Feelings/Emotions

Honour The One You Lost By What You Do

Every so often I write a blog based on a real client. When I do this it is either at their request or with their permission. I always change details to protect the person’s privacy.

This blog is from a mother who wanted to share her story because she wants to help others who lose a child. In this blog she is called Mary.

Mary’s Story

Mary had a son, Brad. He was an amazing boy. He loved telling funny stories at the dinner table and would have the entire family laughing at his stories. He was happy and sunny and people loved him.

He always wanted to be a chef and managed to complete his studies, getting a full time job in a busy restaurant.

Brad’s Difficult Life

Life was not easy for Brad. He struggled with old injuries that caused pain when he was standing in the kitchen working. He became addicted to heroin, it eased his pain and helped him cope with work in the kitchen.

Over time the heroin became such a large part of his life that it impacted on his work. He went to rehab, was doing well, then relapsed and exited the program. After some time he again tried rehab. Sadly that too failed.

The Day Brad Died

The day he died he was living with his mother and was out in the garden planning to work on an area of the garden.

He went inside to get ready and apparently decided to take a dose of heroin before starting.

His mother found him in the bathroom. An additive in the heroin had killed him.

Losing your child is hard and losing them in this way is even harder.

Being Plunged Into Darkness And Numbness

Mary has been forever tortured by the vision of her son lying on the bathroom floor, dead.

Brad’s death plunged Mary into a deep darkness. She felt she was dying too.

She went through the numbness and difficulty comprehending his death as real.

She had days where she cried and cried, and days when she didn’t get out of bed.

She felt terribly guilty and was full of what ifs. What if I had gone inside sooner? What if I had realised he was still using and sent him back to rehab? What did I do to lead to his addiction (as if it was her fault!)?

She felt lost in the darkness.

I Need Help

Then came a day she realised she needed to do something. She came to see me. Together we picked up the pieces of her shattered life.

In time Mary found a purpose in her new “Brad is dead” life. She realised she would never overcome her grief. She would just learn how to live with it.

How Mary Formed Her New Life

As part of her new life she took the following actions:

• She decided that every year on the anniversary of his death she would visit the location where his ashes were released.

• She also planted a garden in her backyard in honour of Brad. It followed the design he had suggested for the garden he was working on the day he died. Each year on his birthday she adds something to the garden. Lovely bamboo wind chimes, a small statue, a pond and so on.

• She also decided to support the rehab unit he had attended and has instituted measures to fund-raise for the unit.

• As Brad had spent some time homeless during the years of his addiction, Mary also works with a homeless charity, handing out packs of toiletries and food items.

• She also joined a charity that supports the families bereaved by drug addiction

Mary’s Summation

At her final session Mary told me that she still cries on occasion. But these days the tears are what she calls good tears.

Mary showed me a clip on YouTube by actor Billy Bob Thornton who lost his younger brother when he was young. His brother died suddenly from an undiagnosed heart problem.

Years later Billy Bob Thornton says his life is 50% happy and 50% sad. He is okay with that because the melancholy is his way of honouring his brother, so he doesn’t forget him.
Billy Bob Thornton doesn’t trust happiness anymore but he is okay with that. He states in the clip that it is important to embrace that you never get over the death of a loved one. He sees the only alternative is to forget his brother and he doesn’t want to do that. He feels it is important to honour the one you lost by what you do. Be it work, sponsoring, walking, fund raising, raising a family, or writing a song. Let the rest of your life honour the one you lost.

Mary thought that was a wonderful summary of what she had discovered.

Can I Help?

If you would like to talk to me about how I can help you with your grief, please contact me on 0409396608 or nan@plentifullifecounselling.com.au

If you would like to learn more, I write a regular newsletter with helpful information, tips, information on courses, and the occasional freebie. At the moment I have a free mindfulness meditation for anyone who signs up to my newsletter. This meditation offers a way to safely explore your feelings and learn to be okay with them. If you would like to subscribe please click on the link here: http://eepurl.com/g8Jpiz

Grief Is A Change You Didn’t Want

Heartbreak is there in grief.

This is because when a person you love dies you are heartbroken.

When a person you love leaves you and rejects you and continues to reject you, then you are heartbroken.

Which pain is worse?

The worst pain is the pain you are experiencing.

Heartbreak

Heartbreak is always present in grief. It is heartbreak at the loss of the future with that person, whether they are alive or dead. Now you must face a future you did not plan and may not even like.

Heartbreak can occur through other life events. Losing a job, not getting the job you really wanted, not getting into the university course you wanted, not getting the marks in an exam you wanted, losing out on the house you wanted to buy, losing the house you can no longer afford to pay the loan on, your car being stolen, your house broken into, the end of a relationship, losing your pet, losing your country.

The really important thing to remember is your pain is always worse for you. There is no comparison. Just because someone else is hurting, it doesn’t mean their pain is worse. Comparisons just can’t be made when it comes to grief.

Heartbreak is not logical

It is always important to remember that the act of making a comparison is one that uses your mind. But when you are heartbroken and suffering grief, those are emotions you are feeling. They are not logical, they are not of the mind. They are the emotions of heartbreak.

Be careful, because grief that isn’t attended to doesn’t just go away. It stays there, unattended, and trips you up when something reminds you of it.

Questions to ask yourself

Ask yourself the question. What heartbreak, what grief, what disappointments in your life have you not attended to?

Once you have the answer ask yourself. Why don’t you attend to it?

The answer is most likely that it is difficult, painful even, to confront that pain.

It is so easy to run from pain. Pain hurts.

The realness of emotional pain

Did you know that physical pain and emotional pain are registered in the same part of the brain?

All these years people’s emotional pain has been dismissed as being nothing, yet it is as painful as physical pain.

The metaphor of the Buffalo

Grief expert David Kessler uses the metaphor of a buffalo turning to face a storm and walk into it. The buffalo knows it will get through the storm faster if it does this. But humans try to stay away from the storm. They try to keep a metre or so away. This way they remain in the storm a long time.

Instead of facing the storm, humans stay close to it and try to numb themselves, try to move away, but not far away, or try to avoid any triggering memories. Humans may even run away.

Substituting One Emotion For Another

One way of avoiding the storm is to go to another emotion that feels more comfortable.

What emotions might that be?

The most common one to go after is anger.

If you explore what is under your anger you will often find it is sadness, grief or fear.

There is a very real fear that once you give in to the pain of grief you will never be able to stop crying.

But you will stop crying in time.

Self Compassion Is The Best Treatment

When you allow yourself to enter the storm and feel your emotions deeply. When you allow yourself to engage with the emotions, then you are caring for yourself. You are showing up for yourself. Allowing yourself to feel these emotions is the way you can be there for you. It is an opportunity to show self compassion.

Self compassion only works if you pay attention to your emotions.

To show self compassion you have to be able to accept that this horrible thing happened. You have to be allowed to feel sorry for yourself, for the pain you are experiencing and have experienced.

Our society tells us it is wrong to feel sorry for yourself. But that is wrong. It is not wrong to feel sorry for yourself. It is not wrong to feel for what you have been through. To acknowledge that what you have been through was horrible.

When others try to shut you down over this it is because they feel uncomfortable and don’t want to be exposed to that discomfort.

Beware The Failure To Own Your Problems

Refusing to be accountable for what you have done in your life and refusing to own your problems causes difficulties around feeling sorry for yourself.

If you feel sorry for yourself and get stuck in that place, constantly seeking those who will affirm your pain but never doing anything to get out of that pain, then you are failing to understand your own problems and find ways to resolve them.

The Importance of Being Seen

It is important to feel seen, to have your pain acknowledged. But sometimes you are the one who is going to see you, who will acknowledge your pain.

Being seen is empowering. Seeing yourself is as empowering as being seen by someone else.

Tara Brach PhD, a leading western teacher of Buddhist meditation, emotional healing and spiritual awakening, talks about the importance of putting your hand over your heart centre and saying “Ouch, that hurts” as a way to acknowledge the pain you are feeling and give yourself self compassion. Try it sometime, you will most likely find it helps a lot.

In Summary

The worst abandonment is when you abandon yourself

In your pain do not fail to acknowledge to yourself the pain you are in.

Don’t fail to show compassion to yourself.

Stop judging yourself, shaming yourself, criticising yourself, telling yourself you are bad or unworthy, failing to defend yourself.

Make sure you recognise your own pain. Remember “Ouch it hurts” is very important.

Sit with your pain and acknowledge it. Comfort yourself.

Advice To The Recently Bereaved

I often have recently bereaved people visit me. Their bereavement is so recent they haven’t even had the funeral yet. One of the things I tell them in that first session is to be kind to themselves, to be okay to not look after other people at the funeral. To let others care for them. To absent themselves from the post funeral get together if they need to. To cry, be unstable, not want to talk, not want to socialise, not look after others are all permissible and necessary self care actions.

Grief Forces Change

I model for the recently bereaved how to speak kindly to yourself, how to be caring and compassionate to yourself, how to be there for yourself.

It is scary to be placed in the position where you have to grow and change. But grief puts you there and there is only one way out and that is to walk through the storm.

You are going to have to learn the new way to be. You will not know it immediately, but you will learn over time and self compassion is your best ally in this learning.

Can I Help?

If you would like to talk to me about how I can help you with your grief and heartbreak please contact me on 0409396608 or nan@plentifullifecounselling.com.au

Surfing Your Emotions

Did you know that emotions rise up and then fade within 90 seconds if you can identify your internal experience, give the emotions a name and allow them to flow?

If you try to suppress your emotions, or pretend they are not happening then they last longer and feel a lot more powerful.

When you feel an emotion you need to go surfing.

Just as a surfer rides a wave you need to allow yourself to rise up on the crest of the emotion. You need to get uncomfortable. You need to listen to what that discomfort is telling you. If you try to fight it then it will get worse.

If you listen to that discomfort and follow that discomfort to find the need under the feelings you are experiencing then you will ride that wave to the end and emerge with the emotion in the past.

Sometimes it can be hard to sit with that discomfort. Maybe you have never learned to feel safe with the discomfort. Maybe you don’t know how to search for the need that underlies the emotions.

If you come to see me about emotions you are experiencing, I will always help you sit with those emotions and listen to the discomfort that is there. You can learn to do this and sometimes you need help to learn.

Anger, frustration and resentment are emotions that frequently trouble people. These emotions however are secondary emotions. They come on top of another emotion.

You could liken those emotions to an iceberg. What you see on the surface is the emotion of anger, frustration or resentment.

What is underneath the water is often sadness, pain, fear, disappointment and loss. These emotions have often been laid down in childhood when things happened that you couldn’t process properly either because you didn’t understand what had happened, or because you didn’t have the skills to process them.

Once you learn how to explore and identify your secondary emotions, you can start healing the primary emotions that you have carried around since childhood.

Can I Help?

If you would like to talk to me about how I can help you with managing your emotions, please contact me on 0409396608 or nan@plentifullifecounselling.com.au

The Circle of Perspective

When you are in a difficult situation it can be hard to see a way out of it.

Often the way out of the situation is to change the perspective on that situation.

This is what I describe as moving around the circle of the problem.

Moving Around the Circle of the Problem

If you imagine the problem as an object in front of you.

Imagine there is a circle around the problem and you are standing on a spot on that circle.

The spot you are standing on is one of great difficulty with no seeming way out of the problem.

But what is you took a step to the left or right around the circle? What would the problem look like then?

Using the Circle of the Problem

This is something I have used for most of my adult life. It is something that is possible to learn and apply with determination and intention.

The next time you find yourself with a problem to solve try this.

Imagine yourself standing on a circle looking at the problem.

Then imagine you are taking a step to the left or right. As you take that imaginary step, do so with the intention of seeking the problem from a different angle.

It is amazing how solvable a problem looks when you just take a step to one side or another of a problem.

Take Time to Consider the Problem

Sometimes you need time to sit with a problem before you are able to see it from another perspective.

There are many ways to give yourself time.

Sometimes sleeping on the problem can be a good way to prepare to take that step. Things are always easier to attend to when you are well rested.

You can also put the problem aside and do something else. Maybe you decide to have a walk, go out with friends, meditate.

Find a Trusted Confidant to Share the Problem With

Another way of preparing to take that step is to discuss the problem with someone else who is prepared to listen and be your sounding board. The ideal person will listen and ask questions to allow you to explore your feelings around the problem and to test the various solutions you may consider or different perspectives you may have. You need someone who can be neutral and not push their solution on you.

This is where a counsellor can be very helpful. We are trained to listen and help you explore all options and your feelings around them.

Can I Help?

If you would like to talk to me about how I can help you with your problem, please contact me on 0409396608 or nan@plentifullifecounselling.com.au

3 Questions That May Help You With Those Thoughts That Go Around And Around In Your Head

So many people struggle with thoughts that go around and around in their heads. Not nice thoughts, but ones that bother you and destroy your enjoyment of activities during waking hours. Thoughts the keep you aware at 1am, 2am, 3am and so on.

If you are going to be thinking in circles about something then why not turn your thoughts to seeing if you can resolve the issue that is bothering.

Here are the questions to ask:

Am I Aware How Long I Have Been Having This Thought?

Have you actually been thinking about this thing for a long time, or does it just feel like it. Maybe it is a thought that keeps repeating and it just seems to be going round in your head.

The next question to ask yourself is”

2. Is now a good time to be thinking about this?

If the thought is bothering you the answer is probably no.

Then you need to ask yourself the next question:

3. Is There Something I Am Avoiding?

So often something that is bothering you spins around in your mind but you don’t explore it. This is often because the thought is so overwhelming that you don’t feel you can manage what comes next.

The reality is, exploring this thought further can help you resolve it.

When those distressing thoughts revolve in your mind they are often indicators of something deeper that needs processing. This is why you ask the question.

When you ask the question be prepared to sit with the question and wait for the answer to arise.

When the answer comes to you, allow yourself to explore it further:

• Where in your body is the thought?

• How long has it been there in your body?

• What is the thought about? There is often something that you have not processed that is bugging you until you process it.

• Is now a good time to work through this thought? You might be at work, or it may be the middle of the night and you feel you can’t attend to it. If that is so then set a time to attend to it. Visualise yourself putting the thought on that time and tell yourself that is when it will be dealt with.

When Exploring A Question Doesn’t Bring Relief Try Something Else

Sometimes recurring thoughts are too difficult to resolve, and you may need help. It is unlikely you will get help immediately. In the interim you may need to put that thought aside until you can attend to it.

If this recurring thought is during the day then change what you are doing and do something that will occupy your mind.

Maybe you want to do something that requires your full attention.

Maybe you want to talk to someone.

A change of scenery can dislodge that thought. Try changing where you are working. If you can, go for a walk.

Observation using your senses can also be useful.

• Look around you.

• Name 5 things you can see.

• Now name 5 things you touch. Name what they feel like to touch.

• Now name 5 things you can smell. Name them.

• Name 5 things you can hear and describe what you are hearing.

If it is the early hours of the morning, rather than tossing and turning, unable to get back to sleep and those thoughts just going on and on then get up and do something else for a little while.

Maybe you have a good book to read. Maybe you can listen to music. Just choose something that will not wake you up too much and so that thing until you feel able to go back to sleep.

Most people find it takes half an hour or so before they have cleared their mind enough to go back to sleep. If you can’t, allow yourself to accept that and find something enjoyable and restful to do. Yes you may be tired the next morning, but you will be less stressed. Maybe you will sleep better the next night.

Can I Help?

If you would like to talk to me about how I can help you with your incessant thoughts or attending to the underlying issues, please contact me on 0409396608 or nan@plentifullifecounselling.com.au

You Are Unique And Your Way Of Responding To Life Events Is Unique Too

One of the biggest worries that is presented to me in sessions is the feeling of having reacted to something the wrong way.

This is so common I thought I would write about it today.

Have you had this happen to you?

Something happens and you feel strong emotions and respond based on those emotions. But then others judge you because they don’t agree with your response. And you feel you were wrong and judge your feelings as being irrational and incorrect.

It is always important in these moments to remember that you are hearing another person’s individual response. It is unique to them and is obviously different to your response.

Even if the other person is backed up in judging your response, it does not make you wrong.

Who you are, and your view of the world, is based on what you have experienced in life. Your authentic reaction to something is correct for you. No two people will react to an event in the same way.

Some people are frightened when people react to things differently to them. They may feel frightened and want to dampen their response. If you don’t do that their fear may drive them to judge you and tell you that you were wrong. That is fear talking, not a judgement on you.

All reactions to events are valid.

Obviously, some reactions are morally wrong and even may be illegal. Assaulting someone is not the right thing. But being angry at them can be valid.

Allow those events where you feel you reacted differently to others to be opportunities for reflection. You can reflect on your feelings and how you reacted. If you were angry with someone you can congratulate yourself on not hitting them but reacting in a more productive way. Just because another person chose to retreat and avoid addressing the situation does not make you wrong. All it does is make you different and unique.

Remember to not take on board other people’s issues. If someone judges you for the way you respond to a situation, don’t take that on board. Don’t own their stuff. It is theirs, give it back to them. Own your stuff because it does belong to you.

Can I Help?

If you would like to talk to me about how I can help you with understanding yourself and being okay with yourself, please contact me on 0409396608 or nan@plentifullifecounselling.com.au

How to Learn Not To Fear Emotions

A big problem for many people I see is unprocessed emotional pain. A large volume of unprocessed emotional pain.

It is not surprising given the belief in our society that you should just push those “bad” feelings down and ignore them.

If you didn’t grow up in a family that supported you experiencing that pain and learning how to process it, then you will be unlikely to know how to process it.

Emotional Pain Is Not Bad

Some mental health approaches pathologise the experiencing of emotional pain. As a result they teach the suppression of emotional pain.

This belief and teaching fails to understand the roots of some pain. Unprocessed emotional pain that has been with you for a long time will continue to be with you until it is processed.

You will not be able to process emotional pain until you have developed the courage, strength and skills to stay with those overwhelming emotions until they are fully processed.

Emotional Pain As The Monster Under The Bed

A lot of people tell me they fear those emotions. I can understand that. A lot of these unprocessed emotions relate to childhood.

A child needs to be taught how to process emotions. If they aren’t taught then those frightening emotions are impossible to process. The child learns to fear those emotions because they seem insurmountable.

If you add to that difficulty a family that actively encourages the suppression of emotions, even punishes family members for feeling emotions, then that fear becomes terrifying and deep seated.

The Pain Body

In his book “A New Earth” Eckhart Tolle describes the ‘pain body’. This is the “energy of old but still very-much-alive emotion that lives in almost every human being.”

The pain of old traumas is often described as energy because of the way this pain crops up again and again. The pain is actually stress or trauma that has never been processed so remains in the body. When that stress or trauma was initially experienced the nervous system became dysregulated and the emotions felt at the time became trapped in the body. Things can trigger the memories around this stress or trauma and you are again feeling the old pain.

Not Feeling Into The Body

Unprocessed pain can cause you to fear emotions and their associated feelings. To avoid experiencing what is feared you stop feeling into your body at all. The body becomes a scary place where emotional monsters lurk.

If you can’t feel into your body, you can’t release the pain and you can’t feel safe and relaxed. In order to relax you need to be able to feel your inner body. That means you have to be prepared to feel the feelings there.

Actions Are Trapped In Your Body

Many somatic therapists talk about the actions trapped in our bodies.

Peter A Levine, the developer of Somatic Experiencing and author of many books including ‘Waking the Tiger’, speaks of the experience of animals chased by predators and escaping. After the animal has escaped the predator it shakes its body to release the energy still in the body that allowed it to escape. He likens it to our need to release that excess energy after a fight/flight event. This allows the energy to be released from our bodies.

Eckhart Tolle also talks about releasing energy from stress. He tells the story of two ducks getting into a fight. After they are finished they move away from each other and flap their wings several times. Then they continue on as though nothing has happened. The ducks are also releasing the excess energy.

The Problem Of Holding On To Experiences Instead Of Releasing Them

We humans tend to hold on to these experiences. Instead of the release actions of the animal that has escaped a predator or the duck that has just finished a fight, we hold on to the fight or the escape.

Humans create narratives of events and the escape and fight get woven into our narratives. If the opportunity to process the events and release them does not happen, the events are kept alive and ongoing by continuing to tell the story, even to ourselves.

Remembering Events But Releasing The Energy

We need to remember events. This is how our brain keeps us safe by remembering dangerous situations and alerting us to similarities in situations. The problem arises when we continue to think of the events as ongoing, instead of past events.

The way forward is to learn how to regulate emotions.

Learn not to fear experiencing the emotions. That you can do this and actually those monster emotions are not massive, overwhelming giants, but mild little critters that are quite manageable.

Once you learn how to regulate and that those emotions are not as scary as you thought they were, you can then learn to be kind to your body. You can learn to be present and have confidence in your strength and ability to process painful feelings and emotions.

You can also learn that difficult emotions can be temporarily destabilising. That they may need attention to work through them. But they can be worked through and you can emerge stronger in the knowledge that you have the skills to process your emotions.

Can I Help?

If you would like to talk to me about how I can help you learn not to fear your emotions and to process them, please contact me on 0409396608 or nan@plentifullifecounselling.com.au

24 Common Signs Of Trauma and How To Heal

Experiencing a traumatic event has a major impact on your emotional, physical and psychological health.

Trauma may be long term, such as being in a relationship with a narcissist or an abusive person. Trauma may be a single event, such as something painful or shocking that happens.

Trauma challenges your sense of safety in the world and the reliability of the world.

Trauma challenges your sense of self, of who you are.

Gabor Mate, a Canadian doctor and expert on trauma in his book “The Myth of Normal” writes that “trauma is not what happens to you but what happens inside you”.

In this quote he is talking about the impact of a traumatic event being individual. Some may walk away from an event relatively unscathed whereas others may be deeply impacted.

The age you are when you experience a trauma has an impact on how you are affected. Trauma occurring in childhood, while the child is still developing their sense of identity as well as developing their brain, has the potential to cause more damage than trauma affecting an adult.

The 24 most common signs of unhealed trauma include:

1.    Being chronically exhausted

2.    Finding it difficult to trust others

3.    Compulsive behaviours and addictions, all about avoiding unpleasant feelings

4.    Not feeling safe anywhere, at home, out of the home, inside your body

5.    Experiencing emotional numbness

6.    Experiencing difficulty concentrating

7.    Having a heightened startle response

8.    Finding it difficult to sleep or having nightmares.

9.    Feeling numb and dissociated from what is going on around you

10.   Skin issues such as rashes and other irritations.

11.   Upset stomach, diarrhoea, bloating, nausea and so on

12.   Constantly apologising

13.   Constantly thinking about things

14.   Gaining or losing weight.

15.   Feeling emotionally dysregulated and struggling to contain feelings of rage or anger

16.   Feeling Depressed

17.   Self-isolating from others

18.   Uncontrollably crying

19.   Experiencing difficulties relating to others

20.   Being frightened of being alone

21.   Struggling with memory and processing information

22.   Having unrealistic beliefs about other people.

23.   Feeling guilty, and experiencing shame.

24.   Being hypervigilant.

As you can imagine, experiencing even some of these signs is distressing and challenging to your sense of who you are.

How Do I Recover?

The biggest impact of trauma is your sense of who you are.

The good news is that you can rebuild your sense of who you are.

You can also learn how to trust the world. Part of that learning is identifying what safety for you is, right now.

You also need to allow yourself time to grieve for what you have lost. Without that healing is not possible.

This recovery will not happen overnight. It takes time. Don’t rush. Don’t think you are failing because you are not “over it” quickly. Cut yourself some slack and be patient.

What Do I Need To Do To Recover?

Sometimes, if the trauma had a smaller impact on you, you can recover with the help of supportive people. Other times you need a trauma trained counsellor to help you.

The first thing you need to do is to understand what safety looks like for you.

Once you understand what that is, you can work at rebuilding your sense of safety.

Rebuilding Your Sense of Safety

To feel safe, you need to feel safe within your body. When you suffer a trauma you may want to run away from the unpleasant feelings. You experience these feelings in your body. A major part of coping with the unpleasant feelings is ignoring what your body is experiencing.

To rebuild your sense of safety you need to learn to feel what is happening in your body. You also need to learn to be comfortable with those feelings.

For someone who experienced trauma as a child, there may never have been learning about feeling into the body. For those who learned already, it will be more about learning to feel into the body again.

Regulation Is A Major Part of Feeling Safe

When you experience uncomfortable feelings in your body you need to be able to cope with those feelings.

Many people learn unhealthy ways to do this. Addictions and compulsive behaviours are about dulling feelings. Emotional numbing is also an unhealthy strategy.

What you may need to learn is how to calm your body. Being able to calm yourself down allows you to feel you have control over the feelings in your body as well as the emotions and memories that come up. That is very empowering. When you have control and feel you have power then you can feel safe.

Internal Safety Leads Outward

Once you feel safe in yourself, you can feel more confident to start trusting those closest to you, then those less close and finally strangers and situations you encounter day to day.

When you feel safe in yourself you also can experience greater clarity around the people in your life and can make decisions about what relationship you have that are unhealthy and set boundaries around those relationships.

Boundaries may look like ending the relationship, limiting when you see the other person, or even limiting the type of contact you will have with them and the type of behaviour you will tolerate from them.

Allow Space For Grieving

When you experience trauma, whether it is recent or in the past, you have lost things that are important. The loss of sense of self and sense of safety. What way you saw the world and those around you is lost. You have also lost the life you had. There may be other losses as well.

All these losses need to be recognised and grieved over.

Grief isn’t pleasant. It hurts. You may even feel angry. The pain is deep.

It is important to learn to be okay with those unpleasant feelings. Don’t try to avoid the feelings by getting busy with activities, be they work, social life, hobbies or relationships. Those avoidance activities will only prolong the grief, they won’t solve it.

A lot of the signs of trauma are caused by trying to avoid the pain.

Counselling is helpful here too in learning how to process this grief.

Building Your Connection Back To Self

When you have grieved the losses and rebuilt your sense of safety in the world you can work on establishing a connection to yourself so you can get to know Who You Are again.

This is a wonderful opportunity to explore the things in life that help you feel who you are. The things that feed you.

This is where you learn to listen to your body as it tells you it is comfortable.

This is where you may find that trying new things will help you discover aspects of yourself you didn’t know existed.

Here is your opportunity to learn how to live in the post trauma world.

Space and Time

As you rebuild your sense of self and safety, as well as grieving for what was lost, give yourself the space to grow.

Ensuring you sleep enough hours is important. Take yourself out to the beach of the bush. Sit and feel the waves at your feet, sit under a tree and listen to the sound of wind through the leaves. See a trauma trained counsellor.

Surround yourself with people who support you and will encourage you to grow and try new things.

Most importantly give yourself time. See this as a journey that is best enjoyed and taken at a slow enjoyable pace.

Can I Help?

If you would like to talk to me about how I can help you with healing from your trauma, please contact me on 0409396608 or nan@plentifullifecounselling.com.au

Suppressing Your Thoughts And Feelings Seems Right, But It Isn’t.

In the current world there is a general belief that if an emotion is too hard you just suppress it. Force it under.

One of the main styles of therapy that is presented as “the correct way” to be and to operate tells you that these uncomfortable thoughts and emotions are faulty and wrong. You just have to work harder. You have to will harder. You can over come this.

But the truth is all the will in the world will not heal those uncomfortable thoughts and emotions.

I Failed Magic Wand Class

I see a lot of people who come to me for that style of therapy. They think it will be like a magic wand that I wave and in a few sessions they will be all fixed.

If only it were so.

The Myth Of Instant Gratification

We all want things to be achieved instantly.

Instead of working hard at following a correct diet and activity regime, we want to take a pill to lose weight.

Instead of working through those uncomfortable emotions. Instead of allowing time for those emotions to heal. Instead of allowing time for our brains to make the necessary changes to heal. Instead of doing all this we want it to be better instantly.

Having to work at something is hard and in this modern world with instant everything working at something is not what we have been taught to expect or have to do.

So maybe you come to me expecting instant results.

The Reality Of Healing

Sometimes the difficulty you are experiencing can be resolved with one or two counselling sessions.

Other times the difficulty will need longer.

Maybe your expectations have been raised by the passion for “the correct way”. You expect I will tell you what is wrong with you and you will do some homework and exercises and keep them up and you will be all better.

After all, it is so much easier to push things down and pretend they don’t exist than deal with them.

Isn’t it?

The Lure Of Running From Those Uncomfortable Feelings

So you run from those uncomfortable feelings. But they come after you.

So you run from them with alcohol, or cigarettes, or drugs or other addictions.

That works for a while, until the effects wear off. Then what do you do?

Running Is Like The Scab Over A Cut

As a former Registered Nurse, I liken the suppressing of uncomfortable thoughts and feelings to a scab that has formed over a cut.

You cut yourself, it hurts and it bleeds. Your body starts work immediately, defending from infection and commencing healing. First you will see a scab form. Ah! Its getting better.

But is it?

If all goes well, the scab forms, healing occurs underneath and the scab eventually falls off to reveal healed skin underneath.

But it doesn’t always go well.

Under that scab there is an infection. Pus forms and is trapped underneath the scab. That cut hurts. That cut is not healing as you thought it should.

The pus builds up. The cut hurts more.

I watched a colleague once remove the scab on a man’s leg. Her comment is so relevant here.

“I never trust a scab. It hides things that shouldn’t be there.”

She had noticed the signs of infection under the scab.

Scab removed, the cut was able to be cleaned and the infection cleared up. Not overnight, but over a matter of days with continued cleansing until the infection was cleared.

Counselling is like that.

Healing Requires Work and Time

If you want to resolve those uncomfortable thoughts and feelings you need to work at them.

I am not going to tell you that your thoughts are “faulty”. They aren’t.

I am not going to instruct you to not think about them. I will help you examine them to find what lies underneath them.

I may not seem to be “working” with you, but I am.

I Trust You To Be Able To Heal, Maybe With Help

I trust you as a person to have the ability to heal those uncomfortable thoughts and feelings with my assistance.

By assistance I mean that I will help you identify what is actually going on. I will tell you that what you are experiencing is a normal way for your brain to respond to your circumstances. Then I will help you work with your brain as it heals.

I will help you understand the unconscious parts of your brain that you cannot control consciously. I will help you heal those, which will often involve feeling into your body as well as allowing your brain to express itself through art, sand play, movement or other expressive methods.

I will tell you that things take time. Because your brain can’t rebuild new neural circuits overnight. Expect a few months at least.

I Don’t Use A Magic Wand

Whatever you do, don’t be like the people who come expecting me to wave my magic wand and make you all better in one session. See the start of progress, no matter how slight, as the wonderful evidence that healing has started.

And don’t tell your children they just need some “strategies” to cope with those painful thoughts and emotions when what they actually need is compassion and understanding that what is happening in their life hurts and it is okay to hurt.

Soldiering On Doesn’t Work

Wanting to be able to just “soldier on” was a wonderful marketing ploy for a drug company selling cold and flu tablets. We apply solider on to everything, including emotional pain. But there is no instant fix and even the “soldier on” message has been shown to be the worst treatment for those colds and flu.

Allow time. If you need to see a counsellor expect it to not be instant and be very wary of someone who tells you your thoughts are “faulty”.

In The Next Blog

I mentioned the pain of dealing with painful thoughts and emotions.

In the past few weeks I have seen a lot of people who have struggled with other people inadvertently causing them pain through their questions.

How are you? To the person struggling to cope with the death of their partner.

What is your job? To the person just made redundant.

What do your parents do? To the teenager who is grieving the death of their father.

These seemingly innocent comments can cause a lot of pain. So what can you do to avoid those foot in mouth blunders?

I will talk more about this in my next blog.t

Can I Help?

In the meantime, if you would like to talk to me about how I can help you with managing your thoughts and feelings, please contact me on 0409396608 or nan@plentifullifecounselling.com.au

When Shame Blocks You Grieving Properly

Grief is a natural part of life. Ever since humankind was capable of feeling love, we have grieved for the loss of that love.

It is natural for us to cry and reach out to others for comfort. That is considered the way grief has happened for millennia. Part of grief is to allow the putting into the past of our grief.

Shame is a big emotion that causes other emotions, mainly sad ones, to be stuck. When Shame complicates grief you are unable to put grief in the past and it just keeps on in the present.

Grief and Shame Often Appear Together

When I work with people who are grieving I have noticed that grief is often experienced alongside shame.

Grief is designed to help us loosen, release and reach out. Shame has the opposite effect. It causes us to freeze and isolate from others.

Shame leads to endless loops of worry and rehashing the shameful episode. This keeps it in the present instead of the past where you fervently wish it would go.

Grief involves crying and grieving for what has happened and putting that grief in the past.

Grief needs to be worked with in a different way to shame.

Complicated Emotions

Complicated emotions are difficult. They require different approaches and sometimes need to be separated in order to work through them.

This complication is probably why most people dislike complex emotions in themselves or in others.

Interestingly, children have no difficulty managing complicated emotions. It is as if that maturing, and learning to identify our emotions, stops us from being able to work with the different emotions we are likely to feel at any time.

Accepting Complicated Emotions

One of the best approaches to working with complicated emotions is to accept they are there. To accept that they just are.

Shame is one of the emotions we fear the most. One of those reasons is that when shame is present, we can’t process our emotions as we are supposed to. Instead of being processed and moved on quickly, they remain stuck by shame. Emotions are manageable when they are processed quickly, but when they remain unresolved, they become difficult to manage.

Shame does have a purpose. Its purpose is to keep us safe by lowering the intensity of other emotions. This allows us to curb our reactions to emotions such as anger. That is fine if we then later attend to these emotions. But what happens more often is that shame binds with those emotions and they remain.

All those bound emotions makes for one crowded mind. And a mind that struggles to process emotions. And shame creates an endless loop of being trapped in emotions.

Working Through Grief and Shame

Most people who come to see me about their grief have shame caught up in the grief as well. When I work with you, it is important to identify all the emotions you are working through and then separate them all out to deal with them.

If I don’t attend to your shame and help you work through it you will be stuck in your grief. Usually that stuckness is what brings you to me.

Can I Help?

If you would like to talk to me about how I can help you with your grief and shame, please contact me on 0409396608 or nan@plentifullifecounselling.com.au