Finding the right participants for my YouTube series and podcast In Therapy with Alex Howard isn’t always easy. Of course, the first obstacle is an obvious one – it takes an enormous amount of courage for someone to be vulnerable enough to share their entire therapeutic journey on camera. However, that isn’t our biggest barrier when looking for participants; indeed, since launching the series, we’ve been amazed by how many immensely courageous people are out there.
The real challenge is finding a sufficiently broad range of participants to reflect the wonderful diversity of modern society. With men in particular being much less likely to access therapy,1–3 let alone talk about it, early on, we felt we could be in danger of reflecting this stereotype. Our fears were compounded when the first two men who started filming with us stopped after a few sessions. And then, in walked David.
Originally from Glasgow in Scotland, David was in his mid-forties and was suffering with debilitating depression that had resulted in regular periods of suicidal thoughts. He’d had a series of strokes during his twenties and although he’d come to terms with the impact on his mobility, it had understandably affected his confidence.
I started filming with David around nine months into the COVID-19 pandemic, and the first lockdown had hit him particularly hard. He’d lost his father a few months previously to cancer, and due to restrictions had only been able to say goodbye to him by waving through a window. He’d also lost several close friends, including one to suicide, and broken up with his long-term girlfriend. Every day, he was feeling consumed by grief and by an intense sense of hopelessness about the future.
I liked David instantly, particularly warming to his very dry Scottish sense of humor. However, I had doubts about whether he’d follow through with the therapeutic process. I knew that he wanted his life to be different, but the problem with depression is that it can sap the very energy and resourcefulness we need to invest in the process of change.
It also didn’t help that a few sessions into filming with David, the UK was once more placed into lockdown, which meant he was again intensely isolated. We also had to move our sessions online. It was obvious that David was someone who didn’t suffer fools gladly, and if he was going to stick with the process, he’d have to see evidence that it would be worth it.
For many years, a key part of my therapeutic approach has been to leverage my various online courses and videos to deepen patients’ work outside the therapy room. After all, if someone’s only spending an hour every few weeks on changing their life, it’s going to have a limited impact, whereas having ongoing online resources makes a big difference.
Among the handful of people who started filming for In Therapy but didn’t follow through, we noticed a common theme in that they had hoped the process would do the work for them and had underestimated what the process would expect from them. The process offers participants an opportunity; however, they must invest their own heart and energy into it. As the proverb goes, ‘You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make it drink.’ Like I said at the start of our journey together, it’s not your fault that you have trauma, but it’s your responsibility to do the healing work.
To my relief, David wanted to do the work, and between our early sessions he worked through my RESET Program® in tandem with filming with me every few weeks. He did the exercises and used the tools, and things started to change for him. The changes were small at first, but in time the ripples in his life were much bigger. In a sense, a key outcome of my work with David was his learning to become his own best coach.
As we near the end of our time together, I want to turn our attention to your next steps and making sure that this book isn’t only an interesting read. Just as I ensured that David was doing the work outside of our sessions, I want to ensure that you do the exercises in the book and apply what you’ve been learning in each chapter to your life. As I said earlier, knowledge is nice, but it’s action that creates change.
Of course, what’s most important to prioritize and work on will be different for each person reading this, so in the spirit of any effective coach I’m going to guide you to create your own plan, as opposed to imposing a pre-defined one on you.
However, it’s likely that your plan will include a meditation/mindfulness practice, working to increase your self-awareness, and applying the tools you need to drive change. To support this, we’re going to focus on three key elements: the What, the How, and the What If?
By ‘What’ I mean what your new habits are. The ‘How’ relates to how you’re going to approach putting them into practice – in essence, how you’re relating to yourself. And ‘What If’ is how you’ll respond if things go off track, which we can be sure at some point they will!
In Chapter 10, where we talked about neuroplasticity, we explored the power of habits and how they’re conditioned by whatever we do consistently. At this point, you’ll have numerous daily habits and patterns that have become a normalized part of your daily routine. Some may be immensely helpful, others less so.
To reset your trauma, you don’t have to change everything in your life; instead, you need to change enough things to tip the balance in a new direction. I think this is an important distinction to make, particularly for those of us who might have a perfectionist pattern and therefore an unobtainable image of what our healing should look like.
The good news is that what it takes to change is often not as radical as we might think in the short term. But the bad news is that it’s likely to be more repetitive and tedious than we might have realized. In fact, what matters more than anything is consistency and follow-through with the daily practices and tools that work to shift our homeostatic balance to a new, healthy equilibrium.
Throughout this book, we’ve explored three categories of inner work. Firstly, the necessity of shifting the state of your nervous system, and the importance of tools such as meditation to help support this. Secondly, I’ve offered many different frameworks to help with growing your self-awareness. And finally, we’ve delved into specific practices to support driving change.
Having a daily meditation practice of some kind is critical. As we discussed in Chapter 9, if you need to adapt this to work with your own sensitivities, please do so. But having a practice that builds an inner sense of safety and support in your body and nervous system is key.
In almost every chapter you’ve completed exercises to help grow your awareness, and I strongly encourage you to revisit those multiple times, particularly as you continue working on yourself, as your responses will change and evolve over time. In a sense, self-awareness is often like peeling the layers of an onion, with each layer revealing another as our understanding deepens and expands. In terms of addressing your habits themselves, let’s put something concrete in place.
To bring the work you’ve been doing in this book to life in the real world, I want to encourage you to commit to a daily healing practice. I suggest you spend at least 15 minutes on this, but 30–60 minutes would be ideal.
What time of day will work best for you? For many people it’s first thing in the morning, before the distractions of the day start. But if this isn’t the best time for you, feel free to choose one that is. Ideally, though, a consistent time each day is best. If it’s more realistic for you to commit to, say, five days a week, that’s also fine.
Start with your meditation practice (feel free to adapt the one in Chapter 9 to whatever supports you). Begin with 10 minutes and then build up to 30 minutes.
Reflect on what’s going on for you right now. You can use any of the exercises in the book, but if you need something more bespoke, work with the Therapeutic Inquiry practice in Chapter 12 to help explore what’s going on for you today.
Actively work to change your experience by using the tools in the book:
What’s most important here isn’t getting it ‘right’ but getting things moving and building momentum. By establishing a daily practice that’s tailored to you, you’re taking an important step – not only in supporting change but doing so in a personalized way.
Now that we’ve addressed the ‘What’ of your change process, we’re going to explore the ‘How’ of your approach to it. Learning to be our own best coach and supporter isn’t just a ‘nice thing to have’ on our healing journey – it’s at the heart of navigating the often complex and twisting path of resetting our nervous system from the impacts of trauma. And, just as a great sports coach will constantly change and adapt their approach based on the needs of their athlete, the same must be true in your inner world.
In the last few chapters, we’ve been talking about the importance of asking for help, along with the necessity of setting and holding appropriate boundaries with others. Both skills are just as important in the inner landscape of our relationship with ourselves. Sometimes we need to give ourselves a clear and firm boundary and stop a habit or behavior that isn’t helping or supporting us. Other times, we need more support and softness and to be gentler with ourselves.
When I’m training practitioners in our Therapeutic Coaching® program, I talk about this as ‘pressure on’ and ‘pressure off’ therapy. As in, when it’s time to push the client harder to drive change, and equally, when they’re pushing themselves too hard and things are locking up as a result, and we need to support a pressure release. Knowing which is needed and how to deliver it is part of the skill set of the therapist.
As our relationship with ourself improves, and alongside it our self-awareness, we get better at responding to our needs in a sensitive and skillful way. If you notice that your way of relating to yourself isn’t as supportive and empowering as it could be, I suggest you revisit Chapter 14: Transform Your Inner Critic.
If you tend to be too hard on yourself, then learning to defend against your inner critic and soften your inner world will be important. An unfortunate effect of being too hard on ourselves is that often we become disempowered and unable to commit to following through. It’s like, what’s the point in trying if the story we’re telling ourselves is that we’re useless and bound to fail anyway?
Just as a small child requires loving but firm boundaries to help shape their behavior in helpful and constructive ways, we need the same as adults, and sometimes this involves coaching ourselves to follow through with things that might not feel easy or comfortable in the short term. Just as we’re learning to set boundaries for others, we’re learning to do the same for ourselves in our inner world.
Self-discipline is a muscle that becomes stronger through exercise – the more consistently we commit to doing what needs to be done for us to change, the easier it’ll become. And provided we do so in an intelligent and skillful way, the more we push our limits, the more they’ll expand.
Indeed, that may be the very practice we need to commit to. For example, when I’m working with people with chronic illnesses, I often find they’ve learned that they just need to push harder; but in fact, the problem is that they’re already pushing too hard, and they need to slow down, rest, and be gentler with themselves.
Remember the qualities of healthy boundaries with others we explored in the last chapter? It’s those same qualities that we need to use with ourselves. Our boundaries need to be suitably strong, but they also need to be intelligent. They need to be loving and responsible, but we also need to empower ourselves.
Now, if you’ve spent a lifetime without healthy boundaries, it can take a while to find a place of balance. For example, if you’re used to being too hard on yourself and constantly pushing, perhaps you need to go through a period of being deliberately gentle and easy with yourself.
The challenge is that you won’t know what a place of balance feels like until you hit it. So, along the way, you might find yourself being too soft and not following through, and that’s just fine. It’s a small price to pay in your deliberate and important pursuit of more balance and having sustainable internal boundaries in your relationship with yourself.
Now it’s time to talk about the inevitability of things going wrong! I don’t say this to be negative but as the voice of reality. The hardest thing when it comes to creating change in our inner world isn’t getting started – although that can be difficult – it’s getting started again and again when things go off track.
Since you’re reading a book about trauma, I presume that you’ve experienced some complex and confusing things on your life path. This means, therefore, that your healing journey probably won’t be a straight line. You’re going to try different things, and while some will help, others won’t. This will also likely be true of elements of the approach you’ve been learning in this book.
The problem isn’t that you’ll find yourself going off track many times along the way – it’s that you’ll interpret being off track as failure, when in fact it’s feedback. However, by going in with your eyes open, you can be prepared and ready to roll with the punches.
Furthermore, if I’ve learned one thing clinically from specializing in complex chronic illnesses over the last two decades, it’s that often when things go off track, within the reason for them doing so is a golden nugget of information that may well help drive the next step forward.
For example, there’s a common pattern we see in people who relapse on the chronic fatigue recovery journey – they try to push to do too much, too quickly and don’t listen to their body. Therefore, they need to prioritize slowing down and checking in with how they feel, instead of letting their achiever pattern take over.
Furthermore, when things do go off track and we recognize they’ve done so – while also avoiding too much inner critic action and instead putting our energy back into the practices we’ve committed to – we’re growing our inner discipline. In addition, if we’re able to get back on track, having made some adjustments to our new plan based on what we’ve learned, each time we’ll be taking another step closer to our ultimate goal.
And so, please go into the next stage of your healing work knowing that you’ll find yourself off track many times. Being off track isn’t the problem – giving up completely when you do, is. Although giving up for an hour or even a few days can be a helpful way of taking the pressure off sometimes, make sure you don’t let this become your norm.
When you find yourself off track, return to this chapter and your daily healing practice (above). If you can start by coming back to the discipline of your daily exercises and tools, you’ll be amazed by the impact it has.
To wrap up this chapter, let’s return to David’s story. Developing a new way of relating to himself was critical to the lasting change he was so determined to create, and the first thing he committed to was a daily meditation practice. During meditation, he noticed some subtle but real changes in his anxiety, and a stabilization of his mood. He also realized that he couldn’t meditate only when he felt like it – it had to be a daily practice. And most importantly, he needed to hold a firm boundary with himself on the days when he didn’t want to meditate.
David and I also did some meaningful work on his inner critic. Again, he realized that some lively exercises with me in the therapy room wouldn’t be enough, and he had to commit to continually standing up to his inner critic. And so again, he did, and it helped. As we went on to work with emotions, the same was once again true – he had to commit to embedding the new habit.
The result was that within a year, David had got himself out of a toxic living situation and had moved into a place that really felt like home. His next step was to take a different direction in his career. He found a rewarding and challenging new job, which was one of several he was offered. As things in David’s life continued to improve, he didn’t stop doing the practices that were helping him get there; instead, he continued to tweak and adjust them in a way that best supported him.
David’s final challenge was to commit to finding a new relationship, an area that had been particularly scary for him. Over several sessions, I coaxed and challenged him to put himself out there, and with the support of the inner work he was doing, and the momentum from the changes he’d already made, he developed the courage to do so. By the end of filming, David was embarking on a new relationship for the first time in years.
As you reflect on your next steps using the principles, tools, and exercises in this book, I want you to have the same success with them as David did, because you deserve to! However, it’s the actions that you commit to doing daily that will ultimately determine what happens. And, to show you just how powerful this work is, I’m going to finish by sharing the story of perhaps the biggest challenge I’ve faced in my own trauma healing.