^{A's to your Q's}

The best thing we can do with grief is invite it in and essentially, get out of the way.

Grief is like a wave that moves through the body, and most people have a habit of clenching and creating constricting around it, so they associate grief with tightness in the chest, throat, eyes, forehead, but that tightness is actually the body trying to manage the grief, not the grief itself. 

When the system is open, grief is actually a powerful, expansive experience – it flows through like a wave and out the eyes as tears, so if we are having trouble letting grief move, we often want to focus on softening the throat, mouth, eyes, and forehead – this is what I mean by getting out of the way.

Staying connected to the physicality of grief is very important – the wave moving through the body, the sobs that may want to happen and how the diaphragm is involved with that, the wetness of tears on the face, the sounds that may want to emerge. 

Staying connected to somatic (body-based) experience of grief, and NOT the image or story of what the grief is about, is very important in letting it move through. 

Otherwise we can get caught in a loop where we start to feel sad, and then go into the mind and think about it, and feel more sad, and think about it more, etc… which never lets us get to that primal, powerful expression of grief.

This is such an important part of healing the nervous system and addressing trauma. 

The key to processing internalised toxic shame lies in finding our way towards feeling and expressing disgust. This doesn’t mean that we feel disgusted about ourselves, but that we allow ourselves to feel and express the disgust that our body feels at having to hold such toxic energy.

Other elements may include working with the posture of shame by allowing ourselves to collapse into that shame posture – chest collapsed, shoulders forward, head down, tail between the legs – and then to slowly move into the antipode posture, the ‘Superhero posture’ – standing tall, hands on hips, shoulders back, chest high, chin lifted. 

Moving between these postures mindfully and slowly and really feeling how they feel can also help us, as also may working with the thwarted self-protective impulses, and healthy aggression that would have wanted to arise to protect us from receiving that toxic shame.

These are such valid questions, especially after one has (like so many of you have) tried pretty much everything to heal. The thing is though, what that looks like may be different for each person, but I can give some ideas.

One of the main signs of healing and increased regulation is symptoms that have been around forever softening and fading away – that chronic ache or irregular period is gone, or you find that it’s easier to socially engage. Perhaps the anxiety is much less, or you find that you have lots more energy. 

There’s no way to say for sure what exactly will happen or when, but you can be sure that if you put in the time and effort, your symptoms will start to shift. 

And very often, new sensations and experiences will arise! 

One common experience that is a good, but uncomfortable sign, is that one may feel much better emotionally and mentally – the cycles of depression are gone, and the anxiety has lifted, or the intrusive thoughts are way less, etc. –  but their body may hurt more, or a rash may pop up out of nowhere. 

When this kind of thing happens, it is a definite sign that the system is releasing old trauma and regulation is returning. Same thing if the body starts to feel much better, but one finds themselves angry and irritable for no reason at all, or one starts to feel WAY more in general, whereas before they were numb and didn’t feel much at all.

What we are looking for is CHANGE, even if it’s a temporarily uncomfortable change, that shows that the patterns of dysfunction that the system has been locked into are shifting, making way for greater energy and health.

As for how long? 

Sorry, it is impossible to say, as this is completely dependent on what one has been through, what kind of experiences and other treatments they’ve explored, their personality, their living and work situation, their relationships, and just the unique nature of their being. 

A person may have had a bad car crash but had solid attachment and a healthy family system growing up, and they can get totally better in a couple months. Or a person may have had really bad early/developmental trauma, and even though there is nothing readily available in their history that identifies as ‘a big trauma’, it can take years of practicing the work to get back to regulation. 

It is SO personal that I can’t say for sure how long.

One thing I can say for sure though, is that this work is not about ‘fixing a problem’ in the traditional mechanical way that we tend to see this in the west. It is about fundamentally changing the way we live and relate to the world and ourselves, and our body. It is a total lifestyle shift that lasts a lifetime.

Also, I don’t think there IS actually any end to healing. 

I mean, one can get back to regulation, and have full functionality and live a life full of health, vitality and purpose, and STILL have old layers arise from time to time. Or they may then move into processing more intergenerational trauma at a cultural level. 

As we get better and better, and have more and more capacity, we simply have room (less 'pebbles' in our 'jar’) to experience more in general, including deeper processes of healing.

Above all, work on yourself. 

This is the most effective thing we can do. As we get more regulated and resolve our trauma, the benefit of that will automatically ripple out to them. This is the MOST important thing.

Below are a few practices that help with discerning and refining your perception.

1. Be ok with not knowing at the moment what is what. The "need" to know may come from a part of you that feels threatened by not knowing. Uncertainty is scary while certainty brings safety. If you don't know that's ok. Move in the direction of what feels right or true for you or what "breaks" old patterns or how you're used to operate or show up. Explore, be curious, open and create space for the discomfort that comes from now knowing.

2. Engage your body relationally. To "hear" the body, we need a bit of space to listen sense or feel what is being transmitted. Experience yourself in relationship to your body. Observe it.

3. Ask questions to your heart, your body or core self. For example, ask: What do you need? And don't wait for an answer right away or for the answer to come from thoughts as though someone could tell you: "You need to spend more time in nature" or "You need to pause more often."

Expecting immediate and clear answers is part of our survival protection. It's not like this, or at least not at the beginning when there's a lot of survival activation and enmeshment with our trauma responses.

If you ask a question and live through this question for one week, paying attention and being open to guidance, you'll see that an answer will come to you, even if 1%. Something will open up. But it's important to stay open and not project and answer. Make space for the unknown.

2. Connecting with animals and the natural elements. Animals are instinctual beings that can remind us of our instinctual capacity. The part of our brain that is in charge of survival responses and instinct is our brainstem. Animals live a lot through their survival instinctual brains. Observe animals, notice what animals resonate with you and play or be that animal in your body. Be that animal and notice how life is through their lens. This sounds "off" for the intellectual mind but quite empowering and liberating for our survival brain.

3. Spontaneous, unstructured, free movement. Allowing our body to move in the way that the body ant to move is a portal towards body empowerment. This practice is very simple. You can do it without music or with music. You can stand and tell your body: How do you want to move? And the waiting for the body to initiate a movement. Much like what the 'Moving What You're Feeling' practice suggests. 

4. Befriend your nervous system and how it protects. Unresolved trauma and survival responses distort our capacity to discriminate between danger and safety. Our body may perceive danger where there's safety and safety where there's danger.

5. Nurture your sense. Notice simple life experiences where you can explore more with your intuition and impulse rather than intellect. For example, choose four spices or four different flavours, and begin to smell or taste them and notice which one calls you or resonates with you. Do this for one month, not every day but perhaps during weekends. Look at four colours and notice which one resonates with you. Look at various pictures of yourself as a child and notice how your body responds.

For now, Take ONE thing that resonates from this and put it into practice.

Yes, this is not unusual. If we complete a procedural memory which has been wanting us to do something to protect ourselves, this can help the muscles and fascia come out of bracing, which is like a kind of sustained preparation to act. Also, it may be helpful to revisit this action in a slower, gentler way — going through the same kinds of motions and images/emotions, but with more awareness and less force.

In the video of the polar bear, the shaking and trembling starts as he is beginning to emerge from the anesthesia. He is not fully conscious, but is emerging from unconsciousness. This is a perfect example of how the old stuck sympathetic response wants to emerge, as the layers of freeze (in this case it’s a chemically induced freeze via tranquilizer) that are often on top of it, start to lift. In this case you can literally see the bear’s legs “running,” completing the procedural instruction to flee that got shut off when it got hit by the tranquilizer. Then, after that energy discharged, those big spontaneous deep breaths came in, signalling that his system was returning to baseline.

What’s important to remember is that this is a very straightforward example, for the purpose of illustrating the process of deactivation. That bear is a wild animal that has no social conditioning. The trauma was very straightforward and easy to complete. Human trauma, and our process of coming out of freeze and into deactivation, will almost always be much longer and more complex than this!

For most of us, there have been many overwhelming events that caused our survival responses to rear up and remain incomplete, and these events may be decades old, not minutes old. The threats were often much more chronic, or subtle, and tied in with issues of attachment and authenticity. We may have learned to default to freeze in times of stress very early on, such that the freeze response became a deeply embedded part of how we go through the world. We have societal conditioning on top of that, which tells us not to ‘be impolite,’ or ‘act out.’ All of this makes for a longer and more complex process.

So, for us the first thing is establishing safety. That is key. Without a safe environment, where we feel free to start exploring these old survival energies and how they may want to express, we cannot progress. If your work environment isn’t a safe place to do this, well, that’s pretty normal in this day and age and not a huge deal, the trauma work can wait ‘til you get home. If your home environment is not safe though, that is a huge deal. I wish there was a better answer but there just isn’t — without a safe home environment a person cannot heal from trauma. At the very least there needs to be room that is yours, which no one is allowed into, while you are doing this work, but it will still be difficult if those who are living with you aren’t able to support your expression, or at least leave you alone to process. So, if this is the case, the first step is getting out of that home environment and making a new home for yourself that is safe.

Once we have safety, then there are all sorts of ways in which our system may want to start expressing these incomplete responses. It could start with words — speaking truths that never got to be spoken. It could start simply with doing enough orientation that it really LANDS in your system that the environment you are in (where you are doing this work) is now safe. It could start with pressing, or pushing, or squeezing something, or making funny faces. We can never know exactly what each person’s system will need, and that’s why learning to follow your impulse is SO important in this work. Your body knows what it needs, you just need to have a safe environment in which to listen, and then trust your impulses enough to act on them. It also may be very important for some to support this individual work by working one-on-one with a good Somatic Experiencing Practitioner.

It is pretty much universal that at some point there will be some trembling, shaking, or internal vibration of deactivation, but it shouldn’t be forced, and we can’t know when this will happen organically, but we can be sure that at some point it will, though it may be subtler than one may expect. This is why this video with the bear is so important — so we can see that this is a natural process, and when it happens for us, is something to be welcomed and celebrated instead of feared.

If there is a specific incident, like a car accident, that you know left you traumatized, you can try working with this, using memory. Start with before the accident when everything was fine, and also remember after the accident when you knew everything was safe. Then, see if you can slowly progress to the moment of impact in your memory, noticing the whole time what is happening in your body, and pausing to allow any kind of impulse or emotion to be expressed. Remember to go slow! Do this in small bits and pieces, so it may take several tries to get to the actual event.

Again, this kind of work can be well-supported by a qualified Somatic Experiencing Practitioner.

Around the age of 3.

Absolutely. Feeling accepted, understood, and supported is so important, as is being able to express our experiences with this process. All of this sparks up that good ventral vagal social engagement system, which is the antipode to survival energy.

There are many kinds of memory! It is not necessary to have declarative memory (mental images and words) of traumatic events in order to heal them. In fact, that’s the entire beauty of this work! The body remembers, and it’s much more effective to work directly with implicit memory (body memory) than it is to work with declarative memory. That being said, as our implicit memories start to surface, the declarative memories may also spontaneously arise, but they don’t have to in order to heal.

Absolutely. Think about the strain and effort that would have to go into suppressing years of growls that want to come out! Allowing that expression to emerge will usually provide relief from tensions that have built up to keep those energies contained.

Yes. Focus more on the physical exertion of the towel wringing, and how you can allow the face to snarl and bare your fangs. You don’t have to make any sound to do that. And you may also be able to let some soft growls emerge without being heard. A little rumble in the throat doesn’t have to be loud. Also, the car is a great place to do this work, or in the shower.