For some people, listening to music is a pleasant pastime, while for others, music is the language of the soul, and it makes them feel connected and alive in a way that nothing else can. I’m in the second group. In my teenage years, my discovery of angry guitar music did more to stabilize my emotional health than anything else. The impact of my musical heroes’ giving words and melody to the feelings that consumed me helped me realize that I was far from alone – there were millions of others who felt the same way.
As my own trauma healing evolved over the years, the depth of my gratitude for music grew. I came to realize that for me, the theaters and arenas of live music were not just places of entertainment, there were like my church. They were where I went to feel close to myself emotionally, and to feel connected to others who felt the same way. For those few hours at a gig, I felt I was part of a community.
Music speaks to us all differently, and although I enjoy most genres, the same loud guitar music that captured my soul as a teenager still has the most precious place in my heart. And one of the bands that has especially mattered to me is Linkin Park.
In the summer of 2017, I was driving home from a family holiday and with the children traveling separately with my wife, I took advantage of the empty car by cranking up the stereo. Suddenly, a news alert came through: Chester Bennington, the lead singer of Linkin Park, had died by suicide.
I felt crushed. I’d never met Chester, but because his voice had accompanied me through some of my darkest moments, I felt as if I knew him. I’d seen Linkin Park play live a number of times in London, and the thought that I’d never again hear Chester’s haunting vocals soar through an arena made me deeply sad.
Of course, as Linkin Park have sold more than 70 million albums worldwide, I wasn’t alone in my grief. A few months after Chester’s death, a tribute concert, featuring a who’s who of rock royalty, was held at the Hollywood Bowl in LA and livestreamed on YouTube. Afterward, as there is with all grief, there was a void.
But then, something magical happened. Mike Shinoda, Linkin Park’s co-vocalist and primary songwriter, went on tour himself with new material and stripped-down versions of some of the band’s songs. The impact this had on the fans was profound. YouTube is full of emotional fan recordings of these concerts, and Mike speaking openly about the journey of grief.
From the moments of deep sadness to the unexpected highs of joy and celebration, and from the senseless confusion to the profound connection to the preciousness of life, these gigs allowed a healing to take place. Apart from being an excuse to share a little of my deep love of music, here’s the real point I’m making: Just as our trauma doesn’t happen in isolation, neither does our healing.
When we experience trauma, often our tendency is to shut down, push the world away, and hide the wounds that we fear will never heal. Now of course we can do a huge amount to heal by using our awareness and other strategies, as you’ve been learning throughout this book. But there’s a limit to how far this work will take us if we don’t also dare to open our heart and reach out to others.
When we come together with others and let them into our heart, something magical happens. We touch and move each other in transformative ways, and in a sense, we become one big nervous system co-regulating together. And to feel the healing impact of others, we must first learn to be intimate with them. Intimacy is, in a sense, into-me-see. It’s the ability to be vulnerable enough to share the depths of our pain and suffering. The more deeply we let others see into us, the more deeply we can connect and heal.
The problem is that we live in a society in which there’s a great deal of cultural shame around vulnerability, showing our need for others, and dare I say it, asking for help. As I’m sure you recognize by this stage in our journey together, the point isn’t whether we have emotional needs but whether we’re in touch with them and working to meet them.
Put simply, there are three kinds of people in the world: 1) those who have emotional needs, are aware of them, and are open with others; 2) those who have emotional needs and are aware of them but are not open with others; and 3) those who have emotional needs but are not even aware of them. It is, of course, those in categories 2 and 3 who suffer the most.
Part of the reason why many of us who have experienced trauma push others away and prefer to be on our own, particularly when we’re feeling vulnerable, is because the origins of our trauma were difficult experiences with other people. As a result, we’ve not only moved away from certain individuals in our lives, but we’ve also built walls of defense to keep others out and avoid further emotional injuries.
And yet, having the right support team around us is everything. Having the right support means we feel connected and emotionally held, and ultimately, it’s depth of friendship and connection that brings our lives joy and meaning. It can take some time to build this support, so let’s look at who can provide it and how we might set up these relationships.
To build the support that we need in our lives, we need the right people around us, and we need the right dynamics in our interactions with them to give us (and them) the holding we want and need in a sustainable and effective way. We’ll begin with the ‘who’ in your support circle, and then we’ll focus on the ‘how’ of how best to set up and interact in these relationships.
In an ideal world, our support circle would be a combination of loving family members, caring friends, and trained professionals. And right now, we might have none of these. Whatever our starting point, though, actively working to grow the circle of people who support our healing is important. And sometimes, what we need is as simple as the caring presence of humans in our physical space.
As the saying goes, we can choose our friends, but we can’t choose our family. If we’re lucky enough to have a loving, supportive, and emotionally sensitive family, we’ve truly hit the jackpot in life. For many of us, there may be elements of this, but there are likely also complexities. In the next chapter, we’ll be exploring how to create appropriate boundaries when these complexities arise.
My relationships with my family members haven’t always been easy, and so, particularly before I created my own family with Tania, friendships were very important. At the peak of my period of intense anxiety, which I described in Chapter 1, I felt deeply ashamed that I simply couldn’t get my nervous system to relax to a safe place on my own. As I’ve said, this was especially the case at nighttime, when I’d lie in bed in a state of constant panic and anxiety, desperately trying to relax myself to a place of safety and peace. Previously, I’d enjoyed my own company and preferred to live alone, so I found the recognition that I needed other people around me both shameful and frustrating (thanks to my inner critic). And I also knew it to be the truth.
So, I started sharing a house with people – mostly strangers – who knew nothing of the inner turmoil with which I was living. After a few weeks I noticed it was having a profound, transformational effect. Simply having other people around with whom I could decompress at the end of the day, or perhaps watch a TV show or movie with, helped me to recalibrate my nervous system.
Once I added an effective therapist and a wider support community to the mix, I went from feeling isolated and desperately alone to beautifully supported and reminded of the healing power of simply being in the presence of other caring individuals. Human support wasn’t the only factor necessary for my healing, but it was a crucial ingredient.
For many of us, our friendships are more accidental than intentional. Some are event driven, in that we’re pulled together around a particular project or event, and we bond in the process. Others are proximity driven and our bond is simply that they’re the people who are nearest to us. Some friendships are stage driven, in that we go through a particular stage of life together and this becomes the glue of the friendship.
However, what we most want and need at the center of our friendships is a heart connection – individuals who share the same values and passions as us, who treat people with the same care that we value as important, and who, ultimately, will invite us to be vulnerable and emotionally honest.
Such connections are out there, but it can take deliberate time and energy to find them. As I write this final section of the book, I’m on a series of teaching weeks for our Therapeutic Coaching® practitioner training, and as each group evolves through the training, one of the additional blessings is the friendships and bonds that are being formed.
By training with people who share their passion for learning and commitment to healing, many of the participants are opening a whole new career possibility and also finding their true tribe and laying the seeds for lifelong friendships.
Be it through self-development workshops, yoga classes, meet-up groups, or the many other places where like-minded people hang out, there are few things more powerful than spending time with others on their healing journey and having a shared commitment to the potential that we all have to change and transform ourselves.
So, now that we’ve talked about having the right ‘who’ in your life, let’s turn our attention to the ‘how’ of these connections. Just as loving our children isn’t enough on its own to become a skillful and effective parent, loving our friends isn’t enough to become a skillful and effective friend. This is particularly true when it comes to offering emotional support and holding.
Those of us who have been on the receiving end of coercive and manipulative behavior in relationships, or who have been exploited for our instincts to give to and care for others, can be confused about what asking for help actually looks and feels like. And if we don’t know what we’re working toward, we can find ourselves allowing ‘help’ that just results in more pain and frustration. To help us identify the right kind of support in our life, we’re going to walk through what real help is. This will also help you to offer more effective support for others in your life.
When someone gives us real help, it has four key qualities that I find work neatly into the acronym HELP:
Let’s look at the four steps of HELP.
The old saying ‘A problem shared is a problem halved’ might feel true in the metaphorical sense, but it shouldn’t be true in the literal sense. Ultimately, the responsibility for the issues in our life lies with us. Of course, there may be times when we need practical support from others, or for a friend or loved one to help us take a very difficult step, such as reporting an incident to a person who can take action. But mostly, what we need is someone to hold space for us.
Holding space is when someone gives us a genuine invitation to be present to our emotions and feelings while we feel them. It doesn’t mean that they rescue us or take over responsibility for our experience.
Some people can be very keen to take on our problems because it meets the needs of their own helper behavioral pattern, and their own self-esteem is tied to them doing so. However, healing our trauma isn’t about finding other people to take it on for us – it’s about growing our own resilience and capacity to meet the challenges in our lives.
The way we help each other is by providing the invitation for emotional expression – to be where we are and with what we’re feeling in that moment. The real key to holding space for someone else is to stay present to ourselves. The more present to ourselves we are and connected to the moment, the more we can be present for others.
Once someone’s holding space, the next step is to express empathy. This means to witness and be sincerely interested in another person’s experience. Giving a warm introduction to what we’re experiencing helps us go deeper into it.
However, giving help isn’t about taking on someone else’s emotions. When we start overly merging with and feeling another person’s emotions, our capacity to help and support them is reduced and the likelihood of us becoming emotionally drained increases.
As I said earlier, we cannot process each other’s emotions and attempting to do so will leave us a lot less resourceful. Indeed, in my view, this is one of the flaws of certain counselling models – the intention that feeling the difficult feelings with the client will somehow miraculously heal them. My observation is that practitioners who work in this way end up low on energy in their own lives. In a sense they become a dumping ground for others’ heaviness, when ultimately, they can’t do the healing for them anyway.
Often, the thing we most need is for someone to genuinely express interest and care in our world and to invite us to come closer to ourselves emotionally. We might also be providing one another with some temporary nervous system co-regulation, but expressing empathy, done correctly, has a clear boundary between us and the other.
Now that space is being held, and empathy is available, the next step is to listen actively. Active listening means that we’re sincerely engaged in the conversation and responding with appropriate questions that help it to go deeper.
However, active listening isn’t about offering solutions. Of course, it’s fine if ideas spring up along the way, but imposing our own ideas on others is rarely helpful. When we go looking for emotional support and are met with rational solutions, we’ll most likely feel emotionally unseen and unsupported, as well as judged and shamed.
The trick is to ask genuinely insightful and helpful questions to help guide someone toward their own answers. And when we see something on which we can give constructive feedback, to do so with permission, respect, care, and sensitivity.
With space being held, empathy offered, and active listening in place, the final step is positive encouragement. This encouragement should send a message of warmth and reassurance while also coming from a grounded place. The goal isn’t to try and make things better than they are, but to help the other person see the positives and the opportunities.
Remember what we talked about in Chapter 10 when we explored neuroplasticity? We train our brain by the consistent thought patterns we have, and when we find ourselves consistently in a negative frame of mind, this becomes conditioned. When someone feels actively connected to us, and we’ve done the previous three HELP steps, they’ll be much more open to the more hopeful narrative being offered.
Once you understand how HELP works, my hope is that you can recognize who is and who isn’t giving you the kind of support you need; and indeed, whether you have enough such support in your life. Let’s go into this further with the next exercise.
Take some time to reflect on the different areas of your life and identify where you may need more support. You might find it helpful to rate each area from 0–10, with 10 being the optimum, to help clarify where you’re at right now.
What do you notice after completing the HELP audit? Are there areas of your life that are rich in help and support and those where there may be room for more? It’s important to remember that we all start from different places, and wherever you find yourself now is just fine. The purpose of this exercise isn’t for you to start comparing yourself to others, but to have awareness of the areas you might want to work on to invite more HELP into your life.
I’ve deliberately separated the areas of life in the HELP audit as I think they all have something unique and important to give us. For example, we have a depth of history with family that we might not have with friends. And equally, professional support will offer us insight that differs from that given by those who are in a day-to-day relationship with us.
I also think it’s important not to conflate some of these areas; for example, we don’t want to turn our friends into our therapists or our therapist into our friend! Equally, we may not need all the people in these areas all the time. I certainly don’t think that everyone should be in therapy all the time, and there may be occasions when the healthiest thing to do is to take some space from our family. Hopefully, the exercise has helped you to clarify the areas that need some focus, and your job is now to act on these.
Of course, one of the things that can be difficult to navigate when it comes to the relationships in our lives is boundaries and our ability to say no to those who aren’t meeting us emotionally in the ways we need or want. This is especially true for those of us who were taught that we couldn’t have boundaries, or who have people in our life who are constantly testing our boundaries. This is what we’ll explore in the next chapter.