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If you have a few minutes, it is well worth deepening your awareness of healthy sensations. The more you can turn on your curiosity and explore the "where" (in 3 dimensions) and the "what" of healthy sensations to get more and more detail, the deeper this "message" goes into the corners and depths of the primitive brain, and the more positive effect it has on your health.
You have to maintain this curiosity for at least 40 seconds to make sure that it reaches deep enough. Then remain aware of and follow the response for another couple of minutes. The whole point of the exercises I describe here is that we are deepening the communication between your conscious mind and the primitive parts of your brain that run your physiology.
It is that high quality communication that does the work. So this is NOT about changing anything by force – rather, we provide new information and your body decides how it is going to use that information.
Emotions are also physical sensations – they are not just thoughts. So appreciation is a "positive" emotion, just as curiosity is a positive mental state. When we feel appreciation or become genuinely curious about the world, then the message that is detected by our primitive brain - is that we are safe.
Emotions are supposed to move freely through our body and awareness, and then go, once their message has been "heard". This is how a baby or a child or an animal will handle emotions – they feel them 100%, and then the emotion (like all other sensations in the body) eventually changes. Emotions are also sensations. Every emotion has a very specific set of sensations that occur in very specific parts of the body... always it is several parts of the body, and always there is quite a complex set of changes in sensation.
So emotions may be experienced as a mental-emotional reaction, in which case we are usually taken over by the emotion, and we are 100% caught up in the meaning that the emotion conveys to us. It is also possible to perceive emotion as a set of sensations – in which case it is far easier to not be taken over by the emotion, and also it is much easier to carry out a reality check to test whether the emotion is in proportion to what is happening. Obviously this is very complex when we are in a social interaction – but if we are alone, the situation is far simpler, and it is easier to unpick the emotion by observing its somatic detail. Then we have a choice of whether to react or not to the emotion. And we also have a choice as to whether to pay it attention.
If (e.g.) anxiety is being felt, then forget the mental storyline, and experience what it feels like in your body. Smile at it. Welcome it. Acknowledge it, and notice if it is a real and proportionate response to what is happening around you. If it is – then the anxiety was there for a purpose – to bring your attention to danger. If it is not proportionate to your surroundings, then what you are feeling is a memory, in which case, just ask "what else is there? ... where in my body am I NOT feeling this?"
You will find that there are parts of your body that are not anxious at all. In this way, it is possible to manage emotions, so that the body and deeper parts of the brain are not receiving a message that you are in immediate danger of death. Safety is always relative, and as long a we are relatively safe, then life can go on. If we let our primitive survival alarms know that we are safe enough, then they will become calm, and well calibrated to reality.
If for some unfortunate reason you end up in pain through an injury or illness – if you apply the above rules, then the pain will not escalate into central sensitisation. And it is far more likely that (as a result of applying those rules) your body will be more able to heal itself
Your breath can be a useful way to help find sensory and physiological stability and a general awareness of safety. If you are already quite well emotionally resourced, and feel generally safe, then it is possible to use the breath. If there is anxiety, then the breath tends to become short and the lungs tend to only inhale and exhale at the top or bottom. Then an increasing reservoir of carbon dioxide builds up - which then creates a state of physiological anxiety! This is yet another feedback loop in the body.
So using the breath : first, focus on achieving a very deep exhalation and let your body breathe itself on the inhalation. Repeating this several times, and then after about 10 breaths "helping" the inhalation to be full for about 3 breaths will help to clear stagnant carbon dioxide, and replenish the lungs with oxygen. This can produce a sense of energised calmness. The effect can be increased if you follow this clearing-out with a couple of minutes of 10 second breath cycles. i.e. 10 seconds = 4 seconds out, 1 second pause, 4 seconds in, 1 second pause.
Do NOT attempt to use the breath if you are feeling very anxious, or if your breathing is permanently restricted to the top of the lungs. If you are not sure about either of these, better not to bother counting the breath at all. But it is still always useful to exhale long and deeply to clear out any stagnant air.
Contrary to the messages from our medicalised, pathology-aware culture, most sensations arising in the body are healthy. If there were more conversations about the normality of body sensations, there would be less illness(!)
The muscles[1] of body sometimes shake uncontrollably after a high-adrenaline event. This shaking is normal, and is a sign that the body is returning to normal metabolism - the shaking being a way to burn off excess adrenaline. This shaking is not in itself an emotional discharge, but a transition when the body has already recognised that the event has come to an end. It may sometimes also be accompanied by emotions that relate to the high-adrenaline event. In which case if you can just observe them they will come and go and be permanently erased. If the emotional release starts to take over, then the shaking discharge will also probably come to an end, and to release them (and complete the adrenaline burnoff) you will need to titrate the emotions.
An extraordinary range of unusual to slightly weird sensations are signs that the body is healing itself. If you trust your body and been curious about it for some time you will probably have collected a "vocabulary" of sensations and easily know what is happening.
Any of the following sensations that begin unexpectedly and then pass after a few minutes and do not keep returning are likely to accompany self-healing events : Pulsing, deep thumping, vibration, trembling, rippling, slow waves passing through the body from feet to head or head to feet, extreme tingling, temperature changes, auto-motion (the body moves limbs itself), feelings of becoming like a ball of fluid, short sharp bursts of pain (that last for just a second and do not return), feeling a different size (smaller, larger) or a different age, feeling as if part of the body is in a different place from the one you "know" it is in (such as feeling as if one side of the body is higher), feelings of part of the body being absent. I've probably forgotten a few others.
There are many different degrees of dissociation, trauma/PTSD and fragmentation (all of these being more or less similar in behaviour and origin) - it is a spectrum, which (to use the analogy of a bout of flu) can be anything from a dribbly nose up to full blown influenza and pleurisy, whith most people being on the dribbly end of the spectrum.
For relatively small and non-complex stuff (such as being hit by a bus), almost any technique will work. The more complex and entrenched it gets, the less effective are "interventionist&q, heroic, fix-it approaches (and attitudes), and the more likely they are to cause abreactions - i.e. returns of overwhelm. I had many years of abreactions before I realised this little nugget. I personally characterise them by "that must have been a good treatment because I feel like I've been run over by a bus" - time and time again. Alongside the fact that there was clearly no progress being made.
The techniques described here have been gleaned from firstpphase (stabilisation) techniques used in state-of-the-art treatments for extreme trauma, and so tend not to produce abreactions. And if applied with precision also work extremely easily and quickly and painlessly for almost all lower-level cases.
Past a certain level of fragmentation, self-help will not work because the correct kind of external support (probably someone with professional traiing and experience) is needed to supplement the technique. Past another level, further stabilisation techniques PLUS support are needed before anything further is possible by specialist trauma therapists. However, the vasy majority of people reading this will not be anywhere near those levels, and will gain many benefits from giving it a go!
The number #1 rule in everything being presented here is that overwhelm is NOT a useful state to enter. Once overwhelm floods, then it takes over - often without this being even recognised, because it is an absence. So form that point of view, memories (and the story of what happened) are not centre-stage, because they bring with them the memory of overehelm, and therefore bring overwhelm - and therefore nothing useful happens (other than maybe re-telling the story).
Furthermore, we are working with the body and the body-mind, not the cognitive mind. Your cognitive self lives with stories - stories define who we are. But the body-mind does not - it just holds metabolic adaptations and (somatic) memories of movements that were made and that could have been made, and emotions. So provided the emotions are titrated to a manageable level, the body-mind is perfectly capable of re-organising itself around safety, and in doing so it discharges the emotions around memories with usually no need to re-live the event. There is no need for primal screaming if we work with the body. Some memories help us to make sense of our lives, but that aspect is well beyond the scope of this self-help manual.
Many people mistake the instructions to say "what else is there...?&q as avoidance or distraction. This is neither distraction nor avoidance. I am not against distraction - because it is also a useful tool in managing pain. In distraction we attempt to avoid something that we do not like. This can create dissociation if the avoidance is done in any forceful or fearful way.
So the three-zone filtering process described is a very gentle decision that "Yes – I am aware of that, I fully and compassionately acknowledge it, and – for now - I simply choose to curiously place my attention elsewhere".
If any level of force is used in this decision, or there is a fear or dislike of what has been sensed, then a polarity is set up in the body-mind, and this polarity tends to lock the dissociation in – rather than releasing it. Since the primitive brain is very "forgiving", it is perfectly OK to distract or wilfully or even forcefully place your attention elsewhere, or deliberately (temporarily) increase numbness because that is more comfortable. This is always a useful pain management technique. However, distraction is a temporary fix-it that has no long-term effect. So there is a place for it in just getting by from one moment to the next in the day - for sure that is a useful addition to the tool bag, as is any technique that can temporarily improve internal states. But the question I am most interested in is - what will create permament improvements to internal state?
Also see the Reframes.
References & Notes
