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September 24 - September 25, 2025
Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves. . . . Live the questions now. Perhaps you will gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer. —Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet
these patients had learned to shut down the brain areas that transmit the visceral feelings and emotions that accompany and define terror.
Yet in everyday life, those same brain areas are responsible for registering the entire range of emotions and sensations that form the foundation of our self-awareness, our sense of who we are.
Knowing what we feel is the first step to knowing why we feel that way.
But we can’t do this unless our watchtower, the MPFC, learns to observe what is going on inside us.
Self-regulation depends on having a friendly relationship with your body.
Suppressing our inner cries for help does not stop our stress hormones from mobilizing the body.
Somatic symptoms for which no clear physical basis can be found are ubiquitous in traumatized children and adults.
They can include chronic back and neck pain, fibromyalgia, migraines, digestive problems, spastic colon/irritable bowel syndrome, chronic fatigue, and some forms of asthma.
Not being able to discern what is going on inside their bodies causes them to be out of touch with their needs, and they have trouble taking care of themselves, whether it involves eating the right amount at the right time or getting the sleep they need.
In order to change, people need to become aware of their sensations and the way that their bodies interact with the world around them.
These are somatic reenactments of the undigested trauma and most likely represent the postures they assumed when the trauma occurred.
A secure attachment combined with the cultivation of competency builds an internal locus of control, the key factor in healthy coping throughout life.
Securely attached children learn what makes them feel good; they discover what makes them (and others) feel bad, and they acquire a sense of agency: that their actions can change how they feel and how others respond.
Understanding why you feel a certain way does not change how you feel.
The fundamental issue in resolving traumatic stress is to restore the proper balance between the rational and emotional brains, so that you can feel in charge of how you respond and how you conduct your life.
Recovery from trauma involves the restoration of executive functioning and, with it, self-confidence and the capacity for playfulness and creativity.
“interoception”—Latin for “looking inside.”) Most of our conscious brain is dedicated to focusing on the outside world: getting along with others and making plans for the future.
Neuroscience research shows that the only way we can change the way we feel is by becoming aware of our inner experience and learning to befriend what is going on inside ourselves.
Simply noticing our annoyance, nervousness, or anxiety immediately helps us shift our perspective and opens up new options other than our automatic, habitual reactions.
Mindfulness puts us in touch with the transitory nature of our feelings and perceptions.
When we pay focused attention to our bodily sensations, we can recognize the ebb and flow of our emotions and, with tha...
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Practicing mindfulness calms down the sympathetic nervous system, so that you are less likely to be thrown into fight-or-flight.11
Jon Kabat-Zinn, one of the pioneers in mind-body medicine, founded the Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR)
“One way to think of this process of transformation is to think of mindfulness as a lens, taking the scattered and reactive energies of your mind and focusing them into a coherent source of energy for living, for problem solving, for healing.”15
When the physical tension is released, the feelings can be released.
Eventually, the activation patterns that were meant to promote coping are turned back against the organism and now keep fueling inappropriate fight/flight and freeze responses.
In order to return to proper functioning, this persistent emergency response must come to an end. The body needs to be restored to a baseline state of safety and relaxation from which it can mobilize to take action in response to real danger.
Peter Levine calls this process pendulation—gently moving in and out of accessing internal sensations and traumatic memories. In this way patients are helped to gradually expand their window of tolerance.
Somatic therapies can help patients to relocate themselves in the present by experiencing that it is safe to move.
Being traumatized is not just an issue of being stuck in the past; it is just as much a problem of not being fully alive in the present.
By being able to observe the trauma from the calm, mindful state that IFS calls Self (a term I’ll discuss further in chapter 17), mind and brain are in a position to integrate the trauma into the overall fabric of life.
Hiding your core feelings takes an enormous amount of energy, it saps your motivation to pursue worthwhile goals, and it leaves you feeling bored and shut down.
The capacity of art, music, and dance to circumvent the speechlessness that comes with terror may be one reason they are used as trauma treatments in cultures around the world.
For that reason we’ve learned to “pendulate” our approach to trauma, to use a term coined by my friend Peter Levine. We don’t avoid confronting the details, but we teach our patients how to safely dip one toe in the water and then take it out again, thus approaching the truth gradually.
We start by establishing inner “islands of safety” within the body.
This sets the stage for trauma resolution: pendulating between states of exploration and safety, between language and body, between remembering the past and feeling alive in the present.
Only by getting in touch with your body, by connecting viscerally with your self, can you regain a sense of who you are, your priorities and values.
In order to overcome trauma, you need help to get back in touch with your body, with your Self.
As the great psychiatrist Milton Erickson said, once you kick the log, the river will start flowing.
Memories evolve and change. Immediately after a memory is laid down, it undergoes a lengthy process of integration and reinterpretation—a process that automatically happens in the mind/brain without any input from the conscious self. When the process is complete, the experience is integrated with other life events and stops having a life of its own.
As we begin to re-experience a visceral reconnection with the needs of our bodies, there is a brand new capacity to warmly love the self. We experience a new quality of authenticity in our caring, which redirects our attention to our health, our diets, our energy, our time management. This enhanced care for the self arises spontaneously and naturally, not as a response to a “should.” We are able to experience an immediate and intrinsic pleasure in self-care. —Stephen Cope, Yoga and the Quest for the True Self
Her rational mind told her this was nonsense, but this belief emanated from deep within her emotional, survival brain, from the basic wiring of her limbic system.
It’s really interesting to think about how much I have been refusing to listen to my body, which is such an important part of who I am.
While numbing (or compensatory sensation seeking) may make life tolerable, the price you pay is that you lose awareness of what is going on inside your body and, with that, the sense of being fully, sensually alive.
At the same time, it muffles the everyday sensory delights of experiences like music, touch, and light, which imbue life with value.
If you are not aware of what your body needs, you can’t take care of it.
If you don’t feel hunger, you can’t nourish yourself. If you mistake anxiety for hunger, you may eat too much. And if you can’t feel when you’re satiated, you’ll keep eating. This is why cultivating sensory awareness is such a critical aspect of trauma recovery.
Simply noticing what you feel fosters emotional regulation, and it helps you to stop trying to ignore what is going on inside you.
Once you start approaching your body with curiosity rather than with fear, everything shifts.
