Scientists have made a fascinating discovery about the way animals in the wild let go of fear and stress.

Because they are able to release it and move on, they are free of PTSD like symptoms. Without this ability in the wild, they would wander around shut down, uptight or confused . . . and they would not survive long. Wild animals release their trauma. Humans think about their trauma and recycle it, never realizing their body has a secret weapon to let it go.

Non-human animals lack higher brain functions that humans utilize to explain reality. We ask why. We make up theories. We think “if only” or “what if” and the painful memories take up residence in our bodies. Our language, thoughts and feelings are like the “save” function on a word processing program.

Unlike humans, wild animals find a safe place, experience the trauma from start to finish and their nervous system discharges the fright. And this is what scientists like Peter Levine, founder of Somatic Experiencing, have discovered: when a trauma is contained and experienced start to finish, the nervous system discharges the memory, like erasing an Etch a Sketch.

The Body Is Like a Photo Plate

You may know someone who has had a car accident, experienced fright as a child, or has had a scary medical procedure. These traumatic events are embedded in the body like image on a photo plate. And each time we think about fearful experience, we anchor it more deeply in our bodies and nervous systems. With severe trauma, flashbacks, nightmares, and intrusive memories take over and we feel them in our bodies as if we were re-living it physically. These re-enactments take up enormous amounts of energy, and we use a lot of energy avoiding people, places and things to detour around these triggers.

The compulsion to repeat.

When trauma has been blocked from conscious awareness, we may find ourselves in similar situations over and over again as we attempt to work through painful experiences. We may think of ourselves as unlucky in love, or accident prone or start to feel defeated because we can’t break the pattern of challenging behaviors. Or we may use alcohol, drugs, over work, over eating to try to calm the pressure cooker of anxiety inside us.

So how do we get free?

For Peter Levine the answer is not just talking or thinking about painful memories. This can sometimes deepen the trauma. Our memories are shaped and reshaped by thoughts and experiences. They may not be an accurate record of past events. Our thoughts especially, may be an interpretation of what happened as a way to try and explain and distance ourselves.

Unfortunately talking does not change the “photo plate” of our nervous systems. To discharge these body memories, understanding how the nervous system works will can help us “complete” rather than block or try to get fid of the emotions arising for accumulated stress. Your symptoms will be a combination of either the alarm response or or freeze, to dampen feelings of overwhelm.

Alarm: When we are stressed, the fight or flight part of our sympathetic nervous system turns on and we feel:

• Hot, tense, tight jaw, twitches, itchy, sweaty, rapid heartbeat, shallow breath
• Heightened sense of alertness, like something bad is going to happen and our muscles are gearing up to respond
• Emotions such as excitement, fear, anxiety, annoyance or anger

Freeze: When stress overwhelms us, we may feel stuck. Some people refer to this slowing and shutting down as depression. Like an animal in the teeth of the lion, struggling but about to die, the parasympathetic nervous system turns on and we notice the symptoms of shut down:

• Cold, sleepy suddenly, slower heart rate, nausea, heavy limbs as if gravity increased
• Tunnel vision, difficulty seeing,
• Feeling depressed, blank, numb, detached or dissociated. In the initial stages of freeze, the mind may be very active and you may experience anxiety but feel somewhat paralyzed.

So armed with this knowledge you can take your foot off the brakes and learn to set the conditions so your body can release these patterns. Then the mind can follow. Our bodies store the problem. And they also hold the solution. We can use our minds to access the solution rather than playing an endless loop in the projector of our minds.

Things to do

• Find a calm and grounded place where you will have no interruptions, sit comfortably, and start to simply observe what is happening inside. Common experiences may be some of all of these: pressured thoughts, tight or braced feelings, numbness, no awareness of having a body, pressure or heaviness in the upper chest, difficulty breathing.
• Be curious about what you notice and especially curious to see what happens next.
• Bookmark your thoughts. Take your attention to what is arising in the body.
• Notice how the bottoms of your feet feel. If you don’t notice anything, press your foot against the floor a little until you notice your leg muscle engage. And be curious to notice what happens next.
• Notice your connection to the earth, either through your feet, your hands or your sitz bones.
• If you have pet notice how your pets breaths . . . many pets breath very deeply and rhythmically into their belly’s. Try to match the breathing.
• Instead of thinking, use your thinking to remember activities that leave you feeling safe, happy or/and relaxed. Remember places where you feel grounded, favorite memories, people who make your body smile or relax.
• Feel deeply into your present experience, describe and track what happens as you simply observe your body without trying to fix or change it.
• Notice thought and emotions as they simply flow through your awareness like clouds in the sky. Just observe.

Play with the Power of Observation

When you can comfortably do some of these things, invite a stressful thought come to mind. Start with something very easy. Use the tools above to witness and observe, being curious to notice if the stress increases, decreases, stays the same, or changes to something else. Toggle back and forth from the stressful image to a pleasant memory or image.

It may take a few minutes with something simple. And it could last for a much longer period of time for a complex intense memory. Notice the feeling of spaciousness in your body as the nervous system discharges the pattern. Place your hand on the skin of your upper chest and notice a subtle flow of well being come into your body.

Suffering can be transformed and healed and we all have the means to do it ourselves. For low level stress, this simple method can that the edge off stress, and let your body move toward more aliveness and rhythmicity and help you feel more Ease.

Resources

Focusing, Eugene Gendlin
Healing Trauma, Peter Levine
Trauma Through the Child’s Eyes, Peter Levine & Maggie Kline

The post Healing Trauma: Wild Animals Know the Secret appeared first on Oregon Somatic Therapy.

Are you reading Facebook posts and feeling angry or discouraged?

Perhaps you feel like  unplugging completely from the current events?

When alarming headlines are only a notification away, it’s easy to feel like the world is falling apart in front of you. Getting deeply invested in negative news can tax your mental health and lead to anxiety and depression, which is why understanding its impacts on your psychological health is so important.

The Impacts of Anxiety on Your Mental Health

Following the news can be depressing or agitating. What’s equally important is acknowledging the impact these negative stories have on your daily life.

According to many psychologists, overexposure to gloomy stories can significantly alter your mood and neural chemistry, making you more likely to develop stress, mental fatigue, depression, and even a sense that your personal life is spinning out of control.

If you have any history of Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) you may have an exaggerated reaction.  A 2001 study found that some people who simply watched news coverage on 9/11 had PTSD-like symptoms emerge.

What can you do?

1. Watch the News with Intention, Observe your reactions, Stay Connected to That Still Calm Center Inside.

Notice the difference between pain and suffering.   We can’t avoid pain.   When we fight painful events, or in this case disturbing news, we suffer.   It is natural to feel like fighting against the facts: “This should not have happened,” our suffering minds cry out.

As Byron Katie says “When you argue with reality, you lose, but only 100% of the time.”

Seeing the facts, seeing “what is” does not mean we condone things.   It somehow feels like outrage or suffering over “what is” offers some measure of resistance. When we watch disturbing news, we may want to fight or feel anxious or go numb with helplessness.  We may tell ourselves the world is a terrible place, and forecast catastrophe.  In this state, we become victims of the news.

When you feel that way, take a moment to look around.

• Notice “what is,” right where you are. Name some of the things you see.
• Ask yourself, “Am I safe right now?” There are only 2 possible answers: yes or no.  You may not feel   But notice the difference between feeling and “what is” right now.
• Maybe look around again and see the things around you that signal that you are safe, in this moment.
• Then notice how your body responds when you slip back into this present moment. You might find a little breath comes in and you settle a bit.

It takes a little extra intention to see “what is.” Wait for a moment.  Notice your internal reactions and let them settle a bit.  Then decide how to respond.  Once we make this decision, we may discover meaningful actions or responses that had not occurred to us in the flood of emotion.

The Positive News Network has many examples of people who faced painful realities and events.  Then after the grief and sadness and rage, found ways to make meaningful changes.

“I love what I think, and I’m never tempted to believe it.”   Byron Katie

2. Find Ways to Detach

Take charge of your emotional well-being by knowing when to distance yourself. Turn off the TV.   Power down your cell phone.   Spend time with your family or pets.   Read books, sleep, meditate, feel your feet on the ground.  Or better yet, take a short stroll, and experience the natural world.  Look around you.   Breathe in a little fresh air.  And notice how your body responds.

3. Set Boundaries with your Technology!

Take control over your social media newsfeeds. Negative news is more readily shared than good news, so you’re likely to see more of it. When you have a very strong emotional reaction, that’s a signal to do a fact check.  Sensationalism sells.  Practice resistance by find the facts.  Don’t be afraid to cut off internet contact with people or organizations that are adding to your stress levels.  Check out the Positive News Network to find out how ordinary people are making meaningful changes.

Want Help? Contact Counseling Services of Portland

If negative news is triggering anxiety or depression that you can’t seem to pull out of, give us a call.   We will help you make sense out of your concerns for the world today, and help you find ease and meaningful responses so you are not a victim of the news.

Why suffer needlessly? Give us a call, text or email us.  We love what we do and you may be surprised to find that you may not just feel better, but you might get better.

The post How to Support Your Wellbeing in the Face of Negative News Cycles appeared first on Oregon Somatic Therapy.

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.

“When kids start skipping things it might look to their teachers and peers like they are uninterested or underachieving, but the opposite might be true.” – Rachel Ehmke

Children count on adults to help them understand the spectrum of intense emotions they experience throughout their childhood and adolescence. They rely on their parents’ wisdom and emotional skills to assist them in developing their ability to define, express, process, and learn. As parents do their best to nurture children into thriving young adults, they might misinterpret troubling behaviors and difficulties in the classroom without recognizing acute childhood anxiety as the source.

As first described by Harvard physiologist Walter Bradford Cannon in the 1920s, activation of the sympathetic nervous system occurs in response to perceived threat. This acute stress response, also known as the “fight-or-flight” response, is the brain flipping the body’s survival switch, bypassing higher cognitive function and transferring all available resources toward the goal of staying alive.

Once this process is triggered, the mind interprets the environment through a lens of fear. A child’s classroom becomes a physically, mentally, or emotionally dangerous place from which they must escape.

The fight-or-flight response can lead to patterns of withdrawal, avoidance, or aggression.  In some cases the child’s nervous system will try to manage stress by going into the freeze state.  Your child or teen may appear to be listless, tired and sad, when in fact the nervous systems is trying to turn down the emotional thermostat and relieve the anxiety.

However, not all children and adolescents experiencing anxiety in their learning environment exhibit the same behaviors, and sometimes parents misinterpret these as the symptoms of other conditions. If your child’s performance in school is declining, the Child Mind Institute points to several indicators that chronic anxiety might be the cause:

• Trouble paying attention and focusing, restlessness and fidgeting.
• Poor attendance or frequently late to school and classes.
• Aggressiveness towards teachers or other students and being disruptive.
• Performing tasks well when alone or with you, but freezing up or going blank when called on in class.
• Difficulty completing homework.
• Avoiding group activities and assignments.

“Anxious students may be trying desperately hard just to keep up and this could be at great psychological cost” -Professor Michael Eysenck

If your child is struggling with chronic anxiety in school, they are burning an exponential amount of energy just trying to maintain. This daily experience can leave them feeling depleted, depressed, alone, and insecure. Left unaddressed, the chemistry of chronic anxiety can cause long-term physiological changes to their brain as well as negatively impact their developing sense of self.

As discovered by Stanford University School of Medicine researchers, the brain responds to persistent stress in childhood with overdevelopment of the amygdala, the brain’s emotion regulator. The increased number of associated synaptic connections can lead to the development of anxiety, depression, and PTSD in adulthood, and greater susceptibility to substance abuse. Prolonged stress can occur without further emotional complications, but if additional issues do arise, they often become lifelong struggles.

If a child is experiencing educational setbacks due to continual school-related anxiety, it is imperative they understand it’s because of a chemical response to fear rather than an intellectual deficit.

School-age years are critical, as this is when children are forming fundamental beliefs about themselves. Emotional intelligence is more than a psychiatric buzzword; it is a means by which children can learn to distinguish their emotions from their identities.

When faced with a physiological response to stress that undermines their efforts to succeed, children may interpret learning difficulties as the limit of their abilities. If a child is experiencing educational setbacks due to continual school-related anxiety, it is imperative they understand it’s because of a physiological response to fear rather than an intellectual deficit.

Acute stress is an innate response that’s appropriate in extreme circumstances, but the higher cognitive functioning it blocks is what a child needs to survive in their learning environment.

When parents, counselors, and mentors help a child discover what school-related triggers are flipping their anxiety switch, the fight-or-flight cycle is demystified – empowering children and adolescents to overcome their classroom fears and thrive.  In some cases, bullying might be the source of this anxiety, and many children endure this is silence

If your child or teenager shows signs of anxiety or unrelenting stress, we can help.  We have therapist in both our Tigard office and our east side Cherry Blossom office who can see your child immediately.  Why wait?  We take most insurance plans to make it affordable and we love seeing kids recovery from emotional challenges and thrive.

Give us a call at 503-342-2510, or email us.  We can help.

Here are more articles you might be interested in:

• http://www.counseling-portlandoregon.com/bullying-is-wrong/
• http://www.counseling-portlandoregon.com/children-and-teens-therapy/signs-of-bulling/

The post Childhood Anxiety and its Cost to Your Child’s Learning and Development appeared first on Oregon Somatic Therapy.

And the animal that is our body makes use of these intelligences without our even knowing it.

Using SoulCollage® with your Animal Guides can give you direct access to these 7 intutive intelligences.

Read more about these intelligences below.

When pure light shines through a prism, it divides the light into different colors.  The chakra system in the body acts like a prism for the Soul.  Our earthly life schools us in the lessons of the seven major chakras.

Chakras function in two ways:

• Like a CD Rom with information on how to run the body and work in time and space
• As an operating system, or state in which the Soul operates the body in space and time.This state indicates the Soul’s evolution

Each chakra creates an intimate interface between the spiritual and physical world. The chakras describe the journey of the Soul from the physical levels of existence to the cosmic, first to seventh chakra.  The issues or problems we wrestle with in every day life, point to the chakra where we are practicing and growing.  Knowing this can help us understand and appreciate the challenges in our lives as well as our strengths.

Everyone uses all the chakras throughout any given day.  But we may generally be operating from one main chakra that will color our overall journey.

For example, a client came in asking about all the relationships in his life: his wife, people at work, even his animals.  His focus and growth was taking place in the realm of the second chakra – relationships, though he certainly used all the other spiritual intelligences but fore the purpose of relating.

Another client focused on developing her accounting business.  She was on fire using her creativity and third chakra skills to test her skills as an entrepreneur…  She used her vision, empathy, her emotional intelligence for example, but through the lens of learning about the use of power.

A young woman come in with sever anxiety and depression and in working with her animal guides, found out that her creative ability and peace of mind was tied up with a fight for her survival.  She found an image of a cheetah that helped her reclaim her power, and outsmart the anxiety and depression.

Each chakra has a lesson, which must be completed before we can pass through its gateway.  When we complete the spiritual and physical lessons of each chakra, like a butterfly, we emerge into a new state of being, a new focus of attention.

This way of looking at the chakras differs from other models in that it shows how the soul develops and learns by evolving through the lesson of each chakra.  The Soul requires this journey through the physical world to evolve.   We learn because of our earthly life, not in spite of it.  Each lesson builds a foundation and contributes the skills learned for the moving on to the next cycle.  As Jesus described it, we create “on earth as it is in heaven.”

The post Your 7 Intuitive Intelligences 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.

But fight/flight reactions are also roused from energies stored in the nervous system, frozen in time, from past accumulated stress or trauma.

It can look like repeated thunderstorms of irritation, when there are few clouds on the horizon. The nervous system defaults to anger with little external provocation as it attempts to replay unresolved ordeals in order to finally complete them, and feel safe again, as animals do in the wild.

With accumulated stress however, the cues come from the inside us even though the mind finds convincing evidence that others are to blame. Bullying is a good example of this type of projection.

You may have experienced this type of disconnected anger when highly charged words erupt like a volcano. Something triggered a little storm-ball of energy inside waiting patiently to fight against an unseen, even un-remembered danger.

It can feel like you are fighting an invisible enemy.

Fight or flight physiology includes the reactions listed below. They show up whether you are escaping from a grizzly bear or sitting in a tense business meeting. If you lived this way, it is easy to see how this could make daily life a little challenging:

• Blood pressure and heart rate increase, blood sugars and fats dump into the blood stream to supply quick energy.
• Increased muscle tension provides extra strength and speed
• Cool, pale skin: Blood flow to the surface of the body reroutes to your arms, legs, brain, eyes and ears to aid self-protection. Less blood flow at the skin reduces bleeding.
• Sweating: Prevents over-heating due to the increased activation in muscles and cells.
• Dilated pupils: let more light in and improve sight.
• Digestion slows down or stops to re-route energy for self defense
• Dry mouth: saliva and stomach activity decrease as blood flow reroutes to arms, legs and brain
• Blood clotting factors increase to staunch bleeding in the event of an injury
• Vision narrows to eliminate unneeded information to sharpen focus on the tiger’s actions, or on an escape route. Also known as tunnel vision.
• Some species of cold-blooded animals change color swiftly, to camouflage themselves when in the fight/flight state

Though we may be having a heated conversation with a spouse, sitting in a tense business meeting or stuck in heavy traffic, these reflexes kick in. There’s no tiger in the room, but our nervous system acts as if there might as well be.

The fight/flight system was designed to create a burst of energy, like a thunderclap. A cheetah chases a wildebeest in a supercharged 45-second high-speed chase. But in modern life, the fight/flight system can flare up for long periods of time during family stress, constant work deadlines, or pressures of school.

When we are unable to protect ourselves, the tremendous energy generated by our nervous system stays fixed in neuro-muscular patterns. The thunder never discharges. Its stored power super charges muscles; pumping them up so they are ready to protect us. You may have seen people walking around as if they are ready to punch someone or have an intense startle response that erupts when surprised by a loud noise.

When hyper arousal lasts for hours or even years it, can harm the body and accelerate physical disease. The steady presence of stress hormones can lead to irritable bowel, panic attacks, even inflammatory disease like arthritis. Many people suffer with racing hearts, muscle tension, headaches or upset stomachs. We can also feel challenging emotions like anxiety, depression, hopelessness, frustration, fear or anger. It’s difficult to concentrate on school or work responsibilities.

Without knowing it, we live in a culture where this chronically stressful state seems normal.

Women and men’s bodies respond to stress or danger differently. Men respond with a fight response, while women’s bodies default to a flight response, turn toward others for help, or attempt to defuse the situation with the “tend and befriend” response.

A temporary fight or flight response can sharpen our cognitive ability, helping us be decisive and action oriented. But it can also make us over-reactive and touchy when it’s dialed up.

As stressors continue to warp the nervous system, the chronic fight/flight pattern of sympathetic activation takes root. We start to perceive everything as dangerous: neighbors become enemies, co-workers become threats, the driver in the car ahead of us is an idiot, the “other” political party is evil.

Even family members can turn on each other when people are in perpetual hyper alertness. The raised eyebrow, the innuendo in an email, two people talking, even the weather can be a sign that catastrophe awaits us. Our distorted thinking can make us feel like airport security personnel profiling everyone for danger.

Life can begin to feel like a series of obstacles to overcome. Even relaxation can feel risky. Burnout looms, consequences stop us in our tracks, but lucky these warning signs provide the motivation to step back and re-evaluate our priorities.

Becoming aware of the physiology of anger and the fight/flight state can lay the foundation for profound healing.

The Woman Who Made Friends with Her Thunder.

A woman came in for help after being written up on the job for one too many angry outbursts at work. She was smart, caring, and hard working. Her vision for the department energized her.

She would become disappointed and irritable with co-workers who did not share her passion and her temper would flare. She promised herself she would control her temper, but she only became stiff and tense, as she lost her confidence.

We started working together inventorying the situations that triggered her outbursts. Starting with the smallest trigger with the mildest reaction, she tracked what was happening inside with her body.

She gradually learned that she could identify a slight tension in the back of her neck long before the anger showed up. While in the office with me, she observed with compassionate curiosity as that impulse kindled, increased in intensity like a wave rising up in anger inside her, and then receded. She was left with a small but perceptible feeling of lightness in her chest.

As she worked with more challenging triggers each visit, she developed a sense of mastery and confidence. The defensiveness dissolved as she learned to observe the body’s message that something was wrong without reacting, screaming, or punishing or even throwing things.

She started to observe her breath rather than telling her body how to breathe. She inquired about what kind of breath would give her pleasure and let the body “breathe her.” As anger loosened its grip, she noticed that her body would gradually take deeper breaths. She would yawn; her stomach would start to gurgle as the “rest and digest” part of her nervous system turned back on.

She would naturally look around, just like animals in the wild do when they have safely escaped, processed the experience and go back to living as if nothing had happened.

She found her thinking slowed down, she got more done and even started sleeping more restfully. People started chatting with her again.

She made friends with her anger. Listened to its message and patiently witnessed its rhythms and was rewarded with more energy and clarity.

The Good News: It’s Biology not Psychology

The good news is that these fight/flight states are the result of biology. They are genetically hard wired to help us survive in a dangerous world. Now most of the dangers we face are stress based, emotional dilemmas which trigger this innate survival programming. But we can’t run for our lives, or strike down the hyena. We have to sit and be good, control ourselves and act like nothing is happening.

We can use that same biology to release these patterns, naturally and without drugs just as the client did to reclaim her power and efficacy.

Our Organic Intelligence is designed to return us to a state of relaxed readiness, where empathy connects us to each other and our world.

With a balanced, resilient nervous system, we can enjoy the flash and drama of a good thunder storm too!

If you’d like some effective support with anger patterns, give us a call. We know how to help and we enjoy helping women and men heal and reclaim their healthy thunder.

To book an appointment

Call us at 503-342-2510 or “Text us” at 503-342-2510 or email us

The post Anger, Thunder, and Healing: Making Friends with Anger 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.