There’s a well-known joke in therapy circles: How many therapists does it take to change a light bulb? Only one, but the light bulb must want to change. Put another way, if a patient doesn’t change, it’s their fault because they aren’t sufficiently motivated to do so. No one lays responsibility at the door of the therapist or considers whether their therapeutic methodology is the right one for the patient, and to me, this is a cop-out at best, and victim blaming at worst.
Sanaya was in her early twenties when she agreed to become part of my In Therapy with Alex Howard YouTube series. Considering that at the time she was crippled by feelings of anxiety and occasionally experienced intense panic attacks, I particularly admired her for being willing to allow her therapeutic journey with me to be filmed.
To ensure that they are robust enough to go through the process, and that their motivations are aligned with those of the series, all participants have an independent psychological assessment before we start filming. The psychologist’s report for Sanaya had stated that she hadn’t connected with her previous therapists, who had questioned her motivation and goals for therapy. Was she really committed to changing? In their eyes, Sanaya was the aforementioned light bulb.
What I observed in our first session, however, wasn’t a young woman who didn’t want to change, but one who was afraid of what might be involved in changing, and whether it would even be possible. Sanaya was also deeply afraid of not changing and continuing in the anxiety hell in which she was trapped.
In my experience with clients, for any therapeutic work to be effective – let alone for them to feel able to open to their hidden and unprocessed emotions – they must first feel safe. They need to feel safe with the therapist, safe with the method, and as part of the therapeutic work, learn how to create a feeling of safety in themselves that isn’t dependent on others. Effectively, they need to move from co-regulation with the therapist to self-regulation for themselves.
Returning to our proverbial light bulb, perhaps it only takes one therapist to help it change, but they need to help it feel safe enough to do so. After all, safety isn’t just a nice thing to have, it’s the very foundation of what we need to heal.
Sanaya’s ongoing state of anxiety meant that when she looked at herself, her feelings, and the world around her, everything was perceived through the lens of fear. The ‘anxiety podcast’ was playing in every situation in which she found herself. The prospect of changing was terrifying, but so was not changing. And even if she could change, would it last? And would she even like the person she became? Trapped between a rock and a hard place, everywhere she looked there was a trigger to her nervous system.
And of course, Sanaya wasn’t alone in her experience. This is a dilemma that many of us experience along the way – to feel safe enough to change we need to be able to calm our nervous system, but to calm our nervous system we need to change. And so, when it comes to truly learning to feel and connect to our emotions, we first need to learn to create an inner state of safety.
Having an inner state of safety is a superpower that will not only transform your trauma healing, but it will also revolutionize your relationship with the world around you. So, where does the inner feeling of safety we need come from and how do we create it?
As we touched on in Chapter 4, an inner state of safety is created when we’re able to self-regulate our nervous system in response to the world. In the context of our nervous system, self-regulation means that we have direct influence over our physiological and emotional state. It doesn’t mean we can control how we feel in any given moment, but it does mean that if we recognize that our nervous system is running too fast, we have the capacity to actively slow it down and come to a calmer place.
In an ideal world, we’re given this as a gift from our primary caregivers (most commonly our mother) as a baby1–3 and as we grow.4,5 As we find ourselves impacted and affected by the world around us, our caregivers soothe us, not just in their words and actions but, most importantly, by their own calm and settled nervous system.
By co-regulating with our caregivers, we learn that the world is a safe place, and crucially, we learn how to do the same for ourselves and self-regulate our system to create an inner state of safety. Just as we’re learning to walk, talk, and do a million other incredible things, our nervous system is also learning how to self-regulate in response to our environment.
However, to varying degrees, many of us didn’t have this need met in the way we needed to.6–11 Indeed, as we discussed earlier, this shift in our homeostatic balance is one of the ECHOs of trauma. And so, when it comes to resetting our nervous system, the skill of self-regulation is the foundation. Thankfully, like all skills, with practice, we can learn to do it. Let’s look at that now.
Tracking back to Sanaya’s story, one of her most challenging triggers was noticing the feeling of anxiety in her body and this then triggering more anxiety. In a sense, her maladaptive stress response was self-generating. The more anxiety she felt, the more anxious she’d become. This is what I call anxiety about anxiety.
When our maladaptive stress response results in an excess of stress hormones, such as cortisol and adrenaline, being released, it’ll take some time for our blood chemistry to normalize. When I explained this process to Sanaya, it helped her to understand that measuring any intervention by whether she felt different immediately wasn’t realistic. Instead, she needed to learn to find a place of acceptance in the short term, and to then notice things settling in her body a few minutes later. You’ll find a video of this exchange with Sanaya in your free companion course at www.alexhoward.com/trauma.
When it comes to learning to self-regulate our nervous system, the most calming thing we can experience is discovering that we can directly impact our own state. The more influence we realize we have, the less powerless we feel, and the calmer our system will become.
Dozens if not hundreds of different tools have been developed over the years to help us learn to self-regulate our nervous system, and almost all of them have their roots in mindfulness and meditation practice. In fact, one of the most researched psychological tools in the history of science is the practice of meditation.12–16 Over the last few decades, awareness around meditation has grown hugely, and so much of that is positive.
It’s also worth noting that not all forms of meditation have the same benefits and focuses. For example, practices such as Transcendental Meditation are designed to help us cultivate a trance-like state of bliss, and visualization practices may focus on impacting certain feeling states. Although these are both helpful, they are not necessarily the quickest path to cultivating a feeling of inner safety.
In the form of meditation that we’re about to explore the key thing is to shift your focus from your mind into being present with your body. Ultimately, you’re working to become more deeply connected to your immediate experience, without trying to disconnect or change it. Learning to relax into your body helps you to move from thinking to feeling. Remember, you can’t think your way to a feeling of safety. But you can feel your way to a feeling of safety.
As the writer James Redfield so potently put it, ‘Where attention goes, energy flows.’ By training your attention into your body, gradually you’re training your energy out of your mind and over-activated nervous system and into the place where the feeling of safety we ultimately crave exists. By learning to stop running and start feeling, we can come home to our body and make peace with whatever we’re experiencing.
Ultimately, self-regulation isn’t about attempting to change or fix what’s happening; instead, it’s about coming to a place of acceptance and peace with it. By moving our attention from feeding the problem to actively calming our system in the moment, we’re training a new way of being.
Now, part of the challenge is that you likely have decades of conditioning that’s trained your mind to be a certain way. As we’ll discuss in the next chapter, it’s going to take time to train it into a different way of functioning. Not because you’re doing the practice wrongly, but because your brain is attempting to return to what it believes is balance.
Remember also that when we’re in a maladaptive stress response a natural speeding-up occurs to engage our nervous system and disconnect us from our emotions. And so, by learning to meditate we’re again working against a deeply ingrained instinct.
When it comes to meditation, my preference is to keep the practice as simple as possible. In fact, the participants on my RESET Program® consistently report that because of the straightforward, structured method at the heart of the way I teach meditation, they’ve been able to sustain a consistent practice for the first time.
Some meditation practices are centuries old, so it’s not surprising that there are often steps and elements to them that exist because of the history, not because they’re designed to make meditation accessible. With some schools of meditation, it can take decades to reach a level of mastery in certain intricate elements. Some of these aspects are important refinements for experienced meditators, and others are just the way they are because that’s how they were passed down.
For example, some schools of meditation insist on the practice of certain postures, including cross-legged ones. These might lend themselves well to people living in warm climates and with highly active lifestyles, but they don’t always work for those in cold, damp Western countries where many people have sedentary jobs, or for those with mobility issues. Indeed, I’m aware of several people who have sustained quite unpleasant injuries while trying repeatedly to force themselves into these postures when clearly their body wasn’t a willing participant.
Over the years, my approach to teaching meditation has been to find the ‘minimum effective dose’ – asking, what’s the lowest number of key principles we can strip the practice back to, while allowing us to have the maximum impact? I also think it’s important to design our meditation training in a way which sets us up for success. Calming the mind and connecting to the body might sound straightforward, but it can sometimes be the hardest thing in the world to do, and the more nuances we must struggle with to get it right, the more overwhelming it becomes.
If we begin by mastering the basics, over time we can add in more elements to help take our practice to the next level. Conversely, if we start by overloading ourselves with details, we may never get the basics right, and soon give up in frustration. Sometimes, trying to do everything perfectly correctly can be a sign that the perfectionist pattern we explored in the last chapter is playing out.
I’m also aware that you may follow a prayer or meditation practice linked to a religious path. It’s important to say that what we’re going to practice together is respectful of all paths but linked to none. What we’ll be focusing on are the scientific elements of meditation that have been demonstrated time and again to play a key role in helping us to self-regulate our nervous system.
Many people working on healing their trauma find that meditation is a hugely helpful practice for learning to calm and ground their mind, emotions, and body. However, for some it can be particularly difficult, and taking a different approach can be beneficial.
When trauma has led to a dysregulated mind and nervous system, and we come into close contact with this through meditation, we can become increasingly frustrated and triggered by how quickly everything’s running. Sitting still and observing our mind and body effectively sends us in a loop of running too fast, feeling frustrated about running too fast, and then running faster in response.
In this instance, moving meditation can be immensely helpful. In a sense, allowing the energy in our system to move, or indeed moving with it, makes it easier for the system to become calm and to reset. There are many forms of moving meditation, including walking meditation, yoga, Tai Chi, and Qigong.17 Sometimes, starting with a practice such as these before then moving into a sitting meditation can make all the difference.
We may also have trauma triggers relating to our emotional or physical body that can become overwhelming or even retraumatizing during standard mind/body practices.18–20 In these cases it’s important to use approaches that help us to maintain a sense of being grounded and connected to what feels safe, while exploring our inner world and sensations.21
Emotional processing approaches such as Emotional Freedom Technique (EFT/Tapping), and Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) can also be very helpful with the guidance of an experienced and trauma-informed practitioner.22–24
It’s also worth noting that although closing our eyes during meditation will often help our practice, as we’ll have less visual sensory input to distract us and draw our attention, for some people doing so will be triggering. If this is true for you, it’s fine to keep your eyes open, but do pick a spot on the wall on which to hold a soft gaze, as this will help prevent your eyes being drawn to distractions.
Basically, there are four key intentions we’re trying to achieve through meditation, and three tactics we’ll be deploying to help us do so. Let’s explore each of these in turn.
You don’t have to think about these key principles while you’re meditating, but I believe that having an understanding of our orientation is both helpful and important. Let’s now explore the three tactics we’re going to deploy in our meditation practice.
Let’s now start to play with meditation itself. You can do the following practice with your eyes open or closed. It’s often helpful to do it sitting up with a straight spine and your feet on the floor. If you’re more comfortable lying down that’s also fine, but be mindful that if you fall asleep, that isn’t the same as meditation practice – although, of course, it’s hugely valuable in itself!
If you’re new to meditation, I’d recommend starting off with just five minutes of practice. If you have some experience, you can of course spend more time on it. Remember that we want to set you up for success, so this is about cultivating positive experiences on which to build, not trying to set meditation records!
This practice is incredibly simple, but like many simple things it’s not always easy. Ultimately, it’s much easier to learn to meditate by being guided through it, so, as part of your free companion course (www.alexhoward.com/trauma), I’ve recorded some guided meditations to support you, using this approach.
Whatever you experience when you first start to meditate is fine – there are no right or wrong experiences. Perhaps you felt that nothing shifted in your nervous system through doing this practice. If that’s the case, please don’t worry, just keep going. It may also be that you felt more activated in your system. If so, remember what I said earlier about moving meditation, along with the importance of doing some trauma healing beforehand.
Even in the best-case scenario, where you may notice a shift in your nervous system and feel a little calmer immediately after practicing, you’ll likely find that as soon as you stop, your nervous system will gradually reactivate back to its stress state. Remember, this is because it believes that’s normal – it’s the homeostatic balance it’s normalized to. To create lasting change, you must be diligent, consistent, and patient with your meditation practice over time. Once you’re consistently practicing for five minutes, you can start to build, ideally up to at least 30 minutes a day.
Ultimately, meditation practice is so called because practice is exactly what’s needed to create lasting change. Over time, as you keep bringing your nervous system back to a state of calmness and connection to your body, you’re teaching your system that this is the new homeostatic balance, and the place from which you now want to live.
One of the challenges of connecting to our body and emotions is that we might start to feel some of the feelings that our maladaptive stress response has been helping us escape from. We’ll drill into this in much more detail in the coming few chapters, but for now please know that this isn’t a sign that something’s wrong; in fact, it’s often a sign of the progress you’ve been working so hard to achieve.
Part of the art of learning to self-regulate our nervous system is allowing our experience to be as it is. Just as a soothing and loving parent reassures a small child, we’re sending the message to our own physical and emotional bodies that our experience is OK, and so are we.
Whether or not we feel that we’re mastering the simple but not easy practice of meditation, this learning to be with and meet our feelings and emotions from a calm and welcoming place can itself be transformational. Indeed, it’s the comfort and holding that our emotional body needs for it to trust us enough to open to us. And, by learning to give this gift to ourselves, we’re truly becoming a healthy and balanced adult in the world.
Let’s return to Sanaya’s story one last time. Alongside some other elements, which you’re learning in this book, meditation played a hugely helpful role in calming her anxiety. Breaking the cycle of anxiety triggering more anxiety and learning how to self-regulate her nervous system meant that she was no longer at the mercy of her panic attacks, and she could start to bring her true personality and talents to the world.
By the end of our eight filmed sessions together, Sanaya was full of joy and excitement for her future and had landed her dream internship in the film industry. As I said to her in our last session, the key wasn’t that she’d never feel anxiety again, but that she now had the tools to self-regulate her nervous system in response to it, which is the ultimate freedom in life.