emotional healing Archives - Amazing Health Advances

Healing Childhood Trauma

The AHA! Team — Mon, 16 Sep 2024 09:46:39 +0000

Dr. Caroline Leaf – In this podcast (episode #590) and blog, I talk about how adverse childhood experiences can make us focus on the negative, and how we can manage this and heal the mind, brain and body. This is a replay of a Neurolive webinar I did on my app. For the full webinar AD-free, please see Neurocycle.app look for Neurocycle on the App Store or Google Play. In the early 90s, researchers embarked on a landmark study of over 17,000 individuals and asked them about negative experiences in childhood and their current physical and mental health. They found was that when children are exposed to toxic stress hormones like cortisol and adrenaline, this can have a dramatic impact on their minds, brains and bodies. This study later became known as the Adverse Childhood Experiences or ACE study. Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) are traumatic events that children may be exposed to while growing up that include abuse, neglect, domestic violence, substance misuse or mental illness. Long-term exposure to childhood trauma has been linked to everything from heart disease and diabetes to alcoholism, depression, and suicide. While there is no denying the reality and impact of adverse childhood experiences on our mental and physical health, just focusing just on the negative alone, or the bad that happened to us, may actually slow the process of our healing down. Research on the mind-brain-body network shows that an overly negative focus without balancing with the positive can distort our perceptions and potentially hamstring our ability to work through what we have gone through in a way that doesn’t keep us trapped in the past. Why? The mind-brain-body network is all about balance and restoring balance when it is upset. Focusing only on the negative will add to an already overloaded amount of toxic stress from the adverse experience. This is why it is important that while we do the work to find the root causes of our distress and process and reconceptualize what has happened to us, we also make sure we have some positive, balancing checkpoints in place on our healing journey or we risk the danger of getting stuck in a cycle of pain and victimhood. In fact, there is exciting research that shows that positive childhood experiences (PCEs) can actually help buffer against the negative health effects caused by exposure to ACEs. PCEs can also promote healing and recovery through activating our resilience. This shows that all of a child’s experiences—positive and negative—matter, so we shouldn’t just be considering the bad of what has happened to us but also the good, and how all these experiences affect our mental health as adults. Some research even shows that people with some exposure to ACEs, if they reported 3 to 5 positive childhood experiences, had 50% lower odds of adulthood depression or poor mental health, and those who reported 6 to 7 PCE’s had a 72% lower chance of adult mental health challenges. These findings demonstrate that positive childhood experiences can have a cumulative effect on life-long mental health outcomes and play an important role in our healing. The 3:1 Ratio Although we definitely need to work on what we experienced growing up, at the same time we need to leave room for the positive, and a great way to do this is what I call the “3:1 thought ratio”. This is one technique I often use this to balance myself and find it extremely helpful when things seem overwhelming. All you have to do is to intentionally focus on the positive to balance out the negative in a 3:1 ratio. And this can be used for any negative situation, not just for ACEs. For every negative thought that comes to mind, along with its emotions, behaviors, and perspectives, counter it with three positive thoughts. This will help to maintain a balance in energy (quantum) waves in the brain so you can think clearly, build your resilience, and rewire healthy thought patterns! When you practice the 3:1 ratio, this means that each time you have a negative thought, you don’t suppress it, but rather use it as a prompt to think of three positive childhood experiences. This doesn’t mean you are ignoring what has happened to you; rather, you are maintaining the balance of your mind, brain and body so that you can heal what has happened to you rather than remaining trapped in the past. You are essentially using the negative thought as a habit loop trigger to help you recognize what to change WHILE “padding” or mitigating the effects this negative event has on your overall wellbeing. This is not swapping the negative for the positive. It is using the positive to help us face and overcome the negative. For more on managing the effect adverse childhood experiences have on your health and wellbeing, listen to my podcast (episode #590). Podcast Highlights 2:16 What ACEs are & how they impact our mental health 7:28 Our childhood experiences are not a life sentence! 11:55 Why we need to balance the negative with the positive 13:46 What PCEs are & how they can help us heal 20:07 How to use the positive to deal with the negative This podcast and blog are for educational purposes only and are not intended as medical advice. We always encourage each person to make the decision that seems best for their situation with the guidance of a medical professional. To read the original article click here.

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Essential Techniques for Self-Healing with Alex Elle

AHA Publisher — Mon, 21 Nov 2022 08:00:23 +0000

Dr. Caroline Leaf – In this podcast (episode #433) and blog, I talk to wellness educator, certified breathwork coach and Restorative Writing teacher Alex Elle about the importance of journaling, her new book How We Heal, why we need to model our experiences as adults so that we can teach our children to handle life’s challenges, focusing on our own journey instead of trying to change other people, and so much more! Writing came into Alex’s life by way of therapy and the exploration of healing through journaling and mindfulness. The intention behind Alex’s work is to build community and self-care practices through literature and language. She teaches workshops, courses and retreats to assist others in finding their voices and creating clarity in their lives & relationships. She is also currently a teacher in residence at CIVANA Resort in Carefree, Arizona. As a restorative writing teacher, Alex is passionate about helping people find true healing and get closer to themselves through the pages of their journal, which she discusses in depth in her amazing new book How We Heal. This book is full of techniques for self-healing, including journaling rituals to cultivate innate strength, accessible tools for processing difficult emotions, and restorative meditations to ease the mind. Complementing these practices are powerful insights from Alex Elle’s own journey of self-discovery using writing to heal, plus remarkable stories of healing from a range of luminary voices, including Nedra Tawwab, Morgan Harper Nichols, Dr. Thema Bryant, Barb Schmidt, and many more. Alex is passionate about reminding people that we are our own greatest teacher. When it comes to healing and transformation, there has to be a sense of self-trust. The healing journey begins when we learn how to trust ourselves—that we are on the right path even when we feel we may not be. Alex’s work centers around guiding people on this journey and teaching them to become their own truth-tellers. She teaches them how to name what they need, give themselves permission to put down things they no longer need, and to honor their own desires. A key part of this process is what Alex calls “restorative writing”, which includes journaling. This kind of journaling and writing doesn’t have to be a “dear diary” experience. You can simply start with a prompt like “I am choosing joy because…” and make a list of what choosing joy looks like for you. Journaling is not just about uncovering trauma and moving forward, which is of course important. It is also about tapping into our joy and inner peace, which is extremely powerful. Trauma is not our resting place—we don’t just have to sit in our trauma. Part of the healing journey also means seeking out joy and self-celebration. This is not just something we do as individuals. It is a communal act. Self-care and self-healing is an act of community care. When we heal ourselves, we heal each other—we heal our lineages and we dismantle cycles of trauma. Yet choosing joy is not just about positive affirmations. As Alex notes, affirmations without actions are just words. Taking action is an important part of any healing journey—we cannot just write “I am worthy” and “I am enough” and think everything will change. We need to take steps to lean into our worthiness and implement actual changes in our lives. This kind of work will have lasting impact in our lives. It is also important to understand that it is okay to not have all the answers. When we tap into our inner joy and peace, we can also find a sense of stability even when things are uncertain—even when we are in the midst of a storm. This kind of journey is not a one-off event. Healing isn’t band-aid work—it is forever work. Healing is a partner in this life, because as long as we are alive, we will face challenges that can affect us emotionally and physically. Healing is not about escaping something. It is about leaning into life and befriending the things that make us afraid so we can tap into our self-compassion and truly move forward. If we stay in the pain and “What ifs”, we will not find acceptance for what we cannot change, which will keep us stuck in the past. But, if we befriend our pain and fears and face them without contention or judgment and with compassion, grace and understanding, we will find true healing. This doesn’t happen overnight. Healing is something that we need to practice. It isn’t easy, but it is worth it, and it gets easier the more we walk the journey. The more we practice tapping into our own experiences, the more we access our own answers: our own how, why, when and where…our own journey forward. We learn to trust ourselves and heal. And, when we model this for our children and share our journey, we teach them from youth to manage their mental health. We teach our children that this is a lifelong journey, and that when we heal ourselves, we heal others. We show our children how true healing is about community. We are all students of life and of each other. When we give ourselves permission to heal, we give other people the permission to do the same. At the same time, it is important to recognize that you can only change yourself, not other people. Our job is not to change people—it is to accept people, even if that means accepting them from afar. This can be hard, especially if it is someone we love. The greatest permission we can give someone to change is to lead by example. Likewise, it is more important to like ourselves than have other people like us. If you don’t like yourself, you will find it hard to truly be yourself around other people, or like other people on a genuine level, which will affect your relationships and your mental health. For more on trusting yourself, the healing journey and improving your mental health, listen to my podcast episode with Alex (episode #433), and check out her amazing work and book. To read the original article click here.

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A Farm Where Animals and People Heal From Trauma Together

AHA Publisher — Fri, 04 Nov 2022 07:00:27 +0000

Abigail Klein Leichman via Israel21c – The three-legged fox, the chameleon that can’t stick out its tongue, and about 200 other creatures on the modern-day Noah’s ark of psychotherapist Yoni Yehuda are rehabilitating from disability, trauma or injury – as is Yehuda himself. Puffing on medical cannabis to ease chronic pain resulting from a 1987 army parachuting accident and a 1996 terror attack, Yehuda explains that he and each of the rescued animals at his Havayot Center outside Jerusalem is an equal partner with patients in his unique “Therapeutic Triangles” model of animal-assisted psychotherapy. “The basis of the work here is saving animals and taking care of them. We are responsible for their welfare as long as they are in cages in our possession, which is not where they are supposed to be.” As he speaks, he’s hand-feeding a bald baby parakeet while a mare named Venus gives a contented snort in her corral outside. Aside from those born here, all animals at the one-acre Havayot Center arrived after some trauma rendered them unable to survive in the wild, temporarily or forever. Some were former patients of the Israeli Wildlife Hospital; others were saved and brought to Yehuda by individuals or by the National Parks Authority. The Triangle Animal-assisted psychotherapy isn’t new. In 1961, American clinical therapist Boris Levinson wrote a paper titled “The dog as a ‘co-therapist’” and coined the term “pet therapy” in 1964. Animals are known to induce calm, self-awareness, compassion and emotional adjustment. However, in typical animal-assisted therapy, usually with dogs or horses, the animals are adjuncts to the therapeutic process. At Havayot, they are fully part of the process as the client and therapist jointly care for the animal’s needs. “We are together on the same level and there is a triangular connection with the animal and with the therapist,” explains Yehuda. “Everything comes from a lot of respect for the animals and letting them lead the process. As a therapist, I have to put my ego aside and then the client can project things on the animals and start to speak about his own world and reach for solutions.” The therapist must have the knowledge and observational expertise to decide which animal will have best therapeutic value for each client. Yehuda chooses from a large variety: insects, fish, reptiles, birds, rodents, an assortment of wild and barnyard animals, dogs and a cat. He gives each one a name and comfortable conditions for its needs. University of Denver Prof. Philip Tedeschi, an expert in animal-assisted therapy and founder of the Institute for Human-Animal Connection, has visited the Havayot Center several times. “Philip said this may be the only place in the world with such a large range of animals for therapy. It was certainly the first of its kind,” says Yehuda. Goldfish Are Therapists, Too When I ask how fish can be therapeutic partners, Yehuda points to Yossi, a handsome goldfish swimming in an aquarium. “Put your finger on the glass and tap it. Now move your finger to the other side and tap it. He will come over to you because Yossi loves to be in touch with people,” Yehuda instructs me. Sure enough, Yossi follows my finger. “Now, think about a very shy child. He may have selective mutism. You want to give him the feeling of connection with an animal, but with Yossi he doesn’t have to be in physical touch with it and he doesn’t have to speak to it,” says Yehuda. “If he wants to, he can try to read Yossi’s body language and become his spokesman. If a child doesn’t want to speak to me but starts speaking to the animal, then he can speak to me. The animal makes the change.” An empty Jack Daniels bottle was placed in Yossi’s aquarium by a client struggling with alcoholism ever since his birth to an alcoholic mother. “The water in the aquarium symbolizes life, the womb. The fish represents our ability to return to the womb and be reborn,” says Yehuda. “Leaving the bottle in the aquarium allowed this man to start over. He was able to stop drinking. And neither I nor the fish had to say anything.” Yehuda shows me a maze constructed by a child grappling with his parents’ divorce. The mouse begins from one house and learns to follow a long route leading to two houses — a mother’s house and a father’s house. Insects such as butterflies, walking sticks and gigantic Madagascar hissing cockroaches can be effective in treating various phobias and difficulties. Snakes help clients with sexual identity issues because of the way they shed their skin and develop a new one as they grow throughout their lifetime. It’s Personal When Yehuda was 13, his beloved cousin Noam was killed in action in Lebanon. The two boys had enjoyed caring for Noam’s pets including a sheep. They used to talk about how animals helped them understand their own feelings. At the time of this tragedy, the Yehuda family was living in England. Sensitive to their son’s grief and his connection to animals, Yoni’s parents signed him up for a class for gifted children at the London Zoo under Sir David Attenborough. At 19, after a military parachuting accident rendered him unable to walk for some time, Yehuda was one of the first wounded soldiers treated by equine therapy pioneer Anita Shkedi, who later founded the Israel National Therapeutic Riding Association. Thus, when he was shot in a terror attack nine years later, “I knew that I had to have animals around me because only with animals could I understand what was happening inside me.” Yehuda, now 54, has a master’s degree in special education and a PhD in psychology. A man of faith, he speculates that God was the first animal-assisted psychotherapist. “To save humanity, God puts Noah in the ark with all these animals. He could have just put him to sleep and woken him up after the flood. But God put people with animals to save their own souls,” he says. Clients need not share his religious beliefs to benefit from his therapeutic model, he emphasizes. The nonprofit Havayot Center, built with Yehuda’s own hands and funds on the grounds of his home in Elazar in 1998, is supervised by the regional veterinary authorities and other governmental agencies and ministries. The center accepts private clients and is an authorized provider for victims of terror attacks and war. Yehuda opened a School of Animal Interventional Therapy at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and traveled extensively lecturing about his work and teaching his protocols. In 2009, the Israel Postal Service issued a series of stamps recognizing the influence of Yehuda’s Therapeutic Triangles model in the field of animal-assisted therapy in Israel and around the world. Saying Hello to Each Animal But Yehuda’s ongoing physical and emotional rehab forced him to take a step back. He grapples daily with PTSD, fibromyalgia, CRPS (complex regional pain syndrome) and other ailments including osteoporosis from intensive steroid therapy. He has daily physical and hydrotherapy and periodically receives hyperbaric oxygen therapy for PTSD. Currently, he’s donating his services to members of an Israeli organization that helps people dealing with PTSD; the Jerusalem-area group encompasses more than 70 families. “My innovation was that I work with the families as well, because they are neglected,” says Yehuda. “No one ever asked my wife, Liat, if she needed help. When I was in a wheelchair, the need for help was obvious. But when you have PTSD, it’s hard for people to understand the hell that’s happening in your head and how it affects your family.” The Bernie Madoff financial scam and the Covid epidemic have left the Havayot Center struggling. Yehuda had to let go many staff members and rehome some horses. But despite his limited energy, time and money, he is carrying on – as much for himself as for his clients. “I don’t know what I would do if I didn’t have the feeling of responsibility to wake up every morning and spend three hours saying hello to each animal,” he says. For more information, click here To read the original article click here.

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One of the Best Mental Health Lessons from Ted Lasso

AHA Publisher — Wed, 02 Feb 2022 08:00:02 +0000

Dr. Caroline Leaf – In this podcast (episode #348) and blog, I talk about the importance of compassion and forgiveness, and how these qualities impact our wellbeing. I recently started watching a popular show on Apple TV called Ted Lasso. Some of you may have heard about it, and some of you may have even watched it already! For those who don’t know what the show is about, here is a brief description: (Spoiler Alert) Jason Sudeikis plays Ted Lasso, an American football coach who is hired by a football club in England (and by “football” here I mean what we call soccer). He knows little about soccer but takes the job anyway. We find out early on that Hannah Wadingham, who plays a character named Rebecca, is the owner of the soccer club. Rebecca recently got divorced from her husband, and they used to own the club together. Her former husband is a very prideful man who cheated on her and treated her badly. She ended up winning complete ownership of the club through the divorce settlement, and she wanted to hire an inexperienced coach so that she could ruin the reputation of the club and hurt her former husband Rupert (played by Anthony Head). Apparently, the club was one of the things her ex-husband loved, and she was trying to ruin it to hurt him the way he hurt her. The character of Ted Lasso comes across as an all-around loveable and nice person. He truly wants to understand those around him, and he works hard trying to get to know people. From the very first episode, he starts to bring Rebecca homemade cookies, which she loves. There’s not a day that goes by that he does not do this small act of kindness. Rebecca, however, is so focused on her revenge that she disregards the people that she has in her life in the present, including Ted. She has an assistant named Higgins (played by Jeremy Swift) who she constantly puts down, who himself is facing a moral dilemma because he wants to work for her but does not feel good about helping her destroy the club. Her best friend Flo, played by Ellie Taylor, has a daughter who Rebecca has lost contact with over the years, even though she is her godmother. In the show, we witness an exchange between them when Flo tells Rebecca that her daughter misses her godmother and can’t understand why she isn’t in her life anymore. Meanwhile, Rebecca, in her mission to ruin the club, hires paparazzi to take photos of Lasso with Keely (played by Juno Temple), the girlfriend of one of the club’s star players, to make it look as if they were romantically involved. This would have severely hurt both Keely and Ted’s reputations and affected the morale of the whole team. Thankfully, in this particular episode, Keely manages to stop the story from being published. Yet Rebecca still tries to do this even though Ted and Keely had been so kind to her. While watching this all play out, I noticed a connection between how much pain Rebecca was in from the trauma that she experienced from her divorce AND how much pain it was causing her and the people in her life as she held onto her anger and tried to get back at Rupert. Of course, I believe that Rebecca’s anger is valid, and that the character of her ex-husband is an awful person who used and mistreated her. Her experiences are very real, and affected her mental and physical wellbeing. Our experiences are wired into the brain by the mind, which, in turn, can affect how we feel and our overall health. However, Rebecca felt that the only solution to her pain was to hurt Rupert in a similar way, and that this was also causing her pain. Rebecca was constantly worrying about her plan for revenge, which made her overlook the incredible people who were still in her life. For example, when Keely found out that Rebecca hired the paparazzi, she was extremely hurt because of the friendship they had developed, and she felt like Rebecca had broken her trust. Likewise, Rebecca’s assistant Higgins ended up quitting because he was suffering emotional trauma from the way that Rebecca treated him and did not like being a part of her plan to ruin the reputation of the soccer club. A defining moment in Rebecca’s life occurred in episode 9 of season 1, where she found out her ex-husband was having a child with his new fiancé. This was one of the hardest things to watch because you can clearly see Rebecca’s deep feelings of pain and grief. It was clear that she had always wanted a child while she had been married Rupert, and he had made her put it off. Now, she has lost her opportunity to become a mother, and this news broke her. Her response to the whole situation was still incredible. She could have shut down and gotten more bitter, and tried even harder to get revenge on her husband. But instead, there was a shift in her mindset—she chose to change the way she reacted to what was happening to her and hope <-?? her experiences played out in her brain, body and life. Rebecca decided to confess to Ted about how she organized the paparazzi and how she only hired Ted to ruin the reputation of the club. She admitted everything, and reached out to the people in her life when she was in a place of extreme brokenness. Ted responded with so much forgiveness and compassion that it completely shocked Rebecca. She fully expected anger and hate from him because those were the emotions she experienced from her ex-husband, and those were the emotions that had dominated her mind because of the grief and trauma of her ugly divorce. But this anger and desire for revenge had only made her brokenness worse. Rebecca realized she was not able to ever fully heal as long as she stayed in this dark mental place. When she experienced Ted’s compassion, she suddenly felt free from the pain she was experiencing—it didn’t just go away, but she did realize that it didn’t have to dominate her life. There was another way to live! You could literally see this change in her facial expressions and her whole body, as if a huge weight had been lifted off her shoulders. It’s as if she was finally able to let go of the toxic anger that was breaking her down because someone she respected accepted and loved her, despite everything that had happened. This is such a crucial scene in the show because it shows how extremely important it is to surround yourself with people who will love and accept you, especially in the moments when you feel broken. It also shows that you never know how you will impact someone if you show love and compassion and have grace—you could literally end up transforming a life! At the end of the day, all human beings need compassion and understanding. We are all struggling, and we are all a little bit broken. Sometimes our brokenness causes us to do things that may hurt other people in our life. But true healing comes when we can seek out help and receive love—when we feel safe enough to admit where we made a mistake, and can see how we are all connected and how our actions impact others. We all need all the help we can get as humans in an ever-evolving, hugely complex world, including large doses of gentleness, kindness, and compassion for each other as well as ourselves. We need a new narrative, one where we listen to each other’s narratives and problem-solve through them together. As I discussed in a recent blog and podcast, the brain functions best with a flexible, dynamic balance between specialized, locally segregated activity, and more generalized global integration. Too much segregation and excessive integration can lead to suboptimal functioning. What does all this science mean? Research has shown that training yourself to be more kind and compassionate to both yourself and others can increase your positive emotions, sense of social connectedness and pro-social behaviors, while decreasing your negative feelings, stress and social biases, all of which improve your brain integration, balance and health. This is also why forgiveness and grace are so important. Research shows that the details of a transgression, which can hold us in a viselike grip, are more susceptible to being reconceptualized and even forgotten when we forgive. Unforgiveness keeps the toxic thought tree strong and powerful in your brain, which impedes your healing because it’s still “connected to the source.” This is due to the law of entanglement in quantum physics, which keeps everything in a relationship— toxic or otherwise—entangled, affecting each component. When we forgive, we actually grow a part of our brain called the anterior superior temporal sulcus (aSTS); the more we grow this area, the easier it will become to manage the pain of a trauma or toxic experience. To read the original article click here.

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How Over-Explaining is Linked to Trauma + Strategies to Find the Root & Heal

AHA Publisher — Thu, 16 Sep 2021 07:00:23 +0000

Dr. Caroline Leaf – In this podcast (episode #314) and blog, Dr. Leaf talks about how over-explaining and over-sharing can be trauma responses, and how they impact the way we function. I decided to speak about this topic because of the many responses I got to a social media post I recently put up: “Over-explaining is a common trauma response for those who were often made to feel at fault as a child. At one point, the desire to people-please provided safety. But, please know, what happened is not your fault, and it’s not your job to regulate other people’s emotional states.” Over-explaining means describing something to an excessive degree, whereas oversharing is the disclosure of an inappropriate amount of information and detail about your personal life. These fall under the fawn trauma response (see podcast #302 for more information on the different trauma responses). We often do this non-consciously to try to control the anxiety we experience in the moment, which is a signal that has a root. This thought “root” is what we need to find, or the uncomfortable feelings we experience won’t stop. If we don’t get to the root of the thought, we will use us a lot of mental energy trying to manage these feelings and other peoples’ impressions of us, which can be a pretty thankless and exhausting task! Why do we do this? 1. Over explaining (O/E thinking): You might be doing this to keep yourself safe, which could be a sign that you have a toxic thought tree that is dominating your thinking, and the root system is some sort of abusive relationship that happened in your past. The only way you managed to cope during that time was a fawning trauma response, which is now no longer sustainable in your life, as it has affected your ability to trust yourself and your self-confidence. You may also slip into an over-explaining response if you have been gaslit. This can make you feel like you must say a lot, and/or say things in different ways, so that the person gaslighting you can’t distort your words and make you look bad by using what you say against you. It could also be that you are trying to make people understand where you are coming from, and you feel the need to use a prefacing comment or story as a protective barrier to make people see your reasoning. You may feel the need to justify yourself or your decisions to make someone accept who you are and how you think, which is also a trauma root that you will need to work on. You could also be trying to keep the peace, and over-explain as a result. Perhaps you tend to over-explain because someone in your past made you feel everything is your fault, no matter what, and you feel the need to defend yourself, or it may bother you if you disappoint someone in your life and you use over-explaining to compensate. You could be thinking out loud, or have had a TBI (traumatic brain injury) and need more words to explain yourself. (I had many patients who did this.) You may see over-explaining as a way to be honest or to boost another person’s emotional state. It could also be that you are a chattier person, especially when you feel you can contribute to the situation, and, once stimulated, you talk too much. The important thing here is mind-management; learn to self-regulate your responses and how you process how other people react to you, and adjust accordingly. Oversharing (O/S thinking): Many of the roots are similar to why we tend to over-explain, which I described briefly above. Sometimes oversharing is also the result of a misguided attempt to gain sympathy. If you share your mistakes to help others, you are being authentic; if you share too much to gain sympathy, then you are oversharing. If you feel like you tend to over-explain or over-share, there is hope! You can work on this by doing a 5-step Neurocycle over 63 days to uncover the root of the thought and work on rewiring your brain. This is the mind-management system I have developed over the past 38 years and is based on my research and practice. (I discuss this in detail in my book Cleaning Up Your Mental Mess, my app Neurocycle and in my recent clinical trials.) The 5 steps are: 1. Gather: O/E = Start with something recent that happened to you and observe your thinking. Did you apologize a lot? Battle to say no? Feel the need to give lots of detail so that the other person understood you? Did you over-anticipate how this person will respond when you set a boundary? Or perhaps focus on the worst-case scenario? O/S = Think of ways you tend to overshare. Do you perhaps post intimate details about your relationships, friendships, family matters and personal drama online? Use social media to vent your frustrations? How do you overshare? How does this make you feel emotionally and physically? Remind yourself that oversharing doesn’t create intimacy; it can be a sign of self-absorption that is masked as “vulnerability”. 2. Reflect: Ask, answer and discuss what you gathered in step 1 to get to the core of what you are doing, why, and the impact this is having on your life and relationships. 3. Write: Write down your reflections to help organize your thinking and gain more clarity into what is going on in your life. 4. Recheck : How you can see this in a different way; what is your thought “antidote”? 5. Practice your new way of thinking every day using the active reach: Some examples of good active reaches are: Practicing being patient with yourself. Celebrating in the moment when you do set a boundary WITHOUT chronicling your reasoning for it in painstaking detail. Learning to sit with the discomfort of disappointing others. You can’t please everyone—the one person you should always prioritize is yourself! Giving yourself permission to feel whatever feelings surface when you say “no”. Reminding yourself of times you did assert a boundary, and how things didn’t end up as badly as you expected them to be. Practicing mind-management, where you self-regulate your reaction to other people, and adjust accordingly. Using use the Neurocycle to do brain-building daily to help improve your mental resilience. For more on this check out my podcast on brain-building. To read the original article click here.

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What to Do When People Don’t Accept Your Boundaries

AHA Publisher — Fri, 03 Sep 2021 07:00:51 +0000

Dr. Caroline Leaf – In this podcast (episode #312) and blog, I am going to talk about how to respond in a healthy way when people don’t respond well to you taking ownership of your mental health and life. Recently I put up this post on social media:“You were never hard to love. You were just getting harder to manipulate & control. You were getting better at honoring your boundaries”. Based on the great responses and questions, I decided this is something that needs to be discussed in a podcast! As you start to heal and prioritize your mental health, you may notice people reacting negatively as you change. There are many reasons for this, which I am going to go through, but before I do, I want to emphasize that you were never hard to love. You are phenomenal. And I am not saying that to make you feel all warm inside; I am saying it as a scientist and researcher. Your psychoneurobiology (mind, brain and body) is wired for love, which is amazing! There is something you can do that no one else can do, which is also incredible! Besides the different structures of your brain, you have about 200 specializations across the different parts of your brain that are aligned in a unique and wonderful way, making you you. Just wow! All this means that your brain is inherently specialized. The cerebral cortex has 200 structures, each with specialized circuits. Everything that you process as you go through life is more efficient when done with a specialized circuit, which is how the brain works. Yes, there is a limit to how many areas there are and how many circuits within those areas exist, because the human skull is limited to a certain size. Yet we all have our own unique 200 areas, or what I call our “perfect you”, which gives us a unique way of perceiving and being in the world—I call this the “wise mind” in all of us. When all this specialization between individuals comes together, we can enhance each other’s existence using our “wise minds”, which is essentially what it means to be part of a community! But, of course, life happens, and adverse circumstances can mess with this beautiful specialization, temporarily blocking our wise mind. The brain is always changing in response to the mind, and this can go in both a negative and positive direction, which is known as the plastic paradox. When we go through hard times, we are messy because our minds get messy—this is part of what it means to be human. However, when we are messy, this can impact those around us, upsetting the natural balance that we, as humans, seek out. Consequently, the people around us may try to restore this balance, and this can potentially make things messier. It is important to note that healing can be very messy, and that seeing loved ones in pain is messy. When this happens, our perspectives can become very dominant to help us survive and cope, which, in turn, makes it difficult to see anything except our own point of view. When this happens, it often feels like the person in your life is trying to control or manipulate you, or is getting frustrated with or resentful of you. They just cannot understand why you are not taking their advice, why you are taking so long to heal or why you aren’t doing it their way. As I said, it can become very messy! But there is hope. When this happens, the situation can be repaired, and all parties involved can grow from this, if they can work through it individually and as a community, which involves a lot of mind management! But how? Here are some tips to handle this kind of situation: 1. Remind yourself that they don’t really understand what you are going through, and you are not responsible for how they choose to react. Most of the time, when someone in your life is acting in the “messy” way described above, it is because they don’t know how to deal with how you are changing. They don’t understand your experience because they are not an expert on your experience—only you are. Indeed, even you won’t fully understand what you are struggling with at times as you go through the stages of healing (which often get worse before they get better). This means you will do and say things you don’t really mean to do or say during your journey, especially if you are triggered. In this case, it’s important to identify those triggers so that you can work on them. And, when you are ready, you can let your loved ones know that this is your mess, your healing, and it will look different at different stages, and that you need to do this for you. You may also have to say to this person (or people) that if they are uncomfortable with this, for the sake of your healing and the relationship, that some distance may be required. Remind yourself that these kind of boundaries are more for you than for them, and that you are not responsible for how they choose to react to you and your needs. 2. Remember that you are entitled to your own space. Sometimes someone may feel they are losing their power over you when you start to heal, which can also lead to a very messy situation. Certain people with narcissistic tendencies may not like losing control over you because of their own traumas, toxic experiences and pain. Some people may be angry that you are changing because of certain cultural or religious mindsets. People like this tend to flip things around and blame you in an obscure and confusing way—they try make you feel bad about what you need to do to heal. When this happens, the key is to recognize this and, as mentioned above, put some major boundaries in place to protect yourself. You can start doing this by visualizing yourself in a suit of armor when you are around them, and creating space and distance between you and them till you feel strong enough to deflect their “darts”. If they try to make you feel guilty for doing this, or “love bomb” you to manipulate you, just see this as more evidence that you need to maintain your boundaries; you are entitled to your own space and have the right to seek out your own healing and peace. 3. Remind yourself, and them, that you are not helpless. Some people may react negatively to your healing journey because they see you as helpless. They feel that their plan, not yours, is the thing that is going to carry you through this challenge/issue/time. They don’t believe that you have it in you to heal yourself. But you should never be treated as helpless, regardless of what may or may not have happened in your past or in your relationships. We all need help and support at times, but you should be supported in way that empowers you to find your own healing—you should be allowed to walk your own journey. In fact, your wise mind becomes activated when people support you with unconditional love, not when people tell you what they think you should be doing. If you find yourself being boxed in by other people’s expectations, it’s important to show and say that even though you are battling, you aren’t helpless, and with your 200 unique brain specializations and circuitry, what works for them will not necessarily work for you. At the end of the day, you need to work out what boundaries you need to heal. As I mentioned above, this is not to keep people out; rather, boundaries are about protecting yourself while you work through your own stuff. This may look like asking the person in question to just listen to you when you need support, or it may mean creating some distance from them as you learn how to embrace, process and reconceptualize your pain. Or you could choose to keep things neutral and light, just seeing this person when you need a mental and emotional break. There is no one way to “do” boundaries. 4. Be careful of “fixers”. There are also people that are always trying to fix things for others, which is often a sign that their own trauma response needs healing; they are trying to fix you to avoid facing their own pain. In this case, blind compliance with no boundaries will only make things worse. If you can see this happening, tell the person directly, but as kindly as possible, that they can’t fix themselves by trying to fix you. It may end the relationship or put it on pause for a time, but it’s important you are not being used as an avoidance technique by someone else—this will only cause more mental pain for everyone involved. Trying to fix someone can also come from a sense of helplessness. When a person sees someone they love in so much pain, it can be heartbreaking. They may want to try to absorb the pain and make it go away, and can end up saying and/or doing too much, until they reach a tipping point and make things worse. In this case, it’s important to calmly tell this person that you understand what they are trying to do, and that you appreciate their concern, but a better way to help you is to wait until you ask them for support instead of offering advice or help so freely all the time. This often happens in a parent-child relationship, especially as the child grows up and enters adulthood. Yet allowing our children, no matter what age they are, to be free to make a mess and accept mental “messiness” as a part of life is incredibly important, as it helps them learn how to manage their mental health and grow as a person. If you find yourself in this kind of situation, just let your parent or guardian know this: “What has happened is a mess, but it is my mess. I need to experience this without judgement. I need to embrace, process and reconceptualize what has happened. I am thankful for your love and support, and I appreciate the fact that I know you will be there for me no matter what, like I am there for you, because we are on the same side. But you cannot fix this for me.” If things are really challenging, I highly recommend family therapy as well, which creates a safe environment, which allows everyone involved to discuss how they feel and what their intentions are. 5. Change the narrative! We need to change the narrative surrounding mental health. We need to accept the fact that it’s okay to be a mess, and we need to level the playing field; no-one is exempt from battling with their mind! At the same time, we need to empower people and let them know that there is hope. As I discuss in detail in my book Cleaning Up Your Mental Mess, through developing self-regulation, we can tune in to our wise minds and find a way forward—we can gain a sense of peace amidst the chaos. Indeed, you can start doing this today! Just take some time out of your day (even if this is just a few minutes!) and tune into yourself…tap into your wise mind. Embrace your worth, and acknowledge your own desire to heal. Say to yourself, “I see you”. To read the original article click here.

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