As I settled into my comfortable chair at the Everyman Cinema in North London, I thought I was on a regular evening out with Tania (who at the time, was my relatively newfound love). I hadn’t paid much attention to the movie we’d chosen; I was just happy to be out of the office early and relaxing.
We found ourselves watching Danny Boyle’s film 127 Hours, which is based on the true story of Aron Ralston, an experienced mountain climber who on a hiking trip in the USA, became trapped alone in a canyon with his lower right arm and hand crushed beneath a boulder. As the film unfolded, we witnessed his emotionally intense and deeply challenging attempts to escape over five excruciating days.
First, Aron attempted to free his arm using brute force, and when that failed, he tried screaming for help. As the hours passed, he went through every emotion possible, oscillating between hope, despair, and terror. Then, after several days without success, he gave up and resigned himself to certain death. In accepting the painful inevitability of his premature demise, he could at least finally surrender. He recorded goodbye messages to his loved ones on his video camera, carved RIP into the boulder, and succumbed to sleep.
When he woke up the following morning it slowly dawned on him that even praying for death was fruitless, because there he was, still trapped, in pain, and facing a very slow and painful dying process.
Eventually, he realized there was only one choice remaining. To free himself, he’d have to cut off his own arm. First, he had to snap his bones, and then, using the only tool he had, which was a blunt multi-purpose penknife, he cut through his skin before using the pliers on the penknife to cut through his tendons.
Throughout the film, I was captivated by what I was seeing, and unaware that anything untoward was happening to me. That was, until the film ended, and I started crying. At this point in my life, I was relatively comfortable with my emotions, and I knew there was nothing to do but let the tears come.
As the credits rolled, however, my tears didn’t quieten and pass as I’d expected. In fact, they started to intensify. Unfortunately, I’m not an elegant crier, but more of a snotty and spluttery one, so I’m sure those around me must have wondered what the hell was going on. Tania sweetly held my arm, and asked if I was OK, but I couldn’t speak. I just nodded as the tears continued to engulf me. I couldn’t move, but I also couldn’t stop crying.
Thankfully, we’d parked around the corner from the cinema, and Tania held my hand as we walked quickly to the car, which to me suddenly seemed like a sanctuary of safety. There, I handed Tania the keys, nodding that she should drive, and once I’d slipped into the passenger seat, the tidal wave of emotion crashed through me again and the tears started flooding uncontrollably. Thankfully, Tania’s training as a psychotherapist meant she knew she had to just sit with me and patiently hold the space while the emotion continued to release.
After at least another 10 minutes, I finally managed to get my breath a little. We’d planned to have dinner at one of our favorite restaurants, but Tania gently looked at me and said, ‘Would you like to eat at home?’ I simply nodded. As Tania drove, I gradually managed to find some space underneath the tears. As I’d learned to do over the years, I worked to tune in to what I was really feeling and to follow the thread in my own life to what had been triggered. It didn’t take long for the answer to come.
Although the external events were very different, the inner journey that Aron had been on almost perfectly paralleled my emotional experience of being chronically ill with ME/CFS – the desperation and false hope; the rage and frustration; the grief and hopelessness. But what had really hit me was the terrible truth that even giving up didn’t work because, just like Aron, I’d given up so many times, and yet the next morning I’d wake up and have to survive another day of my personal living hell. It also deeply moved me to see Aron finally find help and realize that he’d survived and was no longer alone.
For me, the experience of being trapped in a broken body that wouldn’t heal, feeling utterly hopeless and alone, and the belief that I’d never get out was clearly a deep injury in my emotional body that hadn’t yet fully healed. Witnessing Aron’s journey had activated the unhealed memory of those same emotions inside my own heart and body. My big black sack of unprocessed emotions had opened and revealed a trauma that was ready to heal.
Later, as we sat in our kitchen, I shared what was coming up, and felt Tania’s sweet and beautiful support and holding as she witnessed the spontaneous healing that had been triggered inside me. She knew there was nothing to be done but feel and welcome the feelings as they metabolized and processed.
As we discussed earlier, mainstream psychology has been rather quick to dismiss our emotions as something to be fixed, ideally, or at least managed. However, the reality is that our emotional body, the home of our emotional life, needs nurturing and caring for just as much as our physical body does.
Our emotional body is often seen as a problematic or dysfunctional part of us that we should do our best to keep in check. And yet, in truth there’s an incredible wisdom in the way we learn to suppress and lock away what’s too difficult to feel at the time, and equally to be able to heal it at any point in the future when the conditions are right.
However, although our emotional body protects us at the time, unless we commit to making the space to ultimately feel the emotions it’s locked way, we pay the price of being imprisoned by it for life.
We all have a dynamic universe of emotional experience living inside us, and for our trauma healing to happen we must learn to open to it. The question isn’t whether we have emotions, it’s how closely we’re in touch with them. As we explored in the last chapter, we can have all kinds of defenses against feeling our emotions, but this doesn’t mean they go away – instead, we have to run away from ourselves.
As we explored in Chapter 6, we develop a variety of beliefs and meanings about our emotions, which is how we manage to keep ourselves disconnected from feeling them. It’s now time to begin to feel into what happens if we go beyond these beliefs. To do this, we’re going to use a tool called Therapeutic Inquiry.
The practice of Therapeutic Inquiry involves opening to and exploring our inner world and what’s happening within it. With patience and skill, we learn to navigate and make sense of our inner universe, and in the process, we lay the foundation for our healing to happen. A metaphor I find helpful is that Therapeutic Inquiry is like finding our way through a pitch-black building guided only by a piece of thread. By staying quiet and connected to our experience, we can gently feel the next step, trusting that following the thread will take us where we need to go.
A simple example of Therapeutic Inquiry in action is my experience of watching the film 127 Hours. By tuning in to how I was feeling, I was able to follow the thread to understand the origins and history beneath the emotions. What might appear to have been an extreme reaction to a well-made film, was in fact the gateway to accessing a deep potential for healing inside of me.
Inquiry can be used in this way retrospectively to make sense of something we’re already feeling, but it can also be a powerful way of opening up and starting to feel emotions that are currently outside our conscious awareness.
Let’s say you arrive home from work and are feeling on edge and slightly irritable. You take a bath, and as you are finally able to relax, you decide to inquire into what’s going on. As you take some deep breaths into your feeling of irritability, beneath it you find a quite intense anxiety in your chest. As you give some space to the anxiety, in your mind you’re curious as to what’s really going on. By inviting the feeling and being steadfast in your attention toward it and encouraging a sense of safety while meeting the feeling from a loving place, you notice that the anxiety relaxes and reveals a feeling of sadness.
Deepening your connection with the feeling of sadness, you let the tears come and feel a sense of relief in your body for doing so. As you stay curious and open to your experience, memories appear in your mind of a close friend who passed away a few months ago. As you reflect on those memories, your heart feels soft and tender, and you realize how much you miss your friend.
Here, your surface-level feeling of irritability was in fact a sign that you were out of touch with some important emotions that needed to be given space and loving attention. The feelings of sadness and loss don’t need you to do anything; instead, they need you to be with them and give them some space. As you allow yourself to do so, you feel a warmth and love in your heart for your friend, and although you feel the loss, you also feel the love.
On reflection, you realize that your irritability was quite the opposite of something to be avoided or distracted from – it was a sign that you need to connect and be closer to yourself. In doing so, you’re giving yourself the love and holding that you need and deserve. In a sense you’re becoming the patient and attentive parent you perhaps always longed for.
If you reflect on the above example, you’ll see that what you thought was going on at the surface level of your experience wasn’t what was really going on. In fact, it was just a reaction to it and a way of avoiding it. This is so often the case in life. There’s the surface level and then there’s the deep level of what’s really going on. The practice of Therapeutic Inquiry supports us in going beneath the surface level and following the thread to our deeper emotional experience, which is where our healing can really happen.
The surface level of our experience is so often what causes the suffering in our lives. Not only do we have to live with difficult emotions like anxiety, irritability, and frustration, but those around us must also live with us reacting from the place of these emotions. Furthermore, the life choices we tend to make from this place tend to be poor and perpetuate our own suffering.
In my own life, one helpful realization I had is that when I’m disconnected from myself (i.e., living on the surface level of my emotions), I tend to make choices that support further disconnection. Put another way, disconnection feeds disconnection.
Let’s take our example above, but have it play out another way. You get home from work and you’re feeling the same irritability. Instead of choosing to take a bath, relax, and feel into your feelings, you head straight for the sofa and switch on the TV. While watching a show, you’re also scrolling through social media on your phone.
As you spend the evening in a state of emotional disconnect, you find yourself making poor nutritional choices for dinner, and consume this food without enough time to chew it and give your digestive system a chance to properly metabolize it.
Fueled by the stimulation of social media, the fast-paced TV series you’re bingeing, and the pumping cortisol you’ve just triggered by the meal of negative nutrition (food that takes more energy to digest than it gives you), you’re nicely protected from feeling any of your emotions. Ultimately, your disconnection just fed more disconnection.
However, just as disconnection feeds disconnection, connection also feeds connection. Taking the original example, having got closer to how you really feel, the chances are you’ll make some different choices that evening. Perhaps you’ll reach out to other friends and share your feelings, or perhaps you’ll just go gently to stay closer to yourself.
Therapeutic Inquiry can happen from three different centers inside you, and each has something to bring to the practice. You can inquire from your mind, your heart, and your body. Let’s explore each of these now.
The gift our mind offers to the practice of inquiry is our ability to observe what’s happening, make connections between different elements, and in time penetrate the details with our awareness. However, if our inquiry becomes a cognitive exercise on its own, it will go nowhere, as ultimately, we’re seeking to move beyond our mind. Also, we must be careful not to get caught in analysis paralysis, which is where we do a lot of analyzing and thinking about our emotions instead of actually feeling them.
Ultimately, inquiry is a practice of the heart. We’re tuning in to and listening to our emotions and feelings about what’s happening. By meeting our inquiry from our heart, we’re also bringing a quality of love and softness that helps build the inner trust and openness that’s so important. However, if we’re only using our heart, we can find ourselves lost in a sea of emotion without the ability to reflect and understand what’s happening, which is why our mind is also important.
Inquiry is a practice that happens in our body. As you did with the meditation practice in Chapter 9, you’re learning to soften your mental attention, relax, and come home to the experience of your body. It’s easy to think of the body as a lump of meat and bones that has no inherent intelligence, but the reality is quite the opposite.
So much of the wisdom we’re trying to contact and unlock lives in our body, and a key part of our inquiry practice is to open to and welcome this wisdom. While our heart is the home of our emotions, our body is the realm of sensations and feelings. By learning to tune in to these, we can use them as a guide along our journey of inquiry.
We all come to the practice of inquiry with our own areas of comfort, and the places we need to grow and develop. Perhaps you have a sharp and inquisitive mind but approach your body with a closed heart. Or perhaps you’re good at feeling your emotions but you get lost in them and need to become more skilled at grounding yourself in the immediate experience of your bodily sensations. The key is to develop the areas we’re less experienced in while being guided by the gifts we already have at our disposal.
The essence of inquiry is that we’re moving beyond our known experience and allowing our truth in that moment to reveal itself. Inquiry isn’t about attempting to confirm what we already know to be true – it’s about discovering what’s beneath our surface-level understanding and what’s happening in our deeper experience.
To do this, of course, we need to have the ability to self-regulate our nervous system and build an inner sense of safety, and to encourage our experience to continue to reveal itself from a place of love and gentleness. If we’re attempting to control our experience and rejecting or controlling what’s happening, our nervous system will shut down instead of opening up.
Now that we’ve looked at the key places from which you’re meeting your inner experience of inquiry, it’s time to explore the steps of Therapeutic Inquiry.
There are no right and wrong ways to inquire. What’s important is giving space to the truth of how you feel. The gift of inquiry is that you learn to have a new relationship with both your emotions as they are now and your emotional history. So much of what we experience in our lives isn’t about what’s happening today but about our emotional history, which we still need to process. The more we do so, the more we’re able to respond freely and proportionately to our day-to-day life experiences.
My hope for you is that Therapeutic Inquiry will become a daily practice that will not only help you to heal your past but also enable you to make sense of your present and avoid it storing up more unprocessed traumas. As you integrate inquiry into your daily life, I think you’ll notice a lot more emotional space opening up. However, what can often also happen is that we hit inner resistance, and this is what we’re going to tackle in the next chapter.