When I first met Fergus, he was in his late twenties and battling chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS). A likeable guy with a quiet charm and a lively sense of humor, he was using his strong intellect to dive deep into the biomedical aspects of fatigue and working hard to find a path to recovery.
Not wanting to leave any stone unturned, Fergus had started working with me on the psychology side of his healing. Although he was certain that his illness was in his body and not his mind, his research had demonstrated that the mind, emotions, and body are deeply connected.
From our first session, it was obvious to me that Fergus was out of touch with himself emotionally. He could easily engage with practical exercises to grow awareness of his thoughts, and things that involved willpower or effort were no issue for him. But, when it came to slowing down and connecting emotionally, I might as well have been asking him to solve Pythagorean Theorem.
As we’ll explore later, there are different defenses and strategies we use to train ourselves to not feel our emotions. For Fergus, this looked like always being busy and using his mind as a way of analyzing and distancing himself from how he felt. Although his intellect was a valuable tool in his day-today life, it was in danger of becoming a major block to connecting to his heart and emotions.
Wishing to understand more deeply the origins of Fergus’s emotional shutdown, in one session I questioned him about his childhood and what he’d been taught about his feelings. He told me that at the age of eight he’d been sent to one of the UK’s top boarding schools, frequented by British royalty and the upper echelons of society.
Fergus didn’t come from a particularly wealthy family, so the school fees alone had been the source of considerable financial strain for his parents. But it was a burden they were willing to bear because their children were the most important thing in their lives, and they wanted to give them the very best start possible.
For Fergus’s parents, sending their son to boarding school was an act of love, but he experienced it as the ultimate rejection. Beyond the fact that eight is a very young age for a child to be separated from their parents for months on end, Fergus was also a particularly sensitive boy. During his first weeks at the school, he cried himself to sleep every night, longing for his mother’s comfort and reassurance. Ultimately, he was craving the emotional need for love.
This was in the days before mobile phones and email, and the only means of communication the children were allowed was a letter every few weeks. Fergus counted the days until he could write his first letter, convinced that once his mother realized just how unhappy he was she’d let him come home.
However, what he didn’t know was that the letters were vetted before being sent, and the following day he was taken aside by his housemaster and instructed to rewrite his letter as the contents might be too upsetting for his mother to read. With his only lifeline to the comfort that he so desperately craved cut off, Fergus realized he had a choice – he could continue to cry himself to sleep every night and live in the emotional hell his life had become, or he could shut down his emotions; he opted for the latter.
The teachers at Fergus’s school strongly promoted the virtues of being ‘tough’ and not showing emotion; part of the generation who’d grown up in postwar Britain, they valued keeping a ‘stiff upper lip,’ and if Fergus was going to survive, he had to follow their lead. Put another way, they taught him the wrong kind of strength, and he learned that it was no longer safe to show his emotions.
The more Fergus shut down his emotions and vulnerability, the more he thrived in school life, and by the time the holidays finally came he was highly practiced at it and felt a sense of pride at showing his parents how ‘strong’ he’d become. He was on the way to becoming an emotionally disconnected man before his age hit double digits.
And the more Fergus disconnected from his emotions, the more he learned to live in his mind as a place of comfort. He learned that emotions are a sign of weakness; that thoughts are better than emotions; and that if he fell apart emotionally, no one would be there to hold him.
Fergus performed well academically, and he continued to develop his intellectual reasoning skills over his emotional sensitivity. The only hint of the emotional pain he’d buried was his aggression on the rugby field, the sport being a blessed outlet for his anger and hurt.
As Fergus relayed this story, he showed barely a hint of emotion; he might have been talking about someone else’s life. On some level, he knew that what he was revealing was significant, but he was almost completely disconnected from the emotional impact of the life he was describing.
The more Fergus talked, the clearer it became that retreating into his mind had been a defense against his true feelings and emotions. The problem was that the fortress he’d built around his heart had now become a prison. The walls he’d built to help keep the world out were keeping him trapped inside.
Furthermore, we cannot close our heart selectively. If we allow ourselves to feel love, we risk feeling loss. So, by closing his heart to his pain, longing, and sadness, Fergus was also closing his heart to love, joy, and the capacity to feel emotional connection to others. The consequence was that long before he’d had issues with his health, Fergus had struggled with emotional intimacy, particularly in relationships. He pushed people away, and was unable to be vulnerable, and the result was that although he longed to be in a long-term relationship, he seemed to lack the capacity to do so.
Let’s look at Fergus’s situation in the context of the four stages, or ECHOs, of trauma. As a child, he’d suffered the traumatic event of being separated from his parents before he was ready, and the separation itself meant he was cut off from the very love he needed. Furthermore, Fergus had become used to the fact that he had a constant background feeling of anxiety and the sense that the world wasn’t a safe place – i.e., his homeostatic balance had shifted.
However, what was most damaging for Fergus wasn’t so much the event, but the beliefs and behaviors he’d learned from the experience, which, going forward, had echoed throughout every area of his life. When we learn that our emotions aren’t safe, and that they’re not welcome, these are not just beliefs that get set up for the short term – instead, they become our operating system for life.
Of course, we don’t come up with these beliefs in isolation; they’re often heavily influenced by the environment around us, which is far from helped by the medical professionals that many of us look to for guidance. To help you make sense of this, please indulge me while I share a brief overview of the roots of modern psychology…
Most experts credit the inception of the field of psychology as we know it to the American philosopher William James in the late 19th century. Although James’s work was truly groundbreaking at the time, it was his view that emotion is the result of our mind’s perception of our environment. Put another way, emotion is a product of our thinking mind, not a living entity in itself, with its own wisdom and sensitivities.
A few decades later, along came the great Sigmund Freud, an Austrian neurologist who founded psychoanalytic theory. Although Freud, too, made some hugely important contributions to our understanding of the human condition, in psychoanalysis, he saw emotions as a byproduct of our unruly unconscious mind. They’re something to be suspicious of, rather than nurtured and opened to.
In response to Freud’s preoccupation with the unruly and untrainable world of the unconscious, a more pragmatic psychological approach took hold in the mid-1950s with the model of behavioral psychology. Inspired by Pavlov’s famous experiments on his unfortunate dogs 50 years earlier, behavioral psychologists attempted to reduce the human condition to our predictable and trainable reactions to the complex world around us.
In the 1960s, the realization that the world we inhabit is not that simple gave rise to cognitive psychology. Cognitive psychologists made the rather fundamental point that two people can be exposed to the same stimulus and yet demonstrate a very different response. They focused on what they called the mysterious ‘black box’ between stimulus and response and attempted to explain human experience by our logical thinking processes.
And then, in the 1980s, a seeming miracle occurred in the world of academic psychology when the enemy camps of behavioral psychology and cognitive psychology took a proverbial deep breath and realized that perhaps they might both be right. Cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) was born, and it’s been the mainstream psychological approach ever since. CBT is primarily about using rational thinking to change our thoughts and behaviors and has little time for feelings and emotions.
Now, although I certainly believe that CBT has its place, the hugely disproportionate amount of research money it’s received compared to many other psychological approaches has simply served to build the assumption that it’s the only effective approach. And CBT also misses a fundamental point – human beings are so much more than their mind.
The word ‘psychology’ is derived from the Greek word ‘psyche,’ which means ‘life’ or ‘breath.’ Some other derived meanings of the word include ‘self’ or ‘soul.’ My preferred definition is that psychology is ultimately the study of the soul. That being the case, the excellent progress that traditional psychology has made in studying the arena of the mind has missed the fact that our mind is just a small part of our ultimate experience. How about our heart? Our feelings? Our emotions? Can these all just be reduced to our rational (or indeed irrational) cognitions about the world around us?
Of course, it makes sense that traditional psychology focuses in the way it does – it’s a product of academic institutions that value intellect, reasoning, and logic above all else. In more recent years the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-V) has been criticized for having been influenced by the pharmaceutical industry,1,2 for pathologizing healthy reactions to life events, and for being culturally insensitive to the experiences of women and of people from marginalized cultures.3,4
In fact, you might be shocked to hear that the third iteration of the DSM in the 1970s (upon which later editions are still based) was produced by a very small group of white male psychiatrists who held a series of meetings and took votes on what they considered ‘normal’.5 It was very far from being a truly scientific and inclusive or culturally representative process.
Indeed, when was the last time you heard someone speak of the longings and wishes of the heart in a university lecture theater? In the years I spent studying psychology, the closest a lecturer came to exploring emotions was when describing the various signs of paranoia and mental illness.
It’s not only the field of psychology that’s contributed to a relegation of the heart and emotions to a minor footnote in the story of our lives – much of the popular psychology movement has followed a somewhat similar tack. Often, emotions are divided into categories of ‘positive’ and ‘negative.’ So, the goal becomes, how can we experience more positive emotions, such as happiness and excitement, and fewer negative emotions, such as sadness and anxiety?
As we’ll discuss later, in truth, all emotions are ‘positive’ because they all have something important to communicate to us and deserve to be witnessed and experienced. The constant prioritizing of ‘positive’ emotions tends to go alongside a general attitude of ‘just look for the positive’ or ‘good vibes only.’ In some circles, this has come to be called toxic positivity, and I think, rightly so – just as junk food damages our physical body, so toxic positivity can damage our emotional body.
I’m not suggesting that we should wallow in our emotions and become stuck in them; however, they do need to be allowed to move through us, in the way I described in the last chapter, and the rejection of large parts of our emotional range ends up causing a world of pain for us and quite possibly those around us.
At this point, though, you’d be forgiven for thinking, how on earth is it possible for large parts of society to simply ignore the callings of their heart – to effectively assign their emotional life to an eternal purgatory?
Well, in reality, what happens is that the emotions don’t evaporate or disappear (if only life was that simple.) Instead, they’re suppressed into our unconscious, which means they’re a living part of our experience but we’re unable to connect with them or understand them.
As we touched on in Chapter 2, we all walk around with a metaphorical black sack containing all the traumas and emotions we’ve experienced but not processed and digested. If everything’s going to plan in our life and we’re not exposed to further shocks or traumas, we might be able to function relatively easily (or at least appear to on the surface). But when we get pushed beyond our coping limits, or we experience a shock, the top of that black sack opens, and we experience an explosion of unprocessed traumas and emotions. And then, once we’ve let off steam, the chances are the top gets tightly sealed again.
The more we suppress our emotions, and the deeper we push them away, the more dangerous they become in our life – like a toxic substance that festers and eats away at everything we value as important.
Sometimes, unprocessed emotional pain expresses itself as physical pain. Indeed, there’s a growing body of evidence demonstrating the relationship between chronic pain and childhood trauma, for example.6–10 When we don’t process our emotional pain as a child, it’s held in our body as physical pain in our future. Some people experience their emotional disconnection in the anxiety that comes from living in their mind.
And the more our emotions are rejected, the more they color the lens through which we see the world around us. Indeed, we don’t see the world as it really is – we see it through the lens of our beliefs and the meanings we’ve created.11 To truly heal the emotional impacts of our trauma, we must first understand the beliefs and meanings that obscure our ability to see ourselves and the world clearly.
It’s thought that in any given moment, our conscious mind can work with around seven pieces of information.12,13 For example, right now, my mind is focusing on the words I’m writing and how they fit the focus of the chapter; I’m aware of my dogs sleeping next to me in their basket (and one of them snoring!); I can feel some inner pressure to hit my target wordcount for the day; and I’m listening to rock music louder than I probably should.
In this moment, there are lots of things going on that I could be aware of but I’m not – such as the changing light and cooling temperature as evening falls outside, and the stiffness in my lower back from sitting all day.
In fact, it’s estimated that every second, we receive about 11 million pieces of information from our senses.14 Forty or fifty of those are captured by our brain, and just seven can be held and processed by our working memory at any one time. To manage the compression needed to achieve this, our brain uses mental shortcuts, and these can often unconsciously lead to poor decisions or cognitive bias (which is where we see a limited data set that’s influenced by our perspective).15–17
So, with our conscious mind having bandwidth for just seven things, we need to be able to prioritize what we focus on, and that’s the service that our beliefs provide for us – they give us a critical shortcut. Our beliefs are like a map that helps us navigate the complex and overwhelming world around us.
Here’s an example of how beliefs develop. When we’re small and learning to walk, we’ll soon encounter the wonder that is the door. At first, doors will seem like a magical mystery – sometimes they’re open, other times they’re closed. We then discover that we can push or pull to open and close them. However, once we’ve learned how doors open, we’ve learned doors, and we can then use them.
As time passes, we’ll come to realize that sometimes doors are locked, and we need the key. Eventually, we’ll figure out sliding doors versus doors on hinges. But, each time we learn, we update and develop our internal learning of doors, and if you’ll excuse a cliché, that will open lots of doors for us.
Let’s look at this in the context of Fergus’s story. As a child, he had intense emotional pain that he was actively told he wasn’t allowed to feel, and so to survive a highly distressing emotional experience, he learned to shut off his feelings. He took on the belief in his environment that feeling your emotions is dangerous and weak, and from that moment on, it became the lens through which he perceived the world.
Notice that Fergus didn’t learn a more nuanced belief, such as, If you want to survive at a stiff-upper-lip English boarding school, you need to shut down your emotions. However, ultimately, your feelings are both hugely important and totally valid, and the problem lies with the environment, not you. Indeed, if he had, the impact would have been much less.
As we’ve touched on a few times, the real trauma of the event wasn’t the event itself, it was the programming setup in Fergus which, 20 years later, was causing deep misery and suffering in many different areas of his life. Because of the beliefs Fergus had learned, he was living in an emotional Groundhog Day, recreating his own trauma for himself day after day.
Beliefs can be put into two distinct categories. The first is consequential beliefs, which are those where we assume that one thing is the result of another. Examples include: ‘If I show my emotions, people will reject me’ and ‘If I ask for help, people will laugh at me.’ The second category is global beliefs, which are generalized beliefs about the world around us (remember our need to simplify the world from 11 million pieces of information to seven.) Examples include ‘Most people are bad’ or ‘The world’s a scary place.’
Each of us holds numerous consequential and global beliefs about ourselves, our feelings, other people, and the world around us. Now, not all beliefs are wrong, and some of them might be relatively accurate. However, until we go through a careful process of examining and reflecting on these beliefs, we’ve no idea which are which, because the reality is they were shaped impulsively in response to overwhelming and complex situations that we didn’t understand at the time.
To begin the process of loosening the grip of some of your beliefs, we must identify what they are in the first place. A phrase I often use is, ‘If you can see it, you don’t have to be it.’ Put another way, the very naming of a belief will often begin a process of questioning it in our mind, which can help us make a conscious choice about whether we want to continue to relate to ourselves and the world around us through this lens.
Having explored the enormous impact that our beliefs have, it’s time to delve into some of your beliefs. So, what do you believe about emotions and their place in your world? Write down at least three consequential and three global beliefs that you identify with. To help you, I’ve given a few examples of common beliefs of both types that people hold. You may find that some of these feel true to you, or you might find that you discover different beliefs.
Once again, if you find yourself feeling shocked and more vulnerable after seeing what you’ve written in response to these questions, please be gentle with yourself. We’ll be looking at ways to change and challenge these beliefs later.
As we gradually develop various beliefs about ourselves and the world around us through childhood and beyond, we’re effectively setting up and programming our default ways of being and responding in the world.
Perhaps we learn that being loved by others is a result of what we achieve in the world, and so being a high achiever becomes our core focus in life. Or perhaps the conclusion we draw from childhood is that the secret to being safe is to be in control of everything and everyone around us, and so a constant need for control starts seeping into every part of our life.
In a sense, clusters of beliefs start forming the core ways that we relate to ourselves and the world around us. In Chapter 8 we’ll look at some of the key personality patterns that can perpetuate our cycles of trauma. First though, it’s time to explore the RESET model for healing the impacts of your trauma.