I thought I had pretty good self-esteem; I saw myself as a confident caring woman. Little did I know the journey this would take me on both personally and professionally.

For thirty years I have walked that healing journey with many people in a number of different contexts. I have learnt that

• Child sexual abuse was so widespread that over the years every woman I got close to disclosed sexual abuse by a trusted family member or friend; not just one in three!
• The context in which the abuse happened and the way it was dealt with is as important as the event, as to how the person is affected.
• Michael White, the person who has taught me the most about helping people, says trauma undermines the sense of self. To recover from trauma is to restore the sense of self by asking “what did I do to cope” and “what is important me”.  Uncovering what they did to cope recognizes that no one is a passive recipient of what happened.
• We understand what is important to us by validating our emotions; anger, fear, pride, joy and sadness, that recognise what was taken or desecrated that is precious and valued to them.
• Boundaries are the result of a strong sense of self.
• Not only trauma but working with trauma undermines that sense of self.

In the process of journeying with others  healing from child abuse and neglect I have discovered my own story. My personal and professional journeys run side by side with many ironies. To do the healing journey with another I must form an authentic relationship with them. The ‘father of counselling” Carl Rogers said as much way back when I was just a pup.

It is not what has happened to me or what I believe in that is important, it is how I was connected to when that happened and the context of connection in which it happened.

I have developed a very simple model of child development and healing it is all summed up in a simple little diagram;

• Stress and distress- connection-
• As the child is connected with, they connect both with themselves and with others.
• Pathways of connection are formed within the brain; linking instincts, emotions and thoughts; the three different parts of the brain.

The brain is developed in safe nurturing relationships. Safe nurturing relationships give a child their self. They learn who they are from how they are responded to.

For 8 years I developed and facilitated parenting courses. Parents didn’t need to be taught how to parent, they needed to develop a strong sense of self so they could connect with their children from that strong place. Hence the name of my business Bodymindspirit Connections; Standing Strong in Myself.

When we connect with a child, we help them have their story. If children are not seen, heard, felt and responded to, they are unable to put their story together. The story is formed by drawing on information from all the parts of the brain; instincts, emotions and thoughts. The brain cannot do this if it is flooded with stress chemicals such as cortisol and adrenaline.

Every day we help children put the story of their lives together by listening to them, validating and responding to their needs, emotions and opinions. Helping them make sense of what is happening to them; helping them connect facts, feelings and thoughts; creating pathways in the brain.

What if the parent or carer is not able to be present for the child? What if the parent demands the child meets their needs or is emotionally absent?  The brain remains charged with stress. The child must learn ways of coping by ignoring and overcoming the stress. The child is trying to stay alive in a war zone of deadly missiles constantly being fired.

Michael White says before you can know the story you need a” new place to stand”. I began to value myself. By an absolute miracle I had a number of experiences that changed my theology and world view. I saw myself as good; that God loved me. I had been raised on a theology that said I was bad; “there is no health in me”. The charismatic movement within the church of the late 1980s told me God loved me; not because He was gracious, but because I was loveable and precious. That is what every child learns as they are held and rocked and comforted, listened to and have their feelings accepted and validated.

I was being seen and heard. I was learning to see and hear myself. I was putting my story together. I was having an alternative experience of being safe, loved, and heard. I was becoming. But people who had known me didn’t like it; I had boundaries. I got angry. I had limits. I was no longer totally available to them. I was becoming available to me. I began to give the little girl what she had not had; attention, care, nurture, a voice: little things like soft smelly soap (not Solvol) soft pretty toilet paper (not cut up newspapers and scratchy paper) and long showers, not to mention times of quiet and stillness.

The safer I got the crankier I got, the more I felt my feelings and traced them, the more the story emerged. That continues to be my process; feeling and validating my feelings and tracing them to their origins.

Over the thirty years of working with people’s trauma, I have both uncovered my own and experienced more. I have put together my story.

Now I champion self-care for workers, recognizing when we are triggered, understanding emotions, feeling our feelings and putting them where they belong so they don’t overload the present. I champion strength based practices that put the person as the expert of their own life that separates the problem from the person.

Self-esteem was the beginning of the journey to self to by uncovering the story held within.

The post Having a self appeared first on Body Mind Spirit Connections.

To story our experiences is to bring fragments from different parts of the brain and put them in sequence linked with emotions to make sense of and meaning of what happened. When we are not safe or are overwhelmed, we go into survival mode. When we get safe and calm we can put the story together in sequence and connect  the emotions. Emotions tell the truth and make sense of our experiences.

Sometimes we cannot story our experiences because we do not have the mental or emotional ability to take it all in. The experience is outside our ability to understand or endure. We need help. We may need time, information, safety, support or to become a bit older or stronger before we can put the story together. We may need the support of a safe person to help us get the order right, help us stay with the feelings, to believe us and to validate our feelings.

When distressing things happen we cope at the time and when we get safe we try to tell the story. It gets mixed up and we get overwhelmed with emotions. If we can slow down, calm down, breathe, put the facts in sequence and feel the emotions where they belong in the story, the event can be stored as autobiographical memory in the thinking, organising part of the brain. If we don’t get safe and are unable to story the experience it is stored in fragments that can get triggered out of place, when something that reminds us of the original event takes place.

Storying our experiences is an important part of everyday life. We are constantly storying experiences. The same event can have a number of different stories depending on what meaning we want to give it. The story of an event can change over time with new information and a different perspective.

WE need our stories to be about us. We need to be able to tell our stories from our own perspective, our own feelings, our own values, our own opinions.  The story needs to be about what happened to us, not what other people thought or believed happened to us.

When children are tuned into, listened to and allowed to have their feelings and opinions in the experience, they become present in their stories. They develop a sense of their self. Sometimes a child loses his or her story. If the story is not believed, minimised or re-interpreted through someone else’s eyes or beliefs, the child loses their story. By losing their story, they lose their self.

Children’s stories must be heard, believed and understood. Sometimes children might not have all the facts; but they have the feelings. If the feelings don’t match the facts they dismiss their feelings. When someone has another perspective on the event that does not match the child’s they often dismiss theirs. They lose touch with their truth, but it never goes away, it is stored in the body.

As part of healthy families children learn to have their stories and that other people might have different stories about the same event.

How do we have our story?

Tell the story from your own perspective, connecting with your feelings and opinions.

What happened?  What happened to you?

What did other people do to support, or confuse you?

What did you do to cope?

What did you feel? What do you feel now telling the story?

How is this about what you value?

Sometimes when people uncover a story they get confused. What they have been told and what they know don’t match. They need to trust and understand their own knowing.

We have many stories in our lives. Stories aren’t just facts. They have feelings and meaning. How we story our experiences depends on what we give value to. We privilege different aspects of the story. Our emotional responses are a testament to what we give value to; what is important to us. This is why it is important to have feelings validated and believed; they tell us what is important and when what is important is in anyway disrespected or discredited or damaged. Emotion tells the truth about the story.

Putting our story together means seeing the world from our own perspective. It is a way of “tuning in to yourself.”  Dr Daniel Siegel says that to tell our stories is to provide ourselves with the experience of being attuned to. It is profoundly therapeutic as it connects us to the core of our self.

We need to be safe to tell our story. If in the telling or the writing of our story we become confused or overwhelmed we need to get calm so the brain can bring all the information together from the different parts of the brain. We need to stay present with ourselves, our reality, our feelings, our body.  We need to have that story believed, validated and responded to, especially if that did not happen in the past.

Write or tell the facts in sequence. Rewrite or tell in more detail.

Rewrite or retell focusing on the feelings; the feelings you were not safe to have and how you feel about it now.

The post Understanding our Story: Reclaiming our Self appeared first on Body Mind Spirit Connections.

Because the experience is so overwhelming, it is broken down and stored in fragments: facts, emotions, images and perceptions in different parts of the brain.

When we are safe and calm the mind brings the fragments together so it can be stored in the frontal cortex of the brain as a story. The story is put in sequence a piece at a time. Unattached emotions, sensations and perceptions are put where they belong in the story.

If the body is overwhelmed by stress hormones, such as adrenaline, the experience is broken down and stored as fragments, in different parts of the brain. Stress hormones inhibit the part of the brain that coordinates the brain and brings facts, feelings and perceptions together to create a coherent story. When we are safe and calm we can put the pieces together, a bit at a time. If we can’t get safe they get stored as fragments and get all mixed up together. If stressful or distressing things keep happening, and we don’t get safe and supported, we accumulate these fragments.

We carry around a bag of misplaced and mixed up pain that can be triggered and splattered unbidden.

Emotions and sensations that are not stored in the cortex as part of the memory of the event in which they occurred, become attached to current events.

“Instead of using feelings as cues to attend to incoming information, in people with PTSD arousal is likely to precipitate fight or flight reactions. Thus they are likely to go immediately from stimulus to response without making the necessary psychological assessment of the meaning of what is going on.  This makes them prone to freeze or alternatively to overreact and intimidate others in response to minor provocation”. Bessel van der Kolk. “The Body keeps the Score.” 1994.

Events in the present trigger us into feelings that come from unprocessed events in the past. When we trace the feeling to the event and story that event, the feelings, perceptions or sensations can be put to where they belong. To put them where they belong enables us to interpret the present based on what is happening now rather than being seen through unprocessed experiences of past events. This makes sense of the past.

If we have not had the kind of nurture and care that helped us process our experiences, painful events and unmet needs are stored unconsciously and incompletely in the body and “implicit memories”. They are only part memories. They do not contain the story of the events because they have only been processed by the primitive parts of the brain.  They are like jumbled up pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. We need to be able to process these memories so they become stored as complete or explicit memories, in the cortex, or thinking brain.  Implicit memories are not recognised as coming from the past. The unassembled pieces get attached to events in the present, when we are distressed.

Whenever we interpret a situation as unsafe we go into fight or flight mode. The body responds with adrenaline and instincts, from the primitive part of the brain, the hindbrain. When we are operating from instincts we don’t think, we react.  We need to get safe and calm to assemble information from all the parts of the brain. Stop, breathe, reflect, story, think.

This is what happens through mindfulness. We are teaching people to calm down so they can connect with all the parts of the brain: to connect with the body. The body holds the unprocessed sensations and feelings of unprocessed trauma.

If we have accumulated unprocessed feelings and experiences, we get flooded by these feelings. What we are feeling may not be all about the present. It might be overloaded with feelings that belong in the past. We need to recognize what we are feeling and where those feelings belong. Stop, breathe, feel, reflect before we think and respond. This is where both feeling our feelings and piecing the story of our experiences together becomes so important.

We have to get safe to put the story together; to engage the hippocampus, to assemble the information that the different parts of the brain is providing. The event is taken in one fragment at a time. To take in too much is overwhelming. This is why we tell the story over and over again.

I have heard people say not to let people tell their distressing story over and over again, they are re-traumatizing themselves. In fact they are de-traumatizing themselves by trying to make sense of what has happened. Instead of discouraging them to tell the story, we can help them tell their story in ways that help them piece it together. When we recall a distressing event we usually get it all muddled up, out of sequence. Our mind is trying to make sense of what has happened, but we get overwhelmed and confused. We can only make sense if we put it in sequence and put the feelings where they belong. Feelings tell us the truth.

Write or tell the story of an incident, a week, a year.

Write the facts (don’t worry about sentences) leaving gaps.

Come back and fill in the gaps with more detail.

Now focus on the feelings. Rewrite or retell the story putting feelings where they belong.

By listening to people in a calm accepting way, we provide them with the experience of connection that they did not have that helps them story their experiences.

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