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January 28 - April 11, 2020
We’re wired for self-protection and survival, and that’s exactly what your brain is doing when it’s acting all fucked up.
Your brain may be all “Fuck this noise and toss that book.” Because we are generally told not to feel negative emotions. They are bad and to be avoided. And we’re going to go further into why that is complete bullshit.
I have found that one of the most helpful things I do as a therapist is explain what is going on inside the brain and how the work we are doing in therapy is designed to rewire our responses to certain situations.
In order to think more, we have to feel more. And then take both into account when making decisions. Emotions are just as important for our survival as thoughts.
The brainstem may be a basic bitch, but it is sure as hell in charge of a lot.
A trauma is an event that happens outside our understanding of how the world is supposed to work. A traumatic response is when our ability to cope with what happened goes to shit and it’s affecting other areas of our life.
Most of the time, it takes about three months to reestablish equilibrium after a trauma. That is, after about 90 days, our emotional sensors are no longer operating at hyper warp speed mode, and return to normal.
PTSD cannot be diagnosed in the first month. We don’t know yet if we’re going to get our shit back together or not. Those first thirty days are critical. We need time and space to recover, to process what happened, to find ways to make sense of how we want the world to work and our experience of how life actually unfolds. In this time, we need relational supports. Our brains are hardwired to connect, and we get better in connection to other people.
Whatever the reason, the brain can shut down the healing process at a moment’s notice and our “new normal” becomes a trauma-informed experience rather than a healing one.
your brain may process something it considers a threat that you aren’t even cognizant of
Telling someone what they should be doing, feeling, or thinking, won’t help. Even if you are right. Even if they do what you say…you have just taken away their power to do the work they need to do to take charge of their life.
The best thing to do is to ask your loved one how to best support them when they are struggling.
You may need to set hard limits. You may need to protect yourself. This isn’t just for your well-being, but will help you model the importance of doing so to your loved one.
Emotions last longer than 90 seconds because we continue to fuel them with our thoughts. We do this by telling ourselves the same stories about the triggering situation over and over. This is when they stop being emotions and start becoming moods.
Avoiding a certain emotion makes you hold on to it just as much as ruminating over it does. Remember the infection analogy? It’s just festering in there.
Rumination is a way of insisting on making sense of an experience, but doing it in a nonsensical way. And avoiding is just refusing to acknowledge it at all, at a conscious level. Rumination and avoidance are ways of trying to control our experience, rather than taking it as the information that it is meant to be and finding ways to process through our responses.
Healing trauma means working through our shit, rather than trying to overpower it. Instead of full-frontal, Braveheart-style attack, we create ways of having new convos that are safe and supported. We don’t push out of our comfort zone, we create a larger bubble of comfort zone that helps us roll along until we realize we don’t need it anymore.
emotions are meant to be a signal in the brain that something needs your attention. They are meant to only last long enough to actually get your attention, and they dissipate after you decide on your course of action.
Trying new soothing and coping techniques when you are feeling your best self will help you figure out which ones work for you.
Amateurs practice until they get it right, experts practice until they can’t get it wrong.
“What’s the one universal thing that anyone can do to help someone having a rough time?” and the best answer I have is to help people ground themselves back in their bodies and in the present.
remind your brain of where you are in the moment and that you have more control than you realize over what is going on inside you when your panic button has been tripped.
As young children, we are in our bodies and in our experiences all the time. It isn’t until we get older that we realize our bodies can be in one place while our mind goes somewhere else.
Your brain has done its job in keeping you safe, and now you are ready to take the reins back and move forward in your life.
Self-compassion means being as kind to yourself as you would your best friend. It is an intentional honoring of our imperfections as humans. It doesn’t mean we let ourselves off the hook for things we fuck up, and it’s not an excuse to be a dick. In fact, people who are self-compassionate are also more driven to be better human beings because they think they are worth the effort. Treat yourself with kindness, understanding, and self-respect. Ask yourself, what would you say if this was happening to your best friend?
Put your hand over your heart and voice your experience of suffering. Remind yourself that suffering is part of humaning. Tell yourself that you are allowed kindness and forgiveness, and that starts as an inside job.
Think of it as talking over that bullshit tape the amygdala is playing. Yes, I know you are freaking out right now. It will pass and you will feel better. Keep breathing.
You’ve got this. It may not feel like you do. But your success rate for getting through serious bullshit is 100%. You aren’t about to break your winning streak.
You know what sucks? This right now. You know what helps? This isn’t permanent. And you’ve totally earned a cookie for dealing with this today.
Creating a new story means first understanding the one we are now carrying around. Sometimes the story ends up surprising us. We don’t even realize all the hateful shit we are telling ourselves until it happens in our out-loud voice.
The healthiest people are the ones who find meaning in chaos. The ones who can find the pony in a pile of shit every time. It doesn’t make the awful things that happen any less awful with bullshit like “Oh, that was God’s will, there was a lesson to be learned in that.” Because if God wanted me to learn something, there were far easier ways of making that happen, I’m pretty sure. But we can learn skills of resilience and strength through the terrible things that happen. They can make us better, stronger, more compassionate, more engaged human beings.
Your past is your learning experience, not the well-worn rut your brain keeps trying to live in.
Your body is intentionally making you feel off balance so you have to attend to shit. There’s a fancy term for that: Disequilibrium.
Anxiety is a state of full body disequilibrium at a level of intensity that demands immediate attention and corrective action on your part. It can be in the face of a real or perceived threat, either present or anticipated.
the answer lies in whether or not anxiety is controlling your life, rather than being a legit way of your body telling you to get off your ass and do something. Clinically speaking, if you say it’s a problem, I will agree that it’s a problem. You know you the best.
The important thing to know here is that when cortisol is released with its partner in crime, norepinephrine, it creates strong memory associations with certain moods, to create warning signals of what you should avoid in the future.
Optimistic people don’t dwell on bad events, and approach them as temporary setbacks. If they get neg’d on, they bounce back more quickly. They also believe that good things happen for reasons that are permanent. Essentially, the world is fundamentally in their favor.
They also tend to let the things they are good at inform the rest of their lives, rather than keeping that in its own space. Sucking at basketball doesn’t mean you will now make a shitty risotto.
Our cheerful buds blame bad events on bad circumstances rather than bad selfhood, but take credit for good circumstances as indicating that they are good people. So basically failures are events, not people. But successes are people, not events.
A stands for Adversity.
B stands for Belief.
C stands for Consequences,
D stands for Disputation.
At its core, anger is an instinctive response designed to protect us from harm by pushing us into concerted action.
One study found that 40% of individuals in the US considered their anger to have positive consequences over the long term.
We speak of anger in a way that leads us to believe that anger is valid, it is in charge, and it must be acted upon. Our expectation is that anger requires retribution…and we see that our job, then, is to ensure a corrective response. From the time we are children, that anger is not only permissible, it’s a positive means of addressing situations.
Feeling some serious fucking anger is a normal part of being a human being. Losing your shit is not.
When we lose our fucking minds on a regular basis, we are wiring our brains into a constantly heightened state that eventually fries our circuits (and pushes away everyone we love in the process). We program ourselves to always be on the alert. So we react with far greater speed than we used to, and perceive more situations as being dangerous, hostile, or threatening. We are constantly jumping at shadows.
Added up, those conditions are known as autonomic nervous system dysfunction. Many common health problems (heart disease, high blood pressure, food allergies) as well as many common mental health issues (depression, anxiety, PTSD) are related to a continued heightened response.
To borrow a famous Buddhist expression, anger is like holding onto a hot coal and expecting the person we are angry at to get burned.
