From freeze and fear to finding a home

I haven’t sent off any articles for a very long time now. I was in such a deep functional freeze that writing just didn’t flow. But I am now sharing my personal story in the hope it offers strength to those who walk this path. Because in the end, I did make it to the other side— a happy ending of sorts, a new beginning. This spiritual journey after great loss brings my indigenous friend Hazel back into the picture toward the end of this article. 

I had sold my piece of paradise about four years after my husband's death, trusting that the universe would show me the next step in my grieving and letting go journey. But the next step was sixteen months away, and I often wondered if I would ever find my way back home again.

Every day for these long months, I would wake up with fear by my side. A sense that I was trapped with no way forward, sideways, or backwards. Doomed. The doom was dunked in a dense, suffocating weight of shame.

After waking, I would spend the rest of my day trying to get rid of the doom. Religiously riding to the beach could not be skipped. Movement was my biggest weapon while being in a freeze for such a long time, while feeling the terror so close to my skin.

I still managed to make new friends and go freediving, and I had days of laughter and carefree fun while visiting Germany—but for over a year, the headline was one of fear, freeze, and feeling “homeless”.

I have so much compassion for people who are actually homeless. I had a roof over my head and still found the simplest of things difficult. Taking a shower was sometimes an effort, and cooking meals without having my own kitchen was the biggest stressor. I would go to the farmer’s market and buy fresh produce only for it to sit in my fridge. Feeding myself was packed with stress; it felt like trudging up a steep hill carrying a boulder. Some days I would cook myself a meal with ease; that’s when I knew I was having a good day, and the freeze was lifted for a little while. But it never fully left; it stayed put for all these months where hope seemed gone. Only glimpses on the far horizon. 

Friends said, that they envied me for my freedom. I could live anywhere on the planet! But I was completely overwhelmed and felt I did not belong anywhere. I missed the wild bush. “I hate…” was in my head as I dodged cars, noise, traffic lights, and exhaust on my push bike. I had moved to Fremantle with the romanticised idea of what it was twenty-five years ago, but the reality was a felt density that hit me hard: Big blocks had vanished, replaced by three or four houses without yards. Trees and beaches were gone. My nervous system was in constant overload, and I didn’t get to do any of the fun things cities offer. Not once did I jump on a train and go to an art gallery. 

I did look at houses on the market while the prices went up and up and up, finding a home was more and more out of reach. I looked in Shoalwater, back in Denmark, Bali, Broom, Exmouth, over east—I considered putting everything into storage and living in a van or travelling the world. I had to follow my instincts, and not knowing where to go was part of my journey. I trusted this inner knowing of my body and knew this was not a decision my mind could make. This is what I teach my clients. But when I started this journey, I never knew it would last for so long. 

I aimed to escape every morning and just rode to the beach. Every day, sometimes twice. I am such a homebody, but I never pottered at home; I stopped singing and did a hell of a lot of scrolling on my phone to numb myself, and only occasionally did I do qigong and yoga. The beach called me every morning. I loved the wide horizons, but the sand and water underlined the lack of trees. I longed for wild nature, for green. The disconnect made me feel so utterly, utterly lonely.

And city people are busy; you can’t just pop in for a visit. Their nervous systems are overloaded too, but they don’t notice it anymore. 

How desperately I tried to reach out to friends on Digby’s birthday. A day when no human should be alone unless they choose it. One ‘friend ’ said they could ring me in six hours, but when that call finally came, I was shamed and told I should do more therapy. I just needed an actual human being on my side. In the evening, I finally shared my leftover birthday cake with friends, and I knew I was okay. Humans are herd animals. Grieving needs to be witnessed by others, and some days it just needs company, laughter, lightness, and a cup of tea. 

I had days where the constant mantra in my head was “I don’t want to live. I don’t want to live any more”. It went round and round like a ferris wheel, turning without care. It’s the biggest turn-off for any friendship, so some days I would say nothing. I’d go for a walk with a friend, pushing their pram, grateful to not be alone while the wheel in my head kept turning.

Gratefulness. Another chapter I could write about for ages. When a person is in a deep freeze, gratefulness is out of reach. It’s not accessible. Spiritual bypassers would urge me to enjoy the small things, to lift my frequency. But on the doom-laden days, this was just not possible. I felt broken, damaged, lost, and covered in shame.

I still worked and saw clients. I was able to hold people as I had learnt to hold my own doom. I was capable and, surprisingly, really good at my job, connected to a higher source when working. Maybe I was whole and okay, and just walking through a really long and dark night of the soul? A spiritual journey of deep inner suffering that maybe one day would end? Maybe.

In the two weeks leading up to finding my new home, I was in the deepest of freezes.  The fear and terror were bigger than ever before after the New Year. I did not know what to do anymore, so I just imagined being greeted out of my mother’s womb by my beloved aunty. I visualised that she became my mother as soon as I was born. In my mind’s eye, I saw her holding me tight and just gazing at me with utter delight. She really saw me, and I could just relax and be. I did that over and over again and rested a lot while visiting Margaret River. That was where I finally found my new home. Visualisation is a potent, powerful medicine when it hits the sweet spot and nourishes the nervous system in just the right way.

And this story is really a continuation of my spiritual journey with Aboriginal Elder Hazel from Ningaloo. Some might remember that a huge manta ray at my local beach near Denmark, WA, had sent me travelling to Exmouth a year after my husband’s passing. My new spiritual totem animal led me in mysterious ways to Hazel’s doorstep near Coral Bay, a farm directly on the manta ray dreaming beach. Hazel gave me a manta ray brooch she had bought prior to my unplanned turning up. “I had wondered why I bought this brooch. I am a turtle woman. But now I know that I bought this for you two weeks ago”.

We connected over the years, and I loved her stories of spirit; they always made me feel at home. My husband saw spirits, and I missed having a person like that in my life. After Hazel’s husband passed, I camped at her house as the only white person attending an Aboriginal festival. Hazel had asked me to organise a road trip to Margaret River and Denmark in the New Year. As campervans were all booked out, I rang around until a practitioner friend offered me her home while she was away. When it was time to head off, I rang Hazel, only to find out that she never left Ningaloo and was still up north, not feeling too well herself. It was a big blow, but in the end, I just jumped into my car and drove down alone to this empty house in Margaret River. This turned out to be a blessing. I was feeling unsociable, I slept and rested a lot, read a book, watered the gardens. I felt at home for the first time in a very long time. This feeling of being at home followed me to the beach, where I remembered that a dear friend had sent me a house for sale a few months earlier. I didn’t have the energy to check it out back then, but when I received her email, I said out loud, “If this house is meant to be for me, it will wait.”

And there I was in Margaret River. The house had, of course, sold in these crazy market times, but the three-month settlement had fallen through at the last minute. The house had waited for me. I no longer own any land, but I have a home again. 

I am singing again, I am playing my drum and making up songs. I am able to write again in my home, and I have made this place the most beautiful home ever. I hope to build a new community of friends around me. It is my new place for now.

with love

Barbara 

If you want to find out more about your nervous system and the incredible healing from trauma I am inviting you to read the short article on www.counsellingsomatic.com.au in my blog section  - you can subscribe to my newsletters via my website and receive all future blogs conveniently via email. If you no longer wish to receive emails from me, please unsubscribe.

Feel free to forward my article to others, but please add my name to it for copyright reasons.     

You can also find me on my Facebook page “Counselling Somatic Barbara Schmidt" 

 

Barbara Schmidt

Counselling Somatic

Trauma & Nervous System Recovery Specialist

Mental Health Social Worker

Somatic Experiencing Practitioner, EMDR

m: 0458 234 410

e: barbara@counsellingsomatic.com.au

w: www.counsellingsomatic.com.au

We can’t push the river - when we are pushing we are not creating

We are 80 percent water and so the saying “you can’t push a river” refers directly to us: we are the embodied river! Life means going down this river with its rapids and slow flowing sections. We follow the river all the way to the ocean where we can rest, become vapour and be pulled up by the sun towards the cosmos. And one day we might end up as raindrops falling down onto earth again.

Moving along this river we will come to parts where there is little flow and sometimes it can become so stagnant that we might even stop moving altogether. We can then go into a nervous system freeze state (see blog article “Trauma education I: Freeze state”) and being there isn’t exactly fun. It is so very tempting to start pushing so that we can get out of this uncomfortable place. We strangely seem to learn from an early age to push harder when something is tight; but you cannot undo a knot by pulling it, you need to ease the knot open with patience and a gentle hand.

Stress, trauma, life interruptions or any other overwhelming events can cause our nervous system to tighten. Each time we say “I should …” we are most likely pushing, and then our nervous system automatically contracts. A tight nervous system loses its flexibility and cannot bounce back so easily from life’s ups and downs. Life will always come with its bumpy sections, but with a relaxed nervous system we will be able to ride the waves with more eloquence and ease. When we start pushing while in a freeze state we will most likely push ourselves over the edge.

In the Greek mythology Zeus punished Sisyphus by forcing him to roll an immense boulder up a hill.  Every time it neared the top it would roll back down, repeating this action for eternity. Once we start pushing we are on the endless journey of rolling a big rock up a massively steep hill. We won’t succeed. Should we make it to the top of that hill, we will be paying a price. A price so high, that we wish we’d never started this climb. The cost for our summit success can be adrenal fatigue, brain fog, insomnia, exhaustion and massive burn out symptoms.

Now time won’t equal time any more: if we keep talking to someone once we have had enough might mean we are exhausted for the rest of the whole day. A week of pushing doesn’t equal a week of resting – it may take us weeks if not months to recover from it. If we don’t give up on the things that don’t flow, we will inevitably give up on life itself: Once there is stagnation it will be hard to trust the flow of life or even life itself. We can start feeling suicidal and in a deep freeze state.

Instead of beating ourselves up for being lazy, procrastinating, depressed, overwhelmed or suicidal we need to be really kind to ourselves. We can recognize that the river of life simply got jammed up, so anything coming after it started accumulating and blocking its flow. If we truly give ourselves permission to rest and let go our whole system can relax and we are on the right path.

Time to call in helpers and friends as some of the blocking items are “heavy” and cannot be removed on our own. Via the world of sensations and somatic therapy we can dive deep into the wisdom of our reptilian brain to recognize what is actually blocking the flow. We are herd animals and in times like these we do need a village around us. We can acknowledge where we are with curiosity and surprise: “Oh, looks like something got blocked up! No wonder I’ve been feeling so crap.”

When you’re having a day where there is no flow, get up and go for a gentle walk. If possible try to be mindful of your movements and nature around you. And if you feel like crying, do so, but put your attention on your movements, not on the tears that flow naturally. Allow sound to come with your tears. Make sure you open up all your joints and your spine so flow becomes possible: Yoga and Qigong can be great for this. And swimming is one of the best flow openers while you’ll be cleansed by the ocean plasma at the same time. Don’t forget to drink plenty of water on days where you feel stagnant.

Pushing can take so many hidden forms and I myself at times still overlook serious pushing moments. My grieving journey has gifted me with many deep freeze experiences and at times it felt like I would never recover nor get anything ever done again. But I can only say from experience, no matter how tempting, pushing never works. Instead of going forward you’ll be taking a very long detour instead.

Sometimes we simply need to be patient and trust until life takes us where we are meant to go next. Once your body has regained a better flow you will soon find yourself miraculously doing the things that before you had to force yourself to even get started.

Instead of trying to tick off things on your to do list, you will go into a natural and deeply connected flow. The things around you all of a sudden will let you know what wants to be done versus what seemingly needs to be done.

On some days it may be doing the dishes, finishing your tax, mowing the lawn, chain sawing fire wood, weeding, exercising, reading a book, making art or visiting a friend. On other days it will be having a nap and resting deeply.

With love

Barbara

Barbara Schmidt

Counselling Somatic

Trauma and nervous system recovery 

If you want to find out more about your nervous system and the incredible healing from trauma I am inviting you to read the short articles on www.counsellingsomatic.com.au in my blog section  - you can subscribe to my newsletters via my website and receive all future blogs conveniently via email.
Feel free to forward my article to others, but please add my name to it for copyright reasons.     You can also find me on my Facebook page “Counselling Somatic Barbara Schmidt"

Grieving needs a village - a personal grief journey

Grief is transformative and can be a heart opening rollercoaster passage. Today I am sharing my deeply personal and raw journey here. It’s nice to finish this long awaited newsletter after a very touching deep session with a client on the phone followed by the most nurturing evening stroll. I am so grateful for the beauty around me and am in awe of the moments where I am enjoying life with all my senses in a completely fresh and new way.

I hope that one day soon we all can do death and grief better. We need to, if we want to do life better as a society.

I took time out to grieve after my husband’s death this year and stumbled into the biggest free fall of my life. For four months I did not know if I would find my way back, I seemed caught in a nightmare and there was nothing I could do to change that.

My husband Digby was sick for 16 months and when he died he left an excruciating huge hole. A part of me died with him and I had to fight hard to find myself again. He was a very special person, deeply embodied, with inspiring working class ethics, very creative and smart, unbeknownst to many also deeply spiritual. We had this incredible deep connection and it felt like we were one on a soul level. He held me so beautifully for 22 years, he was my rock, he had my back like no one ever did before in my life and his unconditional love was an incredible gift. We were great teachers to each other right till the end and I feel humbled by it.

The grief that hit me after his death hit me hard. So hard that I was on my knees, screaming. Primal, incredibly loud sounds were coming out of my mouth. I heard these new sounds with surprise, watched them with curiosity as they expressed themselves like nothing I had ever heard before. It felt unbearable and cruel at times and yet I just had to let it rip through me. To let grief go through us is something I have been teaching my clients in the last 30 years of my counselling work. But this time it was bigger than anything I had ever experienced before and I wondered how on earth people grieve who don’t have these skills or the support to get through it. I would allow the huge waves to take me– this was the part I could do, sometimes with the support of colleagues and friends, but it wasn’t the hard part of my grieving journey.

What I had not anticipated was the spiritual disconnection that happened with my man’s death. I was stripped completely bare, so vulnerable that I could barely leave my block of land as a never before known strange rawness and anxiety would make my whole being feel completely exposed and defenseless. I was without a skin and had to ask for food deliveries and cooked meals. I would force food into myself but it felt like eating cardboard. Only when someone was there to share a meal with me, could I eat huge plates full and my taste buds would rejoice in the gifted dinner.

In lots of ways I was unprepared for my husband’s death despite his sickness. Digby needed every ounce of his strength to stay alive and wouldn’t talk about death with me, so I had to grieve 16 months on my own. It was a very lonely grieving whilst still holding hope like a fragile bird. And in the last month I actually thought that Digby would live. He kept saying with conviction that he was sure he was not dying. I asked him often if he was delusional and begged him to talk about death or to teach me things around the block of land in case he would die. But he insisted that he knew with every fiber of this being that he was going to live. He was such a grounded person, that I felt I had to trust his judgment. But he was wrong. He died in my arms.

The second I realized that he had passed away peacefully I strangely only felt joy. I was proud that he was able to let go so easily instead of holding on to life when it was his time to go. I felt his joy as he left his body and could sense and see his essence in the room as a big round blue ball. I held him all night after his passing, sang to him the song "Over the rainbow", talked to him, sand some more and cried. I was awake with him all night. And all the next morning when his body went cold I no longer wanted to be close to his physique. his body was all of a sudden an empty shell. It didn't carry his energy, I no longer wanted to bring his body home as previously planned. I felt Digby's spirit everywhere and again his joy helped me accept his death. On the way home I thought to myself, that I would be able to ride the waved of grief with "ease" as my man was still so strongly with me in spirit.

The following days I organized his funeral and on three days we had an empty coffin at our home. Friends and neighbours would pop in to paint symbols onto the coffin in honor of my husband (our daughter painted the whole lid) while I mostly lay on a mattress in the living room surrounded by people and food. This creative painting felt like such an important ritual and brought everyone together. Grief would rip through me and shock me to the core in its intensity, I could hardly walk as all my muscles were tired from shaking so much, but I still felt held and carried hope.

This changed on the fourth day after his passing when a huge double rainbow was right over our block of land. The biggest rainbow I had ever seen, with colors of an intensity coming towards me, which I found almost scary. My daughter and a close friend where there at the time and we all felt it was a sign from Digby. What I didn’t know at the time was that this was his parting gift. His spirit left this dimension with the fading of the rainbow.                                                                                                                        And with it my whole world collapsed. My believe system tumbled and I no longer had a scaffolding to hold me on this earth.

In the beginning this new grief was still doable as I felt propelled to sort things out and to clean like never before in my life. I had so much energy in my system despite a huge lack of sleep. My body had naturally switched to movement, the best antidote to depression and collapse. And the cleaning up helped me to process all that I had witnessed during Digby’s sickness. I howled when the grief would take me, but if I was only weeping I would take myself for a walk and would then naturally end up working physically hard on the block: chain sawing, stacking hundreds of pavers, clearing out sheds and the garage, cleaning and scrubbing the whole house, sorting out clothes and paper work. I honestly worked in these first three weeks more than I ever did in 3 years put together and it had a natural easy flow to it. Physical work and movement helped me step forward and start creating a new space for the life on my own. For the first week I slept at a neighbor’s place as being at home had too many painful reminders of dreams not met, I would only come home during the day to clean the space and make things mine. This was such an important process and going away a lot helped me titrate the grief experience and give me breaks from it. But as I worked my tired body so hard and couldn’t digest enough food, my weight was dropping off me too quickly. And people all of a sudden stopped popping in regularly and food deliveries became scarce.

There came a time when I no longer was in this natural flow to work around block and house and I knew I needed a break. I went up to Fremantle to friends and learnt to eat again, I rested, I rode the bike along the beach and practiced going into shops. I felt a big shift after my return home, but I was not pulled to work on the block any more and when this regular movement stopped a great depression fell over me. I no longer could feel my husband around me and this loss stripped me bare of everything. All of a sudden huge parts of my life where all gone at once: the incredible special rock and soul of my life had left, and I was no longer able to do my counselling work which had been such a big part and passion in my life, but worst of all: my spiritual believe system had completely crashed.

My longing to leave this planet and to follow my soul mate was huge. Suicide was not an option. On many levels I knew that I still had a good life ahead of me once the worst of the grieving journey was over. I somehow had to find a way to reconnect to this planet again.

I used to love looking at the stars, it would always give me the greatest comfort. But all of a sudden I found it confusing and vacant looking into the infinite cosmos. I was no longer at home on this planet and the endlessness of the stars had become meaningless and empty to me. I experienced this as a huge loss. Nothing was holding me any longer.

Again I wondered how people do grieve. There is nothing in our culture that supports a grieving person, no rituals, no cultural guidance and people around you often don’t know how to support you. In the olden days a grieving person would wear black for a year to remind everyone in their circle that they were grieving and still needing support. In our culture we have a funeral and this is pretty much the end of it. But grief needs a village, it cannot be done well on your own and for me the practical help, visits, sleep overs away from home, phone calls and shared meals meant the world to me. How do people grief who can’t allow their sadness to surface, who can’t ask for support, say no to the wrong support and make sure they ask the right people? Grieving requires so many skills like the ability to set boundaries, knowing your needs from the inside out, saying no, reaching out and asking for help, the ability to be vulnerable and to make new friends. I guess it is a crash course for most people, an initiation to a new life. But I do think as a culture we need to learn to do death and grieving better and I hope that one day I can write a book about all I have learnt. I would love to hear from other cultures who have a much clearer understanding of doing death and grief. I thought I could do death, I accompanied so many grieving people in my work, I never had a problem talking about death and I have lost someone who meant the world to me before, but Digby’s passing is something that makes me question death and its finality in a very new way.

I guess my situation was also a bit extreme as I found myself without the stability and structure of a job for months, I was without my family of origin who lives on another continent, no possibility to fly home for a while because of Covid and then some other negative unsupportive outside issues I don’t want to mention here. Death really does bring out the best and the worst in people. On top of this I have a huge block of land that had been too much for my husband and myself at times. I had to learn how to start petrol water pumps and manage our off grid set up and l was often left with a constant feeling of overwhelm mixed with the most immense grief.

People suggested I should go back to work, but I felt it was unethical to use my clients to give me stability when I was lacking it from the inside out. I had to find that place in myself first and at times it felt like I was locked in a nightmare with no way out. In retrospective I feel humbled by these difficult circumstances. This intense grieving and the difficult conditions surrounding it gave me a lot of insight into what grieving people can experience. I lean best if I experience things myself and well, I sure did experience a bit.

I went on my own search and listened to an Indian mystic who spoke of wind, fire, water and earth cleansing rituals to help after the passing of a loved one. In my desperation I remembered Tim Win, the iceman who had developed a special breathing technique and who would swim in ice water after his wife’s suicide. So I started swimming in our dam in the middle of winter. It was freezing, but every time I swam I could feel myself a bit better. I would try to swim in the dam or ocean and shower and have a bath 5 times or more a day. To reconnect myself to this planet I used the help of the earth elements. I would rub clay from the dam all over my body and soak up the sun before jumping into the cold water. It felt odd, strange and unfamiliar doing this, but I was desperate enough and I felt called to do it and it helped. Hot baths were like a womb holding me and in between I’d run up to the dam and swim. I collected and chain sawed wood around the block and lit fires and would let the smoke go through me. I found that singing and toning helped tremendously when anxiety and grief where drowning me. Overtone and throat singing to the humming of my shower fan supported me when I didn’t know what else to do.

With every swim and mud ritual I felt a teeny bit better. It was a very gradual process. On bad days I would swim a lot, on very bad days that brought me to my knees I had to force myself to go for a walk at least in the afternoon and would always end up going for a swim as well then.

In Somatic Experiencing I learnt the importance of going back to incomplete places of trauma with support and with the exact right resources. One day on the phone to one of my many supportive SE colleagues and friends I had an image of my husband’s death pop up. I went back to this memory to renegotiate a small thing that was missing for me, this then took me to the image of the rainbow over our block and I realized that this was the stumbling block that had tied me firmly into nowhere land. When people would tell me, that of course I was grieving and sometimes feeling depressed as it only had been 2 months since Digby died, I still knew that something wasn’t quite right within me. There was more than “just” this huge grief. Something was keeping me locked up and trapped, something was not letting me move forward and kept me stuck and tied to the past.

If a memory has not been healed, it is like strings holding us prisoner to this past unfinished moment. These seemingly unbreakable ties can be healed with the right support and uniquely created resources. For me it was imagining a group of women huddled all around me, holding me very tight and speaking clearly to me, that this was the moment my husband’s spirit would leave this dimension and that afterwards I would not be able to feel him as I had previously known. In my imagination I was kicking and screaming in pain, throwing myself on the floor whilst these archetypal women would hold me with allowing gentleness. A huge tantrum and grief were ripping through me both at the same time. It was so important that someone explained to me what was going to happen and that I could respond to it with all my body while being held. Feeling this holding and support while also experiencing this big discharge, released my trapped spirit.

The next day I felt a door had opened and that I had turned a corner. I would be able to return to work again when ready. My counselling practice and some form of normality was no longer completely out of my reach. There was no rush to return to work and I still had some bad days and will have this unbearable grief for a very long time, but work was now within my scope. A week after this counselling session I felt called to contact my clients. I have been experiencing so much new joy counselling them again and am doing so with ease.

My deepest thank you and gratitude goes out to the people who supported me in this special and sacred grieving time and for the friends who are still there with me today. Thank you for your believing in me when I doubted myself and for listening to my experiences when I couldn’t listen to anyone else. I will need your ongoing support, you popping in for a chat, a walk and shared food.

Grieving needs a village and I am grateful I had at least glimpses of it.

Barbara Schmidt

Counselling Somatic

Trauma and nervous system recovery

If you want to find out more about your nervous system and the incredible healing from trauma I am inviting you to read the short articles on www.counsellingsomatic.com.au in my blog section  - you can subscribe to my newsletters via my website and receive all future blogs conveniently via email/

Feel free to forward my article to others, but please add my name to it for copyright reasons.

You can also find me on my Facebook page “Counselling Somatic Barbara Schmidt"

Nurturing Resilience

I was lucky enough to be able to attended an amazing training with Kathy Kain in Melbourne called “Touch Skills for Therapists” and, during my Christmas holidays, finally read her book “Nurturing Resilience” (Helping Client Move Forward from Developmental Trauma) co-written with Stephen Terrell.

Too little is known about trauma and trauma informed therapy is unfortunately still underrepresented in the field of therapy. This can have a catastrophic effect for clients with complex early trauma, who often also suffer from physical symptoms such as migraines, fibromyalgia, chronic fatigue, autoimmune disorders, sensitivities to the environment, pain syndromes, insomnia, irritable bowel syndrome, spastic colon, constipation and/or diarrhea.

When not highly qualified it is easy to destabilize this client group further. They often suffer from intense emotional and physical dysregulation with a tendency to be hyper-aroused or hypo-aroused, limited resiliency and a predisposition to dissociate. Attachment and bonding difficulties are often underlying and their symptoms can escalate dramatically out of nowhere.

I  learnt a lot reading this book and can only highly recommend reading it for yourself. The following is just a short summary (some sentences are direct quotes from the book) of what was important to me, and hopefully it will inspire some therapists and health professionals to purchase the book:

When we grow up in an environment which is chaotic and lacks consistent feedback surrounding the safety of a situation, we become confused and then can’t properly differentiate between what is safe and what is a threat. We are then tuning more acutely toward the assessment of danger and limiting our ability to recognize safety when it happens. Then our physiology later in life will constantly prepare for danger, which has a detrimental effect on our health long term as constantly preparing for danger uses up a lot of energy. This means that there is not enough left for e.g. digestion, tissue repair and the immune system. Stress chemicals like cortisol will cause havoc and in the end our physical systems can be completely turned upside down and work against us. Parasympathetic nerve and sympathetic nerve become out of sync and turn on when they shouldn’t. In some cases they may even do the opposite of what they should be doing.

And the thing is, when we are tuned in to danger, we will certainly always find it! This then becomes a self fulfilling loop:  “our dysregulation signals threat, our memory of past confirms that threat is present and our threat response kicks into gear. We will over-respond or under-respond to the experience of threat and others around us are likely to respond as if they too are threatened.... We may even misinterpret healthy sensations and responses or give them a lopsided meaning!"

Hence the biggest importance in therapy is the building of a “safety map”:  learning to track positive sensations to describe what safety feels like (not just cognitively as developmental trauma happened way before the cognitive brain was developed):

“Interoception is the process by which a person notices their internal state. A combination of sensations and perceptions of physical processes are then evaluated by  the person to assess their interior milieu and decipher what it’s telling them about what they are feeling, how they are and even who they are.”

Improving interoception is a big part of building capacity towards resilience and is key in healing from trauma. “Our loudest source of interoceptive information comes from our digestive tract, it sends back a tremendous amount of information back to the brain.”

Interoception and Exteroception together (aka Neuroception) are the body’s holistic responses to tell us whether we are safe or not (this is not a cognitive process!!).Under stress even a healthy perceptive system provides distorted information. So if someone grew up with early trauma the amount of distorted information they have stored unconsciously is tremendous.

In therapy it is most important to develop a somatic vocabulary for positive experiences. Without properly attuned interoceptive language we cannot recognize the felt sense of safety; we cannot tell if we are truly regulated and hence can’t truly regulate ourselves when needed. It is so important to be able to differentiate between threat and excitation (enjoyable-ness without any threat). Clients who lack a “safety map” are only tuned in to a trauma map which will shape all their experiences.

Key element in treatment of developmental trauma is hence helping the client build healthier and more accurate interoception. Clients might not recognize “normal” when they feel it, they may interpret sensations through the lens of potential danger in the beginning instead of checking them out with curiosity and experimentation. “Resilience and regulation often have a quality of quiet that some clients will find unnerving. Quiet in the past signalled to them that something bad was about to happen to them.”

Regular homework to notice when something positive or pleasurable happens is supportive for clients. They need to learn to identify these experiences on a sensation level (otherwise it is too cognitive, too much rooted in higher functions of the brain that weren’t online at the time of the traumatic experiences)

The ACE (Adverse Childhood Experiences) study showed that trauma increases the risk of significant health issues over time. Immune responses and uptake of nutrition via digestion and access to replenishing rest are limited, while survival physiology is ramped up. This means that we than have too much sympathetic activation with inadequate breaking from the parasympathetic system. The body may even works against itself when sympathetic and parasympathetic systems are activated at the same time; and a high dorsal tone means being stuck in a freeze state. “A chronic dorsal state in a client is the mirror image of a chronically high level of sympathetic arousal with secretion of stress chemicals that disrupt bodily systems and don’t support relaxed social engagement.”

Contributors to ACE can be: prenatal and perinatal trauma, hospitalizations, early separation, neglect, domestic violence, alcoholism, falls, anesthesia, exposure to toxins, head injuries (just to name a few).

In the first three years of childhood we build the neurophysiological architecture for regulation and connectivity. The vagus nerve that supports social engagement acts as a break on the sympathetic system. It is responsible for slowing the heart rate without needing to secrete stress chemicals that disrupt other bodily systems. The vagus nerve becomes myelinated in pregnancy and this process continues through to adolescence, though most of it happens in the first 6 months after birth.        “When our early foundation is wobbly, everything built on top of it becomes unstable.”

The goal in therapy is regulation and to expand the window of tolerance. When in the window of tolerance we are truly regulated. We are in the optimal arousal zone, have the ability to self sooth and self regulate. We feel safe and connected; capable to receive, process and integrate information, and have the ability to reach out and have a sense of belonging.

Clients with early developmental trauma use a Faux window instead. They look regulated, but have to use defensive management patterns as a substitute for regulation. This can be via compulsive eating, drinking, dissociation, acting out, self medication, busyness, overworking, obsessive attempts to experience a sense of social connection (eg. constant smiles/ joking) or isolating oneself and withdrawing as social situations feel too overstimulating. In the faux window we create a sense of stability and regulation of arousal by narrowing our range of responses, reducing our flexibility and our ability for vulnerability. 

To give you a personal example: After a counselling session I had with my supervisor where too many old childhood stress chemicals were released all at once, I had to isolate myself from the world for days and overuse my old faux window. I was very aware of it after reading Kathy’s book and worked hard and asked for help to stabilize my own nervous system in order to be able to return to equilibrium and my window of tolerance.

Therapists need to have highly trained observational skills to notice subtle indicators for when a client is in a faux window as a client might look completely calm on the outside and even report feeling calm and normal. But a change of face color, body posture or breathing pattern might indicate that they are actually dissociated or anxious without being aware of it themselves - the  faux window has become the norm for them.  “A clients return to faux window may be mistaken for a return to regulation and the clinician may proceed with further interventions that only serve to strengthen the client’s defensive accommodations... A clinician can easily misunderstand or misjudge the client’s capacity to tolerate more stimulus.”

Therapy with ACE clients needs to be regulation informed, come in small increments and work from the bottom (reptilian brain) up. A therapists own ability to authentically self regulate and co-regulate will be vital.

There was so much more covered in this book for therapists, like the role of touch in therapy, somatic shame, polyvagal theory, the locus of control, the narrative of trauma and over/under-coupling.

I can highly recommend reading this book and can’t wait to read the next book “The Tao of Trauma’” that Kathy Kain has co-written with Alaine Duncan.

I hope that with my summary I contribute to your curiosity in understanding trauma and trauma informed therapy.

I certainly am passionate about this field.

Barbara Schmidt

 

Barbara Schmidt

Counselling Somatic

Trauma and Nervous System Recovery

If you want to find out more about your nervous system and the incredible healing from trauma I am inviting you to read the short articles on www.counsellingsomatic.com.au in my blog section  - you can subscribe to my newsletters via my website and receive all future blogs conveniently via email/

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What I have learnt by offering Somatic Therapy – moments of grace

Most of you know that I am not a conventional therapist. As well as being trained in many interesting trauma treatment modalities I enrolled in a three year training in Somatic Experiencing  four years ago.

After finishing this training and quickly becoming booked out I did realize towards the end of last year that I needed to take a serious break and look after myself. I couldn’t really afford to take that step, but I deeply felt I had to follow my inner voice and respect my own nervous systems needs. It is of tremendous importance to me to role model what I teach my clients. It didn’t come easy saying “No” to clients, but I knew that I just had to do this.  I didn’t work for two months and then only continued with very few clients until recently when I felt I was ready to take on new clients once again.

It has been an important time caring for myself, letting three years of intense Somatic Experiencing training integrate naturally and giving myself this precious time to re-evaluate carefully how I work with clients. I became more and more aware of my own body sensations when working with clients and it often surprised me immensely what my body was able to pick up when working with another human being.  At times it felt a lot bigger than just myself,  kind of sacred, and I felt very humbled and honoured witnessing these moments of grace. I learnt to trust when something in myself didn’t feel quite right despite a client in front of me insisting they were okay and things looking truly fine on the outside. It has been such an interesting journey learning to completely trust my intuition – there were plenty of moments when I doubted it as it went so much against my mind’s judgment. But over and over again I found out that in the end it had been my intuition, my own body’s finetuned feedback system, that had been right!

Seeing a lot less clients gave me the space to notice reoccurring patterns: It is incredible how many clients don’t have either flight or fight available to them. They live being stuck in one survival mechanism or trapped in the freeze state and it makes their life so much more difficult. Often clients don’t have any healthy anger available to set boundaries and hence become door mats to others or turn all their rage against themselves, hence sabotaging their own healing and progress.

Trauma causes our boundary skin to break – and without boundaries we feel too much, are constantly overwhelmed and easily hurt, can’t set clear boundaries and lack assertiveness. As parents we then energetically merge with our children instead of helping them become their own empowered selves, which in return hinders our personal growth and ability to stay present. Everyone is so unique and what they need to heal their boundary skin is just as splendidly unique.

Sometimes it is like a detective story, following the bodies’ sensations and secret messages and hence finding out what needs repairing in the present caused by trauma of the past. It is amazing  discovering what the body wants to complete now (it couldn’t do so when in a stressful  and overwhelming situation). Working with the hurts of the ”inner child” and supplying it in the here and now with what was needed back then is another reoccurring topic in my sessions. Finding what resources and supports now has a tremendous healing effect and brings the cells in our body into a mindful present time state. Instead of being stuck in the past we can then truly move forward, making  more room for joy, kindness,  appreciation and gratefulness.

I love exploring with a client their own nervous system’s functioning. Every person’s nervous system is so different and it is a dance working out what nourishes each individual. Clients can sometimes learn for the very first time what really supports them (and what doesn’t!) and are empowered to regulate their affect. They are then no longer at the mercy of their emotions and overwhelming thoughts, instead they can pendulate to a more relaxed way of being.  For me it’s like going on a very exciting treasure hunt with great curiosity and gentleness while slowing down and noticing deeply.  

Through my training I learnt to understand my own nervous system better and better.  I became skilled at noticing what nourishes and resources, and, what overwhelms me. I finally understood why getting too excited and becoming ungrounded can have such a negative backlash for me. I also learnt that being great at making big brave decisions and jumping into cold water is a strength I will always have, but learning to make smaller steps between decisions instead is much more helpful for me in the long run.

I have been working closely together  with other therapists in this time and it has been interesting watching myself in the role of the client.  I became faster at realizing who was good for me and who wasn’t.  It sometimes was confusing when someone working with me was so nice and well meaning, but my body gave me signals that this wasn’t really going to help me move forward. I learnt that I always need to listen to my body. It knows best. Full stop. Even when it is against all rules, theories and expertise in another healing field. We are all unique and in the end only our own self can determine what is right for us.

I have had my break and lived through it with all its ups and downs (yes, there were plenty of downs as well!) and am now ready to go onto more of these detective treasure hunts with you.  I am taking on new clients! Since I know my nervous systems limitations I however will only take on a limited number of clients at a time.

If you want to find out more about your nervous system and the incredible healing of trauma I am inviting you to read the short articles on my blog under www.counsellingsomatic.com.au or on my Facebook page “Counselling Somatic Barbara Schmidt

Artwork by Meera Jacka (first left handed painting) meera.mazdamoo@gmail.com

I haven’t written for a while and it’s because I needed to sit back and rest. Writing my series on trauma education, setting up a newsletter system (weeks of work, I  couldn’t believe it!), then unplanned and suddenly moving into an office space of my own (lots of physical renovating) and with it all of a sudden a full private practise with a waiting list....took its toll and now that I am back online I can share what I have learnt (the hard way) as I hope it will help you (to avoid the hard way).

I just heard this story of an inlet, where a little trickle went through the thick sandbar and then over time this small trickle went bigger and bigger, turned into a slither of a stream with a stronger flow and eventually the whole inlet broke and the water rushed back into the sea.

It’s a great analogy for how therapy (and life!) works. Most of us are so desperate with our conditions that we start digging into the sandbar, starting to shuffle a wide opening with big movements. While we are working overtime and pushing ourselves beyond our capacity, it will take forever digging the inlet open that way. By the time we are a third into the big thick sandbar we will be exhausted and we will have to stop and take months to recover . We forget the bigger picture, that drawing a thin line all the way from the inlet to the ocean, allowing for this gentle trickle to go through while taking in the scenery would have a much bigger effect in the end. With the water doing the work for us. In tune with the elements around us.

Pushing ourselves outside our nervous systems capacity NEVER takes us forward. It might feel like we are getting there quicker for a short time, but that’s forgetting about the recovery time we will need along the way or afterwards. And that one is usually a lot longer than we ever could have  anticipated. I know this and I teach this in my sessions and yet I still fall for it at times as I am naturally a bit impatient.

It is so tempting to “get in there” and “just do it quickly” as we have so much energy and enthusiasm and hope to begin with. Society trains us from early on to go over our limits, to ignore or not even hear that little voice which says “Enough! I need a rest!”. We are racing along as our mind has long taken over pumped with the injection of hope. It now runs the show, completely ignoring intuition that put us on the path in the first place. We are rushing onwards with great big steps, ignoring our sore muscles and massaging a cramp away while hobbling along annoyed - our goal seems to be so close in reach. But we won’t get there. The path that opened up is closed as our mind has pushed intuition out of the way along with our bodies and nervous systems needs.

A healthy nervous systems is relaxed, open, attuned, coherent and flexible. That way it can respond best to any given situation. If we have experienced trauma the nervous system contracts and the more constricted it is, the less flexible we can respond. Little things can then throw us into big chaos.   

                                                                                                                                                                 Trauma means that something happened way too fast for us to process and to cope with and so whenever we go with too much speed we are retriggering our system. Going slow is the best antidote to any trauma – the whole brain then has a chance to come online and to process what happened in small “doable” little segments. If we are however pressing on we are not helping the nervous system to de-constrict: Pushing means pushing inwards. Overriding means overriding the boundaries of what is possible. Pushing and overriding means causing the nervous system to contract  further.

Overriding can be when we are saying “Yes” to something even though we’d rather say “No”; when we are staying that half hour longer with our friend who needed support, ignoring that we need our own space again; when we are pushing ourselves to clean the whole house even though we’ve had enough half way through and could just as well finish it the next day; when we are hanging out with someone thinking we should enjoy their company, but feeling tense throughout most of it; when we visit a busy place on a day where we’d rather be curled up at home – the list is endless.

I am not saying we shouldn’t challenge ourselves – there is plenty of challenges to be had without overriding our deeper needs. As a therapist I encourage my clients to listen to their needs and boundaries  and I watch out that my clients don’t override by telling too much of their story, by sitting too close or too far away from me or by following an invitation by me when it’s not really serving them. Healing cannot happen in a therapy session if you are overriding (“to get there quicker”) and if you don’t feel really safe.

It has been an amazing journey getting to know my own nervous system during my Somatic Experiencing training and ever since. It has been extraordinary learning its ins and outs and I am still learning about it every day. It still stuns me that going slow and gentle can have such amazing results as I am so used to “digging in hard”. There is so much more fun to be had if we take it easy, as we can take in the scenery along the way, enjoy every little step alongside our passage, watch with awe the flow of life doing “its thing” and taking over in this unexpected “much-bigger-than-us”- way.

I am really good at following my intuition and when I become inspired I follow it no matter how scary at first. But I jump in way too quick and then run out of steam. My sensitive nervous system can’t hack that, my mind takes over and I get into a “doing mode” rather a being mode. I work harder and harder and push myself (“Almost there!”, “So close, just a bit longer!”, “ You worked so hard, don’t give up now!”) only to then requiring months of recovery.

I hope I will learn from this last time where I pushed myself way too much, renovating my new office space with lightning speed while slowly beginning to limp emotionally, physically, socially and spiritually (my guess is it will take a few more learning lessons though). I wish next time my intuition inspires me I will sit back and wait a bit longer before jumping into action and letting my mind (it doesn’t know how to stop!) take over. I will try to not override my need for breaks and allow time for the transition. I want to go with the pace my nervous system can take easily. It works so much better in the long term. Life is so much more fun if we go a bit slower.

If you like these posts, please feel free to share them. Everything I have written is copy righted and I am only requesting to give me credit for information passed on and copied. Thanks.

Should you have missed my trauma education series, just check out my Facebook page “Barbara Schmidt Counselling Somatic” or scroll back under the blog section on my web site www.counsellingsomatic.com.au and you can read these easy to understand articles on nervous systems, trauma and healing. You can also subscribe to my newsletters so you won’t miss any future posts.

Have a great day,

Barbara

Counselling Somatic

Barbara Schmidt

Mental Health Social Worker

EMDR, Somatic Experiencing Practitioner

144 Stirling Terrace, Albany &

3/55 Strickland Street, Denmark

e: barbara@counsellingsomatic.com.au

w: www.counsellingsomatic.com.au

m: 0458 234 410