeping company with these pleasant sensations, like you would attend good friend. Notice how it feels from the sensations point of view.

Alternate Noticing Pleasing and Other sensations

• Once that has settled, let your awareness alternate between the pleasant impressions and the tight, tense, numb or uncomfortable sensations.
• And then be curious to see what happens next.

Look Around

• When you sense a shift or feel complete, move your awareness outward and look around. Notice how things look. Notice what pleases your eyes. This takes you back out into the world, into the here and now. And like saving a document on your computer, it anchors and completes the experience in your nervous system.

Taking it inside with words. Here’s a lovely version of this process in first person

written by Ann Weiser Cornell Ph.D. and Barbara McGavin

• I’m bringing my awareness into my body
• I’m sensing for what wants my attention now
• I’m waiting until something comes into my awareness
• I’m taking some time to feel it in my body
• I’m starting to describe what’s here
• I’m acknowledging what’s here just as it is
• I’m settling down with It
• I’m keeping It company with interested curiosity
• I’m sensing how It feels from its point of view
• I’m letting It know I hear it
• I’m taking some time to sense any changes

The science behind this is fascinating. When we are stuck, blocked or frustrated, or overly energized, the sympathetic nervous system provides us with the energy to change things . . . except when we can’t. And then all the energy gets stuck in the nervous system.

When we observe the body, it’s like sending a document to the printer. Instead of it being stuck in the printer cue and taking up space, the colorful documents pour out of the printer. Over a life time, we have 100s of documents stuck in the printer cue, waiting. We feel overwhelmed and all jammed up. But the good news: when we observe what’s happening in the body, stuck energy starts moving again. Then you and your body can focus on life’s pleasures.

That’s when the parasympathetic nervous system comes alive:

• Helping muscles relax,
• Eye sight softens and broadens,
• Heart slows down,
• Digestion starts working again,
• And a long delicious exhale settles the body.

The “rest and digest” functions of the parasympathetic nervous system support the body to return to Relaxed Readiness, or some people call this Easeful Readiness. And we don’t have to do anything more than just observe and be curious to see what will happen next. It feels more alive and calm at the same time, and quite different then the excited / vigilant state so valued by our culture. And very different than feeling checked our or numb.

The only side effect is well-being! . . . And a few more rocks out of your backpack.

The post Feeling Overwhelmed? Tense? appeared first on Oregon Somatic Therapy.

• You have a medical or dental procedure and you try to calm yourself but you notice fear getting the best of you. Afterward you feel numb, spacy and disconnected from yourself.
• You work in an office where no matter how hard you work, it will never be enough, and you have to be accountable to your supervisor for your productivity and accuracy. You meet the weekend exhausted and spend your free time recovering.
• You’ve just been rear ended, and though you don’t feel hurt badly, you’ve never been quite the same since.
• You were a shy child and felt like few people understood you, though they took care of your bodily needs. You had an incident of bullying and you’ve been struggling with feeling like you never fit in.
• You’ve had an argument with your partner, and learned that they have been keeping a secret from you. You suspected something but were never sure. Afterward you feel anxious, angry and fear trusting anyone again. You try to move on, but the thought of this secret betrayal plays over in your mind like a broken record.

These common experiences have touched most of our lives. We make the best of our circumstances and try to move forward. How can you tell if it’s just the stress of challenging life events or trauma?

Here’s the critical difference.

In stress we believe that we can do something about our situation. In a traumatic event we feel helpless to change the outcome, because it was unexpected, uncontrollable, and inescapable. We feel stuck. Stress turns into trauma especially when we feel shame or guilt. The unresolved situation becomes stagnant energy in the body, and flares up when similar experiences trigger the feeling of helplessness. The result is trauma and it stays in the body.

In both stress and trauma, cortisol, the stress hormone, floods into the blood stream, preparing us for action. Constantly present, cortisol suppresses our immune system and can lead to chronic disease. It also interferes in the creation of new synaptic connections that could change stuck behavior patterns. Too much cortisol makes it difficult to be mindful, so we react rather than respond. Our reactions become automatic, like playing out an unconscious script from the past. We repeat the same behaviors even if they don’t work.

In these double binds, your nervous system responds in one of three ways: fights, flees or freezes. In the language of emotion, you feel angry, anxious or numb. These states bind up a lot of energy, and over the course of our lives, these patterns become ingrained. Stored trauma keeps us from making positive changes, feeling like we keep repeating the same lesson. Each new trigger adds to our trauma load, making us less resilient. The good news is that trauma symptoms are caused by our reaction to the event not by the event itself. We can change our reaction and we can help the nervous system recover and discharge these patterns.

Fight, Flight or Freeze

Unlike our wild animal cousins, our sophisticated brains override the organic intelligence of the body. The fixed trauma states show up in observable gestures, body sensations and emotional states for those trained to see them. For example:

Fight response: restlessness, clenching, pulling away, bouncing feet, protection gestures, irritation, anger, twitching, cold sweats, muscle tension, jaws clamped, rapid shallow breathing, jumpy and reactive

Flight response: hyper vigilance, exaggerated startle response, sleep problems, restlessness, feeling trapped, sense of urgency, holding the breath, anxiety, hypersensitivity to touch, chronic pain

Freeze Response: numbness withdrawal, confusion, shock, shyness, memory problems, tired all the time, poor muscle tone, apathy, feeling disconnected, disoriented, depressed

As these uncompleted trauma patterns accumulate, you may find it difficult to be present in your life. In its wisdom, the nervous system may draw you to people and events that reenact the dilemma to try to complete and discharge these stuck patterns.

Healthy responses let you know you are releasing trauma or stress.

• Yawning, sighing, heat or hot flashes, warm perspiration, colors look brighter, feel like you have options again, goose bumps, interest in people and relationships.
• You may find your head moves easily and your eyes want to look around. You feel relaxed and alert. Your shoulders relax, or your blood pressure decreases.
• Your nose may run, eyes water.
• Your digestion starts working again and you notice happy gurgling sounds.
• When the body unthaws from the freeze state it shakes, releasing the effects of stored trauma.

These hard wired responses to trauma are all useful and important ways the body recovers. Most of us have been socialized to suppress these normal, healthy behaviors thinking they are weird. Our head takes over, leaving the body’s wisdom behind. The good news is that with help we can embrace the body’s intelligence and not just manage trauma, but recover.

Talking about it may NOT help.

Common sense would suggest that we should talk about these painful experiences. However talking about trauma can actually make our feelings of helplessness more intense, and reinforce our dilemma. The imprint of the trauma is buried deep in the brain nowhere near the language center of the brain so talking rarely discharges these patterns. Many people find that talk about it over and over again, they feel worse with every telling. I’ve noticed that combat veterans instinctively avoid talking about their traumatic active duty experiences. They either to shut down or can re-enact them without ever intending to do so.

“Sarah”and her birth experience

“Sarah” had been working with me for a few months when she decided she wanted to try the Somatic Experiencing approach. She had been having feelings of anxiety alternating with feeling too busy and then tired and unmotivated. She felt she was a good mother to her 3 teenage children, but felt as if she was just going through the motions of her life and her job.

She noticed she tended to keep people at arm’s length and wondered if being so busy was an unconscious strategy to avoid something. In the initial Somatic Experiencing sessions, she learned how to observe body sensations and stay with them as they “thresholded” and then discharged. She noticed an amazing, but common result of doing Somatic Experiencing: she felt calmer and more balanced and colors looked brighter. (This results from accessing the calming effect of the parasympathetic nervous system, relaxing chronic tension in the eye muscles and effectiveness of the optic nerve).

In one of her last sessions, Sarah came in particularly tired and disjointed feeling. As she observed the sensations in her body she said “I just feel kind of numb, like I’ve been anaesthetized.” She observed her body while it seemed like relatively little was happening. I helped her stay focused on the “nothing” that was going on.

Finally she started to feel a new sensation. Without going into all the details, she was re-living her birth as her little infant body inertly passed through the birth process as a life less object. “I have the feeling of needing someone to touch me, but no one is noticing or perhaps caring. . . . Then I feel this anger go through my body, and something in me decides to never need or want anyone. I will be the one to take care of myself.”

She continued to observe and felt a huge sense of relief as she felt surrounded by a palpable presence of light and love, which she interpreted as an angelic presence that has comforted her throughout her life, when she felt people had let her down.

Afterward, she realized how touch deprived she felt and unconsciously placed her right hand tenderly on her upper chest. A gentle smile came to her lips as she started to release a small part of her lifelong pattern of being fiercely independent.

She realized she wasn’t broken or crazy. She experienced the organic wisdom of her body and how it was only trying to protect her instinctively. This self-protection had been making decisions for her before she could talk or think.

Sarah brought the trauma of being anaesthetized during birth, and then isolated after birth into conscious awareness, a common procedure at the time. She safely relived the experience without feeling helpless. In a safe, supportive environment using Somatic Experiencing, she upgraded this old program for a new more alive engagement in life.

After that session, she started to notice the body sensations that arose when people invited her for coffee, or if someone misunderstood her. She could feel a slight stiffening in her muscles that reminded her to observe rather than act on this deeply imbedded instinct. And after a while she started saying “yes” to life more often. She was optimistic that she could work through this life long pattern, byobserving her body and letting these impulses arise, and naturally complete, freeing her to choose instead of react without thinking.

What you can do to support the organic wisdom of your body.

• Let your eyes look for beauty. Notice what your eyes want to see. Look around. Take in the world and relish what you enjoy.
• Touch. Experience touch that is safe and enjoyable: pets, massage, dancing, holding hands, hugs
• Come to your senses. Observe your body sensations with curiosity, watch and wait to see what happens next as the wisdom of your body is engaged. Your body speaks the language of sensation, and you can learn this language by being a good student of your body’s wisdom.
• Full belly breathing. Notice how your pet or children breath while they are sleeping and match this deep intake of breath down to the pelvic bones. If you prefer technology instead, take a look at the Emwave device to help restore healthy breathing patterns: http://www.myemwave.org
• Touch: Oxytocin. Place your hand over your heart or upper chest. Notice what happens. It can be a bit magical. Touching your skin calms the nervous system and releases a small burst of oxytocin, which helps you feel a sense of belonging and comfort. See the sidebar article.
• Music and creative expression. Writing poetry and singing can calm down the overheated brain, listen to music and watch the magic that unfolds in your body.
• Gratitude. Saying thank you is a prayer that says “yes” to life, and takes your brain out of fight or flight mode.
• SoulCollage®. The simple act of looking at images, cutting them out, moving them around in a way that is pleasing to you, gluing them down unleashes a tide of well-being in the body.
• Buddha Smile. Let your lips curve up in to a tiny micro smile, and notice the wave of relaxation that slides down into your body. Watch a funny movie and notice the feeling of heightened alertness you feel. Laughter releases endorphins, the body’s natural pain reliever as it outsmarts cortisol, reduces your blood pressure and softens pain.

Saying “Yes” to Life instead of playing it safe.

As you learn to observe body sensations, you start to “renegotiate” and heal traumatic experiences rather than relive them over and over again Your body’s instinctive organic intelligence has a built-in immunity to trauma.
This intelligence developed over 500 million years of evolution, helps you safely and gradually discharged stuck survival patterns in the body. As Peter Levine says, stuck trauma reactions create “an internal straight jacket created when devastating moments are frozen in time.” They stifle our authentic selves and keep us from moving forward. They block healthy relationships, creativity and aliveness.

When these energies are discharged, you start to feel relaxed, at ease, alert, responsive. You increase your capacity for healthy authentic relationships, feel emotionally stable and optimistic.

You can say “yes” to life again. Like a wild animal, our own innate animal instincts give us a natural immunity to stress. Knowing how to access the body’s wisdom, we can bounce back into the game of life, resilient, alert, relaxed and looking forward to what will happen next.

If you’d like some help with any stuck patterns, whether it is a car accident, surgery, family difficulties or abuse, Somatic Experiencing can gently return your well being, like the neighbors cat, go back to the business of living life fully. Most people find it easy, enjoyable with results the first time.

The post Is It Stress or Trauma? Learn the difference and outsmart anxiety appeared first on Oregon Somatic Therapy.

Diets don’t work. Hating your body doesn’t work.

Most people don’t realize that prolonged “dieting” can contribute to a higher ratio of fat to muscle in your body. But what is the alternative to dieting? Simply letting the old pattern rule? No! There is a peaceful way to work in harmony with your body and its neurobiology. Intuitive eating develops with simple skills anyone can learn.

Why Dieting Doesn’t Work

Research* shows that 90 – 95 percent of dieters regain the weight they lost and continue on a roller coaster cycle of dieting and weight gain that wreaks havoc with your hormones.

Most people mis-diagnose the problem. They believe they lack willpower. But what really happens when you restrict, diet or eat unnaturally, is that you have what some researchers* call a “broken food thermostat.” They have discovered two hormones leptin and ghrelin, which regulate fat storage and hunger signals. When levels of leptin are high, and levels of ghrelin low, the brain signals you to stop eating because you are full. Dieting breaks this delicate system so that you feel hungry all the time. After years of dieting, your appetite hormones stop working properly and you can’t tell if you are hungry or full. And this leads to anxiety which often leads to even more overeating.

Poor sleep also scrambles these two important hormones. With frequent insomnia, the body produces more ghrelin making you hungrier, and it reduces leptin production, the body’s appetite suppressant. So, you feel hungrier and never feel full. And then you wonder why you struggle so much with food.

Research shows dieting leads to weight gain.

Let’s look at the research summarized by Elyse Resch and Evelyn Tribole in their book Intuitive Eating**

“Would you really embark on a diet, (even a so-called “sensible diet”) if you knew that it could cause you to gain more weight? Here are some sobering studies indicating dieting promotes weight gain:

• UCLA researchers summarized 31 long term studies on dieting and found that dieting is a consistent predictor of weight gain
• Scientists studied 17,000 kids ages 9-14 years old and found that “…in the long term, dieting to control weight is not only ineffective, but it may also actually promote weight gain.”

Intuitive eating doesn’t mean you just eat mindlessly, anything you want, where or when you want. Instead, you can learn to eat in a natural way: 1. Eat what you are hungry for, 2. Eat when you feel hunger 3. Eat foods that satisfy and heal your body and 4. Learn to stop eating when you feel full. When your food “thermostat” is broken, you may need a little help and support to develop these skills again.

Common experiences that result from dieting.

After multiple cycles of dieting, weight loss and weight gain you may notice some of these symptoms:
You feel anxious about getting hungry and over eat for fear you won’t get enough
You are easily triggered to over eat when you feel judged, or subject to scare tactics regarding health problems
You turn to food when you feel stressed, anxious , frustrated or when something is bothering you.
Intuitive eating can be learned like any skill such as playing the piano, or driving a car. The more you practice, the more at ease and natural you become. In your relationship with food, knowing what to do, and how to do it are two VERY different skills.

Managing thoughts.

Successful change depends on how you respond to your thoughts.

For example, you’ve had a stressful day, and you stop at the store to pick up something for dinner. You decide to give yourself a little treat. Notice what your thoughts are telling you “You’ve had a hard day. You deserve a little reward. You’ve been good all week. If you don’t reward yourself, who will…” And the next thing you know you find yourself not just getting a single ice cream bar, you get a pack of six and eat them all on the way home. These sabotaging thoughts over-ride the best of intentions and defeat “will power.”

There is a better way than having a daily power struggle with food. It’s time to fire your Inner Critic who bullies you, pushes you around and shames you any time you eat or even think about food.

A better way.

With a new set of skills, the scene might turn out differently. You hear the thoughts starting to justify impulsive mindless choices. But instead of getting on struggle-with-food-train, you respond to the thoughts in a more compassionate way, “Yes, we’ve had a very hard day. And I am going to get one small treat, eat it with great pleasure, savoring every bite, slowly enjoying the pleasure of my favorite sweet. And I am going to feel very proud of myself for making healthy choices and taking good care of myself. I am building a healthy new life for myself with each choice.”

The difference is that you drop any judgments, whether they are good or bad. You listen to your body and your thoughts as a compassionate observer, and you make choices based on your values, rather than on what anxiety, stress or fear would have you do.

Intuitive Eating: Understand the Stages
of Changing Your Relationship with Food.

When confronted with daily challenges, and especially when things are going really well when you want to celebrate, you may find yourself thinking: “I’ve been good so I can afford to splurge . . . I’ve had a long day, and I need a little extra to keep my energy going . . . I’ll just skip breakfast just for today since I’m already late . . . If I get too hungry, I might freak out . . . This is pointless. I’ve only lost a few pounds why bother? I’ve already eaten one, I might as well finish the package.”

These normal thoughts challenge everyone, and most people simply don’t know how to lovingly respond to them. To make sustainable, natural, long-term change in your relationship with food, there are 5 stages that help you gradually build reliable skills to make peace with food.

Stage one: Developing skills such as how to stay motivated, understanding sustainable eating habits, learning to recognize body sensations such as hunger, cravings, feeling full, feeling emotions and learning how to recognize when anxiety, fear, stress, anger or shame are making choices for you.

Stage two: Developing regular eating habits

Stage three: Sustainable food choices: choosing delicious, satisfying foods and eating for pleasure and enjoyment without guilt, shame or anxiety, with every bite.

Stage four: Planning for special occasions

Stage five: Staying motivated for life and learning how to handle stress and other triggers.

Skills you will learn to sustain these changes for life include:

• How to motivate yourself every day
• How to make small, manageable changes
• How to enjoy every food you eat at every meal
• How to give yourself credit for small changes
• How to feel good about following your sustainable plan
• How to get back on track when you stumble.

The Journey of Intuitive Eating – Part Two

Judith Beck PhD, the Director of the Beck Institute has written about her experience helping people make successful, sustainable change with food issues. She outlines the steps to make these changes.

Stage One: Preparation not Change. Food Is Not the Issue: 3 – 12 weeks until these skills are mastered, not just practiced.

1. Make a list of all the things that would be better in your life when well-being, peace of mind and self-worth do not revolve around food. What would life be like if you made peace with food and your body could return to its natural size? For example: “I’d be able to wear whatever I want.” “I’d have more energy.” “I’d be able to travel comfortably.” “I’d be confident to date or join friends and family on social occasions.”

To lay the foundation for sustainable change, you will create and read a list of 15 – 20 positive motivators every morning and later in the day. These seed thoughts plant new ideas in the mind and start to replace the weeds of self-hate, guilt and shame. In this stage, you will notice what your brain tells you to sabotage this simple step of reading your list: “I already know what’s on the list, so I don’t need to read it. I’m feeling good so I don’t need to read it. I can just think about it and not read it.” It’s like house training your dog; you are consistent, firm but gentle and compassionate.

2. Make index cards with written responses to old thoughts and keep these with you during your waking hours. For example, “If I skip breakfast, I’ll save myself 10 minutes but then I’ll be tempted to make poor food choices at lunch.” “If I don’t read my reasons for change, it will be easy later on to justify caving into my cravings.” “If I let anxiety choose my food, it might feel good for a few minutes but then I’ll be mad at myself for the rest of the day.” “Cravings go away.” “Extra food will always go to waste, either in the compost, or in my body.” If you have a smart phone, you can keep these lists in your phone.

3. Learn to eat slowly. Taste and savor what you eat. Notice this step isn’t about what you eat, but how you eat.

4. Notice the sensation of hunger. You may be triggered to eat by thoughts, stress, shame or anger rather than physical hunger. You may not know the physical sensations of hunger. You fear becoming hungry, so anxiety makes food choices for you.

5. Notice the physical sensations of food cravings and how these are different than hunger.

6. Notice the physical sensations of stress, anxiety, depression or fear and how they trigger food choices.

7. Notice the effects of eating particular foods or amounts or at different times. When you eat out of panic, fear, anxiety, stress or depression, it’s difficult to connect the effects of what we eat. “Do I feel well when I eat fruit? What happens when I eat late at night? What happens when I skip breakfast? What foods energize me and sustain that energy? What foods give me a buzz and then leave me feeling depressed in a couple hours? What happens if I let myself get too hungry, too angry, too lonely, too tired?” These patterns cannot be discovered in a book. Your own has the answers.

Stage Two: Regular Eating. 2 to 6 weeks

1. Regular meals help stabilize your blood sugar, reduce hunger, reduce cravings and give the animal that is your body loving kindness. Without mindful eating skills in stage one, you would let cravings and fears decide when to eat. Emotional triggers sabotage food choices and give permission to eat anything. Everyone is different and you will learn what a natural schedule is for you through mindfulness. Many people eat 3 regular meals and a couple snacks to reassure the body that it will always have enough, but not too much.

2. Continue practicing stage one skills daily

3. Notice and collect new thoughts your mind offers to sabotage your intuitive eating plan and having a written response. For example, resentment suggests that “I should be able to eat whenever I want.” Compassion replies “When I used to eat whenever I wanted, I paid the price of shame, guilt and anxiety. I want something better for myself now. I want to feel confident and enjoy eating.” The Rebellious One suggests “It won’t matter if I skip breakfast just this once.” Compassion replies “Every time I let stress run the show, I pay with anxiety and make it easier to give in the next time I’m stressed.”

You can move to Stage Three once you can maintain regular meals without requiring a lot of effort, self-control, will power or discipline. It starts to feel natural and believe it or not, easy.

Stage Three: Food Selections

1. Throw away any ideas of dieting, calorie counting, any radical food plans and learn to eat naturally. In fact, throw out all those dieting books. Delete all your dieting internet bookmarks. In this stage you will eat foods and portions that you can easily maintain for the rest of your life. In this stage food choices are satisfying, tasty, easy and completely enjoyable. There will be no forbidden foods that create a sense of longing or doing without in this stage. Food choices are guided by mindful eating skills developed in stage one. You learn to recognize how different food desires are from food cravings. You’ve learned more about your body’s natural cycles and can make food choices that prevent stress, keep your metabolism humming a happy song throughout the day. You look forward to eating without stress, shame or anxiety.

2. Meal planning can become a joyful celebration of the good life. Grocery shopping is not walking the gauntlet from temptation to temptation. Every choice feeds a new thought such as “I’m healthy and confident, making a new relationship with food.” “Food is my ally in health and happiness.” “What would my body really enjoy this week that will give me pleasure and energy and fill up my emotional bank account?”

3. Continue cataloging sabotage thoughts and building kind and gentle responses to these challenging thoughts

Stage Four: Planning for contingencies: holidays, vacations, work events, illness and stress

1. Back in the 80s a funny list of dieting rules passed through our office such as “Calories don’t count if you’re standing up. Calories don’t count if you’re on vacation. Calories don’t count after midnight…” It was funny, but highlighted all the ways the mind can sabotage a thoughtful and gentle approach to food.

2. In this stage, you will forecast and plan for special events, working with thoughts to see where you will need to have special plans. Thoughts such as “It’s not fair that I can’t have pecan pie with vanilla Haagen Dazs” as thanksgiving approaches. Special guidelines might include a plan for going off the plan. Not a blanket free for all, but a guideline that will allow for flexibility, eliminate the “have not” feeling of loss, but still be mindful and planful.

Stage Five: Maintaining the plan for life: after 6 – 12 months of the first 4 stages.

1. Maintaining a plan for life will include the experience of a complete crash of the plan. Everyone has times when stress builds up, unexpected events blind side us. And you may completely abandon your plans. The Intuitive Eater will take stock, learn from the experience and add a new component to the plan so that food once again is a natural pleasure that sustains good health and energy and not a coping mechanism or a reward.
2. One of the skills you will learn is how to manage disappointment and setbacks.
3. You may have reached your goals and find a new thought challenging you “I’ve reached my goals so can I start to eat more?” A kind of magical thinking invites us to go back to old patterns. But you remember that you are building a plan that will last a lifetime, not until the scale reports a number that signals you to drop the plan.

Your natural wisdom.

From the moment of your first breath, your body knew how and what to eat. As you practice these simple skills, you will attune with the wise animal that is your body. And every body has its own grand design, guided by DNA and environment. Take the power that is yours for the asking. Listen to your body. Enjoy the natural pleasure of eating. And enjoy the peace that comes from your own natural wisdom.

The post Intuitive Eating: Making Peace with Food appeared first on Oregon Somatic Therapy.

All we’d need is a production staff of 30 – 40 people behind the scenes. If you’ve laid off your staff, maybe you’d like to consider a less stressful holiday season this year.

Or maybe you LIKE the rush you get from climbing Mt. Stress. If you do, here’s your check list of how to really add more stress to your life:

• Put everyone else first
• Go into debt to make others happy
• Skips meals
• Get by on 4 – 6 hours of sleep
• Stop exercising
• Spend every waking moment indoors or in a car

Have a drink to take the edge off
If you’d like a less stressful, more person-centered holiday read on.

Let Speed Work for You

We live in a world of increasing speed. So instead of resisting speed, let it work for you. First notice your style in pacing your life. Which one best describes you?

The Tricyclist – imagine a toddler pedaling furiously, racing up and down the sidewalk. She’s using lots of effort and going nowhere but doing it fast. She’s by herself and she has no plan.

The Racehorse Rider – imagine a dazzling thoroughbred. She breaks out of the starting gate, races around the track, crosses the finish line sweaty and huffing. She’s in a pack but all alone. She has only one goal: win the race and receive applause. Racehorses are hard to control and do one thing well – run. That’s the plan.

The BMW Driver – She sits calmly behind the wheel whether going 5 mph or 100. She may be alone or with family and friends. She might be listening to music, talking on her headset, but she’s calm, present and focused whatever speed she’s going. She knows where she’s going and she knows what’s important. She has a plan.

Purpose and the Use of Time

Every one of us has these three speeds. What separates them is purpose and how they use time. The BMW Driver organizes her time by what she values. She has the key to letting speed work for her.

What do you value more than anything? Are you driven by what other people think of you? Then jump on your racehorse now! The applause is waiting. Except when it’s not.

Perhaps you value peace of mind. Why? Because it allows you to be more loving, more present for friends and family. It opens the door to creatively thinking. It helps you plan instead of react.

Case Study

Nicole had some health problems that set her back for a few years. She felt guilty that she couldn’t be the kind of mother and wife her family needed. As she recovered, she was tempted to be super mom, mount her racehorse and try to win the holiday race. Instead, we talked about how to access her BMW Driver.

She found her #1 Value: a feeling of connection she hoped would be a fond holiday memory rather than expensive gifts of the past. She realized all the things could be discarded, but love and laughter would last in her family’s hearts forever.

Based on her #1 Value, Nicole made some simple rules for herself:

• Plan her day by her values first, not what the list demanded.
• Multitask only if it helped her feel more productive AND more present. She knew trying to carve herself up often led to clutter, chaos and confusion.
• Spend money only if it contributed to a sense of connection with loved ones and would not create debt stress
• Let go, delegate or outsource projects that kept her from living her #1 Value: to create a sense of connection with others
• To climb into her BMW mind, she practiced some easy tools
• Micro Smile. She’d let a tiny smile come to her lips and noticed a wave of wellbeing flow into her body.
• Breathe. She did the 7-11 breath, 7 seconds in, 11 seconds out and pause.
• She made a SoulCollage® card for her family and placed it remind her of her #1 Value
• Used a special light for her SAD (seasonal affective disorder)

Your Recipe for the Holidays

Perhaps you want to avoid Mt. Stress this year. To create a memorable, enjoyable holiday, make use of your Value Compass. Let it chart your course as you sit behind the driver’s wheel. Let speed work for you.

The post Want to Reduce Holiday Stress? appeared first on Oregon Somatic Therapy.