Now, Netflix has released a series called Insatiable which focuses on the life of a young high schooler who was bullied and fat shamed for her weight. After losing weight and becoming “hot” and “pretty”. The problem is already inherent. Fat shaming is a problem because it reinforces negative stigmatization’s on body size and body appearance. The “hot” transformation is problematic because it reinforces thin idealism and continue to compare one body appearance as better or more acceptable than another body appearance. Moreover, it skirts the surface of the real trauma which can result from being bullied due to physical appearance.

Bustle explains that “when the trailer first hit social media, people immediately took issue with two things: the before-and-after, fat-to-skinny plot and the fact that [the main actress] wears a fat suit.” Vox touches on why this shaming contrast matters because “it can’t avoid suggesting that [Patty, the protagonist] was right to hate herself, that fat people should hate themselves, and that they should hurt their bodies until they get better- which is to say skinny.”

Learning to be is part of the process of trauma recovery. Stop the cycle of merry-go-round treatment and find the solution you’re looking for in trauma treatment. Through effective residential treatment, Khiron House helps you find the path you need toward health and wellness in recovery. For information, call us today. UK: 020 3811 2575 (24 hours). USA: (866) 801 6184 (24 hours).

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Children with ADHD are hyperactive in more ways than their energy. Hyperactivity in the mind can lead to difficulty processing information from the outside world. Organization, executing tasks, fulfilling responsibilities, comprehension skills, and other necessary functions for growing children are strained by the hyperactive brain. Children can struggle to fall or stay asleep, have difficulty regulating their emotions, and often experience impulsivity. ADHD can last into adulthood making every day activities of adult life a challenge.

The Center for Disease Control in the United States has reported that nearly one in every ten children receives a diagnosis of ADHD. Research from the University of Southern California Keck School of Medicine examined the relationship between ADHD and the prevalence of digital media in young adults’ lives. Ten high schools and about 3,000 students in the Los Angeles area participated in the study. Students were followed from their sophomore year to their senior year of American high school. Across the board, students who used digital media more frequently were more likely to have symptoms of ADHD. The study does not prove causation, however, it does provide concrete evidence that overuse of digital media can inspire or worsen ADHD symptoms.

Hyperactivity is excitement in the brain and the body. Trauma impacts the nervous system, altering the way the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous system respond to outside stimuli. Many symptoms of trauma are excited symptoms, activating the sympathetic nervous system and the fight or flight response. Digital media is proven to cause stimulation in the brain similar to the same stimulation caused by hard drugs like cocaine. Exciting the system can trigger the trauma responses in the mind and body and vice versa, resulting in hyperactivity and difficulties with attention.

Providing effective residential care and cutting edge treatments, seeking trauma recovery at Khiron House offers healing for many common mental health problems and manifestations of trauma. If you haven’t found the treatment solution you need to sustain a life of recovery, your journey is here waiting for you to begin. For information, please call UK: 020 3811 2575 (24 hours) USA: (866) 801 6184 (24 hours).

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At Khiron House our second highest priority is to incubate research so that these important methods gain academic and professional acceptance more widely.

Please read about this exciting outcome here.

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Our Friends at The Philosopher’s Mail

We came across this article in The Philosopher’s Mail and wanted to share it with you.

The philosopher and writer, Alain de Botton, explores the extraordinary influence of the psychoanalyst, John Bowlby, whose ground breaking ideas led to a new perception about ‘attachment’ and how our early experiences of relationship continue to be played out (in all our relationships) for the rest of our lives.

Alain de Botton writes, insightfully, about a man who, despite his own troubled childhood, worked tirelessly to spread the word that “kindness does not smother and spoil children” and at a time (in the 1950’s) when prevalent assumptions (including his own mother’s) were in direct opposition to this.

The Great Psychoanalysts: John Bowlby

The huge – and not yet fully digested – insight of psychoanalysis is that the challenges of relationships do not start over dinner in an interesting restaurant or a college bar. They start, in fact, when we are children. It was the contribution of the great psychoanalyst John Bowlby to trace the tensions and conflicts we have with our partners back to our early experience of maternal care.

His ideas are sound in part because he drew so deeply and honestly on his own experiences in order to formulate them. Born in 1907, Edward John Mostyn Bowlby had a quintessentially upper class British childhood. His father was a famous and highly successful doctor, with a knighthood and royal connections. Young Bowlby hardly saw his parents and was looked after by a lovely nanny, Minnie. But Minnie was an employee, and when John was four, she was sent away. His parents weren’t being deliberately callous. They (like pretty much everyone else at the time) didn’t realise how wounding her departure could be. At seven, Bowlby went off – in line with the conventions of his class – to boarding school, to a realm from which maternal warmth was rigorously excluded.

Bowlby was a brilliant medical student and an imaginative researcher. In 1952 he made a film, A Two-Year-Old Goes to Hospital, which showed the suffering a child went through when they were institutionally separated from their parents. In the wards mothers were not allowed to hold their sick children, for instance, for fear of spreading germs. Visiting times were punitively restricted.

When he was a consultant to the World Health Organisation in the early 1950s, Bowlby wrote a report, ‘Maternal Care and Mental Health’. He attacked prevalent assumptions (including those vigorously maintained by his own mother), arguing that kindness does not smother and spoil children. And he asserted the importance to both child and mother of developing an intimate and enjoyable relationship. This initiated a wave of reform: the visitation rules of many health institutions were reformed – a dry, bureaucratic move that ended countless afternoons of quiet sorrow and evenings of solitary anguish.

Bowlby poignantly invokes loving care that a little boy needs: ‘all the cuddling and playing, the intimacies of suckling by which a child learns the comfort of his mother’s body, the rituals of washing and dressing by which through her pride and tenderness towards his little limbs he learns the values of his own…’ Such experiences teach a basic trust: that difficulties can be managed; that slip-ups are only that and can be put right, that we are naturally entitled to be treated warmly and considerately, without having to do anything to earn this and without having to make special pleas or demands. ‘’It is as if maternal care were as necessary for the proper development of personality as vitamin D for the proper development of bones.’

The ideal parent is there when child needs it. They are good at actually listening to what the child is saying. They help the child work out for itself what it is feeling. The ideal parent is not anxiously hanging around trying to micromanage everything. The ideal parent makes it feel that problems, difficulties and dangers don’t always have to be avoided: they can be coped with, solved or skillfully overcome. Such a parent makes the child secure. Not just that the child feels secure at particular moments. but that they take this security with them into the tasks of life: they become secure people, so that they are less urgently in need of external validation, less devastated by failure, less in need of markers of status to reassure themselves of their own worth – because they carry within them a stable, reasonable, secure sense of who they are.

But the fact is that we often don’t quite get the maternal care we need. Parents – without meaning to let anyone down – go wrong in endless ways. They are inconsistent: at one point they are hugely available, happy to play and do things; then suddenly they are sternly busy and remote. Or they might be sweet and tender – but equally they might be angry or grumpy. They are around, then they disappear. They might be busy almost all the time, or very much preoccupied by work or social life. Their own fears, anxieties or troubles may keep them from providing the wise, generous attention the child needs.

In a book published in 1959, called ‘Separation Anxiety’, Bowlby looks at what happens when there isn’t enough maternal care. He described the behaviour of children he had observed who had been separated from their parents. They went through three stages: protest, despair and detachment. The first phase began as soon as the parent left, and it would last between a few hours and a week. Protesting children would cry, roll around and react to any movement as the possibility of their mother returning.

If something like this is frequently experienced, then the child craves the attention, love and interest of the parents but feels that anything good may disappear at any moment. They look for a lot of reassurance – and get upset if it is not forthcoming. They are volatile: they take heart, then they despair, then they are filled with hope again. This is the pattern of what Bowlby called ‘anxious attachment’.

But the degree of separation from the parents may be greater. the child could feel so helpless, they become detached: they enter their own world. To protect themselves they become remote and cold. They are, Bowlby says, ‘attachment avoidant’: that is, they see tenderness, closeness, emotional investment as dangerous and to be shunned. They may, in truth, be desperate for a cuddle or for reassurance, but such things look far too treacherous.

The focus of Bowlby’s thinking was about what happens to a child if there are too many difficulties in forming secure attachments. But the consequences don’t magically get restricted only to the age of 8 or 12 or 17. They are life long. The pattern of relating that we develop in childhood gets deployed in our adult lives.

Our attachment style is fed by early experiences: it defines our individual way of being with others. It’s how we sense what other people are up to, how we frame our own needs, how we expect things to go. It’s a pre-existing script that gets written into our adult relationships – usually without us even realising that this happens. It all feels obvious and familiar (even when it is uncomfortable). We take this with us, from partner to partner.

In line with Bowlby’s views about how children relate to their parents, there are three basic kinds of attachment we have to other adults.

Secure attachment is the (rare) ideal. If there is a problem, you work it out. You are not appalled by the weakness of your partner. You can take it in your stride, because you can look after yourself when you have to. So if your partner is a bit down, confused or just plain annoying, you don’t have to react too wildly. Because even if they can’t be nice to you, you can take care of yourself and have, hopefully, a little left over to meet some of the needs of your partner. You give the other the benefit of the doubt when interpreting behaviour. You realise that maybe they were just busy, when they didn’t show any interest in your new haircut, or insights into the news. Maybe they had a tricky time at work, that’s why they are not interested in your day. The explanations are accommodating, generous – and usually more accurate. You are slow to anger, quick to forgive and forget.

Anxious attachment is marked by clinginess: texting and calling just to check where the other is and keep tabs on what they are up to. You need to make sure that they haven’t left you – or the country. Anxious attachment involves a lot of anger because the stakes feel very high. A minor slight, a hasty word, a tiny oversight can look – to the very anxious person – like huge threats. They seem to announce the imminent breakup of the whole relationship. One feels: the reason you don’t tell me that the minestrone soup I made is delicious is that you don’t love me and are planning to leave me; the fact that I have done everything I can to please you (or so it feels) counts for nothing in your eyes, I give everything and you give nothing … and so on for another five minutes. When the true explanation may simply be that one’s partner is mulling over a very tricky bit of news about a contract at work. Anxiously attached people feel they are always fighting for their lives. They often raise difficulties – and problems are brought up a lot, yet never resolved. They tend to feel underappreciated – they are bitter. They become coercive and demanding and focus on their own needs – not their partner’s.

Avoidant attachment means that you would rather withdraw, and go away, than compromise, get angry or even just get close to the other person. If there is a problem, you don’t talk. Your instinct is to say you don’t need the other person (especially if you are lonely). Avoidant spouses often team up with anxious ones. It’s a risky combination. The avoidant one doesn’t give the anxious one much support. And the anxious one is always invading the delicate privacy of the avoidant one.

Bowlby helps us towards more generous – and more constructive – ways of seeing what our partners are doing, when they upset or disappoint us. Almost no one in truth is purely anxious or avoidant. They are just a bit like that, some of the time. So, alerted by Bowlby, we can see that a partner’s apparent coldness and indifference is not caused by their loathing of us, but by the fact that a long time ago they were too badly hurt by intimacy. They are protecting themselves out of fear. They deserve compassion, not a character assassination. 

And it opens possibilities of self-knowledge which can help one reform (if only a little) one’s own behaviour. Perhaps I work so hard because I can’t trust anyone, I find it hard to believe that others will accept me, that I will be OK, unless I am forever proving – by my endless hours and multiple projects and achievements – that I am in fact worthy of attention and respect. And the thought may be that below the surface I respond not so much to a demand in the present as to a need from long ago, when I hoped that if only I performed well enough, I would secure the fleeting unreliable love of my parents. 

Bowlby died in September 1990 in his early eighties, at his summer home on the Island of Skye.

There’s a powerful, modest but very real principle of hope at work here. It took a long time for Bowlby’s ideas about the importance of the early bond between the mother and child to get broader recognition and support. But it did happen, eventually. There was no single dramatic revolutionary moment. Many thousands of people changed their minds in small ways: an idea that sounded stupid, came to seem mildly interesting. The slow revolution took place at dinner tables and at school gates, at conferences in out of the way places and in careful cost-benefit analyses worked out by civil servants. It is a process of social evolution in which there a few obvious heroes and many necessary participants who can never know exactly what contribution they made: so that today a child facing a frightening operation is surrounded by love and kindness and her parents get to sleep in a bed beside her.

How long it took in history for this need to be taken seriously – and so touching it should be by this particular man, whose family background, childhood, and education would be expected to close off such sympathetic insight.

This is an article that first appeared in The Philosopher’s Mail. You can find the link to the original article in context here.

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Khiron House features in the latest edition of the Craniosacral Therapy Association’s journal – ‘The Fulcrum’ (edition 62).

The article, written by Penny Boreham, our Intake Manager, was entitled “Working Through Trauma” and the journal made this the title and theme of the edition. Here is the text of the article without the pictures and artwork which we cannot blog for reasons of copyright :-

Working Through Trauma

Khiron House Trauma Healing Clinic is an innovative clinic where CST is among the therapies used to treat common mental health conditions and behavioural disorders, including addictions. In this article CST practitioner Penny Boreham Saban describes how the clinic was born and interviews some of the practitioners who work there.

“The body unconscious is where life bubbles up in us” – DH Lawrence quoted by Peter Levine

Khiron House

The first of its kind in Europe, Khiron House is modelled on a clinic in Arizona, USA, where founder, psychotherapist Benjamin Fry, was himself treated after a severe nervous breakdown five years ago.

At Khiron House’s residential clinic in Oxfordshire, people stay, often for months at a time, to take part in an intensive programme of therapy. They have typically been in and out of the mental health system for long periods of time, and are suffering from complex trauma, often with a history of abuse. I find my role there as intake manager calls on all my CST training – to be grounded and aware of my inner fulcrum in order to be a therapeutically supportive presence for the residents during their stay. I am also the first point of contact for anyone enquiring about our work and a kind of communications officer, writing blogs etc and raising awareness about this exciting new approach uniting top down and body up approaches to treating trauma.

The trauma healing clinic in Arizona which inspired Khiron House, and helped Benjamin Fry, was Mellody House, founded by Pia Mellody in collaboration with the renowned somatic therapist Peter Levine, who developed Somatic Experiencing to treat trauma.

Benjamin was so thankful for the transforming healing he received that he vowed to replicate it here in the UK. Benjamin’s choice of the word ‘Khiron’, from the Greek myth of the wounded healer, is of course significant and as he says:

“It is an acknowledgment of my own damaged parts and a reminder to those of us who work there never to stand apart from our patients. We are all on a continuum and on the same journey. Some of us just left on earlier trains… My life was handed back to me in the desert, and now it is on loan to others.”

Khiron House has both an outpatient Clinic in London, offering one to one therapy (Somatic Experiencing and Sensorimotor Psychotherapy) and also group work, with a residential clinic in Oxfordshire where those same therapies are part of the core programme as well as yoga therapy, meditation, mindfulness, Tai Chi, clinical nutrition and of course CST.

In 2008, Benjamin Fry suffered a severe breakdown in which none of the talking therapy he was trained in seemed able to help. He tried many therapists, was admitted to the Priory (which he says made him worse) and suffered bad reactions to any anti depressants he was prescribed. His journey brought him to Arizona, where he finally found his way to Mellody House. It was here that he started to realise it was early trauma, and its impact on his nervous system, that lay at the heart of his problems.

The Background To Peter Levine’s Crouching Tiger

Rewind to the 1960s, and Peter Levine, who was using body awareness as a tool for relaxation in the bodywork that he was also practicing, and when he encountered a very challenging session.

During this session, his client went into a frozen state and Peter describes feeling panicky himself. He then had a strong image of a tiger. He says:

“It was an unconscious image, a vision of a tiger crouching at the other side of the room and getting ready to pounce”.

He communicated this to the client and almost immediately “her legs started moving as though she was running… her whole body started to shake and tremble… and the shaking and the trembling and the waves of coldness and heat went on for almost 30-40 minutes. And after that her breathing was free and spontaneous”.

This was a pivotal and transformative session for her, as she had become aware, for the first time, of the trauma that lay at the heart of her anxiety: during a tonsillectomy as a child she was held down as nurses and doctors put on an ether mask. Finally in this session with Peter, her body had started to discharge the built up energy that had been locked in her system since she was a girl.

It was of course also pivotal for Peter, and for those who have since learned from his discoveries. From then on, he began to develop his work with trauma and it was rooted in the understanding that humans, like all mammals, have a fight and flight response that if activated and not discharged can cause massive problems.

A Pink, Luminous Ball Of Rubbery Goo

And 50 years later Benjamin Fry was experiencing his own pivotal session of Somatic Experiencing at the Clinic in Arizona, as he worked with what appeared to be his mother’s energy and emotions when she was dying.

“My therapist invited me to pick up and squeeze a child’s toy and massage it very hard – this pink luminous ball of rubbery goo? I was starting to think that maybe I had got this all wrong after all? But I had faith and followed her instructions and sat there squeezing a luridly coloured squashy toy, although I was still stuck enough in my old ways to be asking her what possible good this could do me. She gave me the eyebrows and told me to get on with it. Within about two or three minutes I was on the floor, curled up, wailing. As horrific as it was to be releasing this excessive scale of my mother’s terrified adult emotion from the tiny container of my infant, it was curiously better than feeling like I did before I had been able to do so”.

For Benjamin this was both:-

“the hardest therapeutic work I had ever done” and the most healing.

“Being connected with the sensation in my hands of that gooey, cold plastic brought me out of my malfunctioning human brain and back into the natural process of my mammalian brain, a brain connected with sensation rather than thought. I began to realize that as a psychotherapist I knew nothing, this was a new paradigm. There was such a sense of privilege, awe even.”

As I am always hearing, the key is safety.

It just isn’t possible to discharge such built-up energy unless you are held in a very safe place, supported in a strong and boundaried frame, with delicacy and subtlety.

Sensorimotor Psychotherapy

While not practiced at Mellody House, Sensorimotor psychotherapy has been included at Khiron House. It was founded in the 1970s by Pat Ogden, who is often quoted as saying “the body has been left out of the talking cure”. While working as a technician and a yoga and dance teacher at a psychiatric unit, Pat saw that, while most of the patients with trauma were constantly at the mercy of reliving their past traumatising experiences, the treatments at the hospital were actually also triggering traumatic reminders.

From then, Pat Ogden became committed to developing body-centred somatic psychotherapy. In 1981, she founded the Sensorimotor Psychotherapy Institute, which draws on somatic (‘of the body’) therapies, neuroscience, attachment theory and cognitive approaches.

Twelve years ago, our clinical lead at Khiron House, Catriona Morten, was finding that the therapies at her disposal were not answering the needs of the deeply traumatised children she was working with at the time for the NSPCC. So when Catriona found how this therapy worked with experiences as “felt” and processed within the body, she recalls:

“It was as though a light bulb went on, and I felt this was exactly what these children needed. It was a therapeutic approach that I just knew would work, and it did, and I also knew I had found something that could help people recover from trauma and not just learn to live with it … Also I now knew that people did not have to tell me deeply painful and humiliating details in order to get better”. 

CST At Khiron House

One of the practitioners here at the clinic, Prahlad Galbiati, is both a Somatic Experiencing practitioner and a biodynamic CST practitioner.

Prahlad has explained to me that his biodynamic CST experience informs every aspect of his work. It is of course a huge part of his grounded and compassionate presence with clients and leads to a continuous attention to his inner fulcrum, resources and his midline.

He finds that SE and CST can be used complementarily for the real benefit of clients at the clinic, and in many cases he ends a session of SE with CST as he finds it enables the client’s system to “remove the ripples of dysregulation and discharge, and allow the system to integrate the process through the quality of the tide”.

However, Prahlad finds that if there is too much dysregulation in the nervous system the client cannot settle and “there are situations when any touch, however respectful, is not appropriate or possible. The client’s system cannot tolerate it”.

Therefore, he judges, on a case-by-case basis, whether to use CST: “I offer CST when I feel the client, and the client’s system, is ready and capable to be stable enough to dive in at the depth of the Tide”. 

Prahlad has described to me how, as the relationship between the practitioner and the client establishes itself, “the perfect opportunity often arises to bring CST in to support the client’s process”. In some cases, though, Prahlad points out “it can take years to get to that point” and “what I find helpful is the ongoing negotiation of contact – in fact negotiation about all aspects of the session. This is empowering the client to be a relevant part of the unfolding treatment by feeling listened to and met”.

Prahlad first connected with Benjamin Fry, in 2011, when Benjamin was recruiting his team for the House. Prahlad was a Somatic Experiencing practitioner and had been a biodynamic CST practitioner since 1999. His spiritual background, the long-term bodywork and SE training felt like the right combination of skills for the KH project. Both Prahlad and Benjamin attended the Breath of Life conference in which Peter Levine participated, as well as an additional 2-day workshop he gave in London. Benjamin was looking for Somatic Experiencing practitioners for his new clinic, and not long after Prahlad joined him.

Prahlad was introduced to the work of Peter Levine in his second CST training where the teachers were Somatic Experiencing practitioners themselves. As soon as Prahlad encountered Peter Levine’s approach he was drawn to it:

“I resonated with Peter Levine’s work as soon as I read ‘Waking the Tiger’. What stood out for me was an example he made about how when you are flying on a plane and sitting there in a relaxed way and you suddenly experience turbulence, you are thrown into a state of fear. You can feel the shift in your body. I began to see the connection within mind and body in relation to trauma.”

Prahlad had himself been involved in a serious accident in 1997 when he crashed against a wall on his motorbike – it had left him in a coma and led to surgery, and he remembers the first extraordinary treatment he received from one of the SE trained biodynamic CST teachers.

“It was mind-blowing for me, absolutely transformative – the way the practitioner invited me to build resources that were perfect and ideal for me.  When I got to the point of crashing myself against “the wall” – a big chunky white cushion – everything was so perfect that the idea of ending my ride slowly in that way was absolutely and completely the next thing I wanted to do. This allowed the system to manifest a thwarted defensive response as well as release a lot of energy from the body

For Prahlad, Somatic Experiencing is all about delicacy, precision and compassion and he often recalls Peter Levine’s words “I demand precision from my students” and Prahlad describes how the SE process needs to be as slow as the individual system requires.

“It involves mobilizing just the right amount of energy to help the client to process. I will always recall Peter’s phenomenal acuity in discerning what is happening in the physiology. This calls for 100 percent attention in order to discern shifts and micro shifts which can can happen in a fraction of a second”.

Penny Boreham has been a radio producer for 25 years, for 15 of those she was a Senior Producer at the BBC World Service, and (as Penny Boreham Saban) she is a CST practitioner, graduating four years ago from CCST. She is now the Intake Manager for Khiron House.

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Telegraph Weekend Section 1 March 2014

Therapist Benjamin Fry’s privileged upbringing left him ill-equipped for his own collapse. Now he shares the radical ideas that helped him to recover.

A few years ago, I had a major breakdown and was admitted to a specialist psychiatric hospital in Arizona, where I stayed for four months. In that time, I didn’t receive a single card, letter or email from any of my friends or family. Nobody called, nobody visited. Every day, I would check for mail, telephone messages and email. Nothing. Being British and posh, I did what I was bar-coded to do and just carried on.

I know it sounds like a poor little rich kid’s sob story, but bear with me. Behind that sad sketch lies a problem that has plagued me all my life.

My father was a multimillionaire, earning his money through the financial services industry. My mother died when I was 11 months old, but when my father remarried I was brought up at a prestigious address in Knightsbridge, London, and I went first to Eton and then to Oxford. Most normal people would tag me as ludicrously privileged.

By 30 I was married with a child (the first of five), working as a psychotherapist and presenting TV shows such as Freaky Eaters and Spendaholics.

You may not believe it but my life was, in fact, far from golden. I had felt from very early on that there was something wrong with me – I’d wander through my prep school alone at night, anxious. Later, in my twenties, I suffered panic attacks and needed therapy, which was only partially helpful.

Bad things, such as losing a mother, can happen to any of us, but I found that my background had not only prepared me spectacularly badly for dealing with them, but had contributed to the mental health problems they would cause and had been a serious barrier to my recovery.

I became brilliant at faking the kind of extraordinary confidence that people like me, equipped with a world-class education, are supposed to have, but inside I knew I had zero emotional skills.

I didn’t feel as though I could complain, which might have led to suggestions for help – I had drawn lucky in life, so what had I to moan about? People like me don’t cry: we cover our emotions and carry on.

On the surface things looked fine, but I was ignoring a rising panic within. I began to behave more and more recklessly to try to keep my golden façade intact and I invested in the emerging Greek property bubble to compensate for my lack of earnings from the work I loved.

When I lost everything in the crash of 2008, I gradually spiralled into a total collapse and became suicidal. I tried every clinic there was, but nothing helped. In the end, months after I had ignored a recommendation from a therapist friend, I gave in and found myself on a plane to Mellody House, in Arizona.

There, where a new generation of psychological therapies were being pioneered, I finally had a breakthrough.

I learned that conditions we have traditionally called ‘mental health’ problems, such as anxiety and depression, are now beginning to be understood differently.

Increasingly, they are seen as being rooted in the neurobiology of our nervous systems, and in this respect all mammals are almost identical. When faced with stress, which the body perceives as a threat, the body does what it needs to to respond and ensure survival.

However, when there is no chance to allow stressful experiences to resolve themselves naturally, many of us are unable to turn off our ‘neuroception’ of threat long after the threat itself has been survived. This means we get stuck in a frozen state that our system struggles to resolve, resulting in a biological meltdown (aka ‘trauma’). We relive the biology of a child who could not resolve his or her sense of threat.

Outwardly, this can manifest itself as many symptoms including anxiety (when the system overreacts to perceived threat); depression (when it underreacts); OCD; ADHD and ‘medically unexplained symptoms’. These almost always arise from a failure of the nervous system to automatically regulate itself.

Many people unknowingly make things worse by medicating the symptoms of trauma with drugs and alcohol as they try to bring themselves back to a balanced ‘normal’.

As I began to understand this, I realised I could apply it to my own childhood. My mother’s death was a major stress factor that I hadn’t resolved. On top of that – part of the double bind of being posh – I was pushed to be independent from a very young age at boarding school, another stress. I formed weak, anxious attachments because my parents were posh and were therefore the product of an even more difficult generation above. There’s no blame in this, I realised, just biology and causation. Mammals that are well attached in early childhood metabolise threat and stress well; those who are not, do not.

I realised that in 32 years from starting boarding school to being admitted to hospital, I had been hiding. At Eton I was desperate for friendship, and pretended I was fine. At university I didn’t offer friendship, but instead used it. I started a lifelong habit of neglecting friends once I found a woman to comfort me. I just couldn’t get vulnerable, or be open, with anyone. I had to continue the façade, doing what posh people do, living like posh people live, succeeding like posh people succeed; crying was not an option, and so in the end no one even knew who I was. And I don’t doubt that I used and abused my family’s help: I just took from them and then withdrew again. Ours was a typically high achieving, stiff upper lip household, and they didn’t know what to make of my gradual, messy falling apart.

The Arizona centre treated my breakdown with a form of trauma therapy which I now attribute to saving my life.

Working with the body from the ‘bottom up’ (which means literally working upwards through the brainstem rather than from the ‘mind down’, the opposite), my so-called ‘mental health’ problems were restored by a new generation of body psychotherapies, such as Sensorimotor Psychotherapy, Somatic Experiencing and EMDR.

The difference between these and other therapies I’d encountered is that the therapist tries to engage with the mammal part of the brain and biology, not the human thinking or ‘mind’. The instruction to patients is often to engage with ‘sensation’ rather than ‘thought’ and in doing so the therapists are helping us to resolve problems in our mammalian brain (the limbic system) rather than in the human neocortex. This is radically new because it puts the primal, animal instinct before the brilliant, overdeveloped human in the chain of solving this particular problem. And it works.

Months later, recovered and back in England, I began to get back to work. The entrepreneur in me slowly fluttered to life again. My illness had taught me a lot, not least about how difficult it is to find the right kind of help, so I founded a non-profit organisation and lobbied government for better access to more effective treatment for all. Passionate about the ground-breaking therapy that had so helped me, but which was only available in America, I also established a residential clinic, Khiron House, in Oxfordshire, and an outpatient practice in Harley Street.

People began to come in their droves, from every conceivable walk of life. I couldn’t help but observe, however, that those who had grown up with the same advantages as myself, although they had the money for treatment, somehow found it even harder to accept help.

One such posh patient, George, came to see me last year. Educated at Harrow and Cirencester, George led a hedonistic life. Successful in property, he had left it behind to pursue his passion of sponsoring sport. He was charming, flamboyant, but something inside was consuming him. He was unable to tolerate his many romantic relationships for long. He suffered depression, often resorting to shutting himself in his house alone, running his business in his pyjamas. He was resourceful, resilient, but after the umpteenth bout of despair, he became suicidal. His life ‘should have been’ wonderful – and he was ashamed of not being happy, let alone well, and the isolation this caused was almost worse than his illness.

In treatment, we helped him to understand that his nervous system was responding in its natural way to the threats he’d encountered when young (an alcoholic mother and the desperation he felt when he was bullied, aged eight, at his new boarding school). We enabled George to stop judging himself for being unwell, emerge from his crushing self-hatred and accept that he needed help. Finally we were able to admit him to our residential clinic in Oxfordshire and get him on the path to a full recovery.

Anxiety; depression; OCD; bi-polar; addiction: in my clinic we no longer think solely in terms of these recognised conditions. We think of ‘incomplete stress cycles’. Our patients are overwhelmed, responding to life as if it is a constant threat, and they cannot cope.

The first step to recovery is helping patients to understand this. In my case, I also had to come to terms with the reasons why I was alone in that Arizona hospital. And it was because I deserved to be. I had treated people badly.

The damage still runs deep. Much of my family still don’t speak to me and I’m getting divorced, but at least now I understand why. I accept my own adult responsibility for the consequences of my behaviour and have gone a long way towards fixing that permanently – and now can help others to do so too. I was lucky.

Benjamin Fry’s book ‘How I F***ed Up My Life and Made It Mean Something’ is published later this month. He is the founder of Khiron House (www.khironhouse.com) and Get Stable (www.getstable.org).

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The post Telegraph Article: People like me don’t cry; we just carry on by Benjamin Fry appeared first on Khiron Clinics.

Overwhelmed? Constantly over-reacting? More of us than we think are suffering from frozen trauma.

view as a pdf or at dailymail.co.uk

Benjamin Fry

Your life looks fine – even enviable – on the surface. But underneath you are more stressed and anxious than anyone realizes. You’ve been called ‘over sensitive’ or accused of ‘over reacting’ because the setbacks and stresses that other people seem to take in their stride can knock you for six. You’ve also been told that you are attractive, bright, full of potential, and yet somehow, you have failed to find real success in relationships or work. You are not weak, or lazy or self pitying. You are overwhelmed; stuck in a state of anxiety and distress that has been massively misunderstood and wrongly diagnosed. The good news is that there is a radical and transformative new way of understanding it, and of getting yourself unstuck, for good.

I know what this feels like. I was ‘stuck’ myself for years until, in 2008, I suffered a complete breakdown. I looked like an unlikely candidate for a breakdown. I was a trained psychotherapist, and a privileged person in many ways. I grew up in a wealthy family, went to Eton and Oxford, my first job was as a teenage model for Mario Testino, and I then became a successful nightclub entrepreneur. By 30 I had made my first million, married a wonderful woman and was living in a big house with a much loved child, the first of five. It looked like a golden life, but inside I was falling apart. I trained as a psychotherapist, treating patients in my own practice and working on TV programmes such as Freaky Eaters and Spendaholics. But I always felt as if I didn’t properly ‘belong’ with my colleagues. Many of my patients generously told me that I had helped them, but the truth was that I understood them because I was exactly like them, full of anxiety, unhappiness and isolation.

What was wrong with me? I had lost my mother, who died from aplastic anaemia, when I was eleven months old. For the next two years I lived with family friends, while my father rebuilt his life and career. He would visit me frequently, and after he remarried took me to live with him and his new wife. Our early years are fundamentally important in our emotional development, so I was always aware that my mother’s death had scarred me, and that early experience had contributed to my anxiety. But I loved my father and went on to have a successful life, so though I was never glib enough to say I had ‘got over’ that loss, I believed I had survived it.

By 2008, my ‘golden’ life was unravelling. My wife was pregnant with our fifth child, and I was in deep trouble. I had made a series of property speculations in Greece that crashed badly, and which ruined us financially. We had to leave our home, rent a smaller place out of London and beg my father to bail us out of our huge debts. Poor me, eh? I know that this isn’t the worst problem someone can have. I had the privilege of a safety net, and if I’d made money before, maybe I could make it again. But I didn’t see it that way. It felt utterly overwhelming and devastating and sent me into a spiral of worry which led to serious clinical anxiety and depression, and finally into a suicidal despair because nobody could help me recover. Only the thought of my children stopped me from killing myself.

I tried everything: my doctor, the NHS, church, the Priory – I even tried a faith healer. Nothing worked. I was well informed and well connected, but I discovered a massive failure in our therapy system, which repeatedly misdiagnosed me, or just medicated me (which often made me worse). Finally, after a series of therapeutic failures and disasters, I found myself at Mellody House in Arizona, where I discovered what was really wrong with me, and what had been wrong with me all my life. I was suffering from post traumatic stress The death of my mother at such a young age had sent me into deep trauma, and rather than recovering from it, as I had thought, it had ‘frozen’ inside me.

Trauma is not a word most of us use about the bad things that happen to us. We think it refers only to extremes, like soldiers in a combat zone. But so far as our minds and – crucially – our bodies are concerned, trauma means anything that causes us stress so overwhelming that our physical response to it is to ‘freeze’.- think of a rabbit caught headlights, and unable to move. This ‘frozen’ material is usually stored up in childhood and then triggered in adult life by a new stress like a bereavement, a break-up, a car accident or a redundancy – the kind of ‘normal’ stresses that we’ll all experience it at least once in our lives. Most of us recover fully from our traumas, but some of us don’t. Why some of us don’t what happens to us as a result and how we can heal, is at the heart of the new science of trauma. Mellody House has created a radical new understanding of the causes of psychological distress that many therapists believe is the greatest leap forward in this field in our lifetime.

This new model of thinking was mainly pioneered by a man called Peter Levine, who spent years studying the habits of wild animals under stress. Imagine a young gazelle, grazing peacefully with his herd, when a lion appears. We’ve all heard of the ‘fight’ or ‘flight’ response to threat: when the threat is too big to fight, the gazelle runs for its life. As the lion bears down, Pete Levine noticed that often, the gazelle would suddenly drop to the ground, as if shot, moments before the lion caught him. About to be caught and killed, it ‘freezes’. But sometimes the lion keeps running – there are other, fatter gazelles to chase – and the gazelle would wake from its frozen state and escape. But before it did, it would behave in an odd way, shaking and twitching all over. Over time, Levine realized what was happening: the flight response floods the gazelle’s body with hormones and stress energy to enable it to run for its life. If the threat is removed, that energy is no longer needed, and the body discharges it – the gazelle would do it by shaking and twitching its body. All animals instinctively process their trauma. But humans are too self-conscious, too ‘clever’ to act on like the frozen gazelle who shook and twitched and shuddered his way out of it once he came to. Our sophisticated brain tells us that this is ‘crazy’ behaviour, which is disturbing for us and for those around us, especially when there is no visible threat in sight. Instead we push it down, take a pill, think or talk our way around it, and tell ourselves we’re fine. Mentally we may have rationalised it, but biologically, that energy – crying out for release – is stuck.

Perhaps our first big stress happened, as it did to me, when we were very young, and we simply weren’t able to process it thoroughly. Or it felt so overwhelming, we didn’t manage to discharge that stress energy fully. Having begun with animals, Peter Levine went on to test this theory with patients, and found again and again, that problems such as extreme emotional sensitivity, anxiety, depression, and many behaviours such as OCD, ADHD, borderline personality and eating disorders, could all be traced back to a frozen trauma. If we think of our bodies as a measuring jug, that original threatening event filled us almost to the brim with stress energy. any new stresses – even small ones – quickly causes our stress to ‘spill over’, which is why we can become so quickly anxious and overwhelmed. This kind of anxiety and stress are not just emotions, but physical responses trapped in our nervous systems. Peter Levine discovered that if he could help his patients discharge that energy , he could ‘reset’ their stress gauge, and help them to heal.

That was the treatment I received in Mellody House, where they had been pioneering this new model of trauma treatment in a residential setting for more than seven years. It changed my life, and inspired me to set up a clinic in the UK to replicate that treatment over here. I’ve seen many examples of frozen trauma, and how it damages peoples’ lives. Sarah, in her late thirties, came to our out-patient clinic in London because her second marriage was on the verge of collapse, and so was she. Only recently married, she was driving her husband away with her rages and ‘withdrawing’ behaviours. This had been a pattern for all of Sarah’s relationships. She’d fall quickly and deeply in love, convinced that this person was her ‘soul mate’, and lavish them with attention. But once the relationship was established, she constantly ‘tested’ this love with cruel behaviour. When he grew angry or distant in return, she’d despair, feeling abandoned and terrified. Sarah’s mother had a difficult labour with her first child and she wanted no more children – Sarah was an unplanned pregnancy. Sarah absorbed her mother’s feelings of rejection, which continued during her childhood. Although fed and cared for, Sarah never felt loved or wanted. This long term lack of safety overwhelmed her system and so traumatised her, and that trauma had frozen. In adult life, she set people up to reject her, and every new disappointment brought her closer to breakdown.

My clinic uses several methods for unblocking trauma, but to begin we’ll talk about the earlier experiences and feelings. Instead of dwelling on the events, I ask the patient to observe how their body feels. Sarah became aware of her clenched body language, and of how her stomach would feel tight as she discussed her mother. The big breakthrough with this therapy is understanding that the stress is a biological one, so although I don’t touch my patients, the therapy focuses on physical sensation and we use Somatic Experiencing and Sensorimotor Psychotherapy. Patients will usually observe a physical response as energy is released. Some will feel warm – they may break into a sweat – or cold. Twitching and shaking are common. We treat the nervous system, not the past – which can’t be changed, but can lose its power to control our lives in the present. We treated Sarah just like a fallen gazelle, and like a gazelle, her biology was intelligent enough to do its work once we opened up the pathway. Once released from her trauma, Sarah’s rages and terror of abandonment disappeared, and she has a very different approach to relationships.

Another patient, Kate, treated at our residential clinic in Oxfordshire, told me how she every time she thought she was ‘in trouble’ with authority figures –such as being late for work – her heart would race and her chest feel tight. Her fear of people with power over her stemmed from her early life with strict parents and an even stricter school. Constantly in ‘flight’ mode through her childhood, she had built up too much stress energy to discharge it properly, and the frozen stress haunted her interactions as an adult. In a case like this, it’s helpful to stop worrying about the ‘trouble’ and observe your reactions. Instead of saying ‘my boss is making me crazy’, think, ‘I notice when my boss gives me a look, I instantly experience worry and stress’. Now see if you can identify the physical sensation that goes with this feeling. As you do, you start to connect with the deep mammal instinct that knows how to let go of that stress response, and if you are lucky or after you have practiced this for a while, you may notice a response in your body, such as trembling or other form of energetic release. You may feel an emotion connected with this – sadness, anger – you may even cry. This is what happens as the trauma thaws and it passes quickly, leaving you feeling better afterwards.

While self-help is possible for many of us (see box), for deeper or very stuck traumas, it is too difficult to try to manage this process alone. Cara came to see me with a history of bulimia and self harming. She had been sexually abused as a child, and her early adult life had been her heroic attempt to overcome her history and not to be defined by it. She worked at a bank, bought a house, and earned a lot of money. But always anxious and sensitive, she abused food and alcohol, before her increasingly black depressions undermined her career and the self harming started. In early sessions she curled up in a chair in a foetal position, and our first job was to make her feel ‘held’ and safe. We worked with a happier memory from her childhood –a best friend whose family welcomed Cara to stay in their loving home,- and this became her ‘safe place’ to go to when she felt overwhelmed. Releasing too much trauma too quickly can be retraumatising and so has to be managed very carefully. It doesn’t matter what happened, only what that event caused to happen: the stress is frozen – unfinished. So one person from a war and another from a dysfunctional family might have the exact same symptoms of frozen trauma in the body. Our nervous systems can’t distinguish between a car accident or a person – it just understands threat, and the same stress energy floods our system in response to both.

This is the big difference between this treatment and conventional talking therapies, especially those that try to ‘retrain our thoughts’. Our thoughts are not the main problem (although they can then contribute to it), they are a symptom of a deeper cause. We need to tap into the deep ‘mammal brain’ which is part of all of us, below the rational level, to the sensing, non verbal place where the damage is stored. After eight weeks in residential treatment, Cara still had work to do but looked, moved and felt like a completely different person.

My story ended happily too. I went through multiple stages of both physical and emotional releases of my own trauma, sometimes shaking, sometimes twitching, experiencing some deep grief, sadness, loss and some real anger at times. My children were delighted to have their father back, but it had taken a toll on both my marriage and my children. Trauma always affects those around us as well as ourselves. My illness and absence – which of course, they have experienced as an abandonment, along with their fear that I was so ill I might die and never return, upset my family deeply. Having seen how well I was doing with this therapy though some of them also have now had the same treatment to recover from the trauma of this passage of our lives. They are all doing much better. It takes support, patience and love to recover from trauma, but it can be done. Feeling overwhelmed does not have to rule your life, or be a permanent part of it. Somewhere, something happened to you that caused you a huge stress, and you have been unable to release that trauma. But our bodies are wise, they know exactly what to do; they have been doing it for hundreds of millions of years. All we need to do is get out of our own way and let that happen. I did it, and so can you. The rewards are life changing.

SYMPTOMS OF ‘FROZEN TRAUMA’

Feeling overwhelmed: do things you used to cope with now feel too much?

Repeating relationship patterns: are you having the same problems with different people?

Over reacting: later, do you think your reaction was bigger than the problem deserved?

Isolation: do you feel lonely – but safer when you’re alone?

Rage: a form of over reacting, but linked to the fight/flight response.

Anxiety: is your ‘threat response’ on all the time, even when you’re safe?

Depression: when your system crashes from being ‘always on’ (anxiety)

OCD: keep checking things? You haven’t ‘completed’ your response to something that was dangerous.

ADHD: can’t sit still and focus? No one can if they feel under threat.

Self medicating: A stressed system is hard to bear. Do you medicate with drugs, food or alcohol to calm yourself?

HELP YOURSELF:

For temporary relief :

Aromatherapy. Calming scents such as frankincense go straight into our nervous system.

Press your feet into the ground and feel the size and strength of the earth: it tells our body that we are, literally, ‘grounded’.

Breathe: Breathe through your nose slowly, and exhale through the mouth. This mimics the body’s response to rest and safety.

For longer term help:

Read ‘Waking The Tiger’ by Peter Levine. It explains the science behind the new understanding of trauma, and includes a CD to guide you through the process by yourself.

Develop a habit of noticing your physical sensations rather than your thoughts. Do this as much as possible.

Engage with tried and tested mind/body work such as yoga and meditation.

For professional help:

Find a practitioner in ‘Somatic Experiencing’ – Levine’s method – at seauk.org

Or Sensiorimotor Psychotherapy at sensorimotorpsychotherapy.org

Contact Benjamin Fry at www.khironhouse.com

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The post Frozen Trauma article in YOU magazine for Mail on Sunday appeared first on Khiron Clinics.

I came across this article recently explaining how interest in dissociation as a mental ability and a set of symptoms secondary to trauma, has revitalized in the last ten years following a one hundred year hiatus.

Dissociative Phenomena in the everyday lives of trauma survivors

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Peter Levine

An article entitled ‘What is SE?’ written by the developer of Somatic Experiencing, Dr Peter A Levine PhD

http://www.somaticexperiencing.com/peter-levine.html

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The post Trauma is a Fact of Life … but it doesn’t have to be a life sentence. appeared first on Khiron Clinics.

Delighted that Addictions Today magazine decided to publish my article. It isn’t easy to read the colourful pdf so here’s the copy. It’s quite long but I hope you’ll find it interesting…

Background

I was in the grips of what would classically be called a nervous breakdown a few years ago, and as a psychotherapist myself, I was naturally highly resistant to thinking that I was in any way mentally ill. I thought I was just a little bit worried.  In fact, I was descending into a near psychotic state of anxiety, masking depressive episodes, and looking back on it was clearly very, very ill.

Over and over a friend, who was a psychotherapist who specialised in addiction, would tell me that I had to go to the Meadows in Arizona for help. My reaction to this at the time was probably coloured by my opinion that she was in general just a little bit over keen on this institution, which had helped her as a patient considerably; in fact I probably thought that if I called her up and told her that I had lost my dog, the advice would also be to go to the Meadows. In this case though she recommended it for trauma. I knew I needed help for trauma, but why would I go to a rehab for that?

Unfortunately I became so ill that it didn’t matter much what the rhyme or reason for getting help was, I wasn’t going to survive without it. I had exhausted the private and state options in the UK without success, so the Meadows seemed like the last throw of the dice. Much against the prevailing opinion of both my family and the one I came from, I dropped myself tranquilised and hysterical onto a plane to Phoenix.

What is Trauma

A little ironically perhaps, it wasn’t actually the Meadows were I got well. They have a little after-care unit called Mellody House (named after Pia Mellody who founded much of the clinical work at both) which they advertise as extended care for trauma.

I went there with a friend who had been through the primary programme with me; he was on his fourth rehab for drug addiction, and I was newly medicated into some kind of stable state of mind. We went through exactly the same programme in primary treatment, and exactly the same programme in extended care. I saw him last weekend and he was doing really well; as I hope am I. So this raises the question, what has a drug addict got in common with a florid neurotic, and why would the same treatment programme get them both so well?

Rather boringly these days, my answer to almost any question (see lost dog example above) is always the same too; trauma. I have become a benign zealot in the wake of these experiences, my subsequent learning and clinical practice.  Trauma has become a well-thumbed noun these days in acute mental health and addiction care, but the word is bandied around a little too freely. As a diagnosis, or even treatment plan, it can point to many places in its current wide-ranging use. However trauma does have a definition, and it doesn’t come from a description of behaviour, or in a proscription for care.

The Body Knows

The first thing you need to know about trauma is that it is in the body, and not in the event. Trauma is a biological process, independent of our minds, and even our species. Almost everything you need to know about the bio-medical aspects of trauma, and how they relate to the human condition can be found in Peter Levine’s book “In An Unspoken Voice”, which summarises his 45 years of research on the topic. His clinical conclusions from this work were the foundation stone of the treatment protocol at Mellody House.

Peter Levine began his academic career with a doctorate on medical neurobiology and has concerned himself during much of his research with the behaviour of animals as they flex their stress response in the wild; preying on and being preyed upon. His work is grounded in common factors across mammals and other species, and the bio-medical systems of organisms over millions of years of evolution. Coming from a background in psychotherapy, it makes a nice change from “tell me about your mother/father”.

There is much less subjectivity in the topic when it gets grounded in some fairly basic science. The application of the treatment it implies remains somewhat of an art, but at least the discussion of the theory behind it gets more and more grounded the further you go into the specifics of the biology of trauma.

The Unfinished Cycle

Taking a mechanistic view of the body (you can forget the mind for now), we can quite easily begin to see where the problem lies, for both mental health sufferers and addicts.

When a biological system responds to threat, in our case through the reptilian brain in the brain stem, or from the mid-brain limbic system, much of our response to this threat is hard wired. Our pro-frontal cortex at the top of the head (the place where we do our thinking, and often our therapy) is not required.

Our response to threat will go through different phases, which correspond themselves to different phases of complexity in evolution. At the most benign level, we engage with threat socially, like at a UKESAD dinner, testing who is friend and who is foe. If voices are raised across the room, we might escalate to our adrenalin response, a preparation perhaps for a full blown reaction. Once furniture starts flying, we will move quickly into the “fight or flight” response, which is a highly activated state of physical intelligence. We are ready to fight for our life, or if we judge this to be a losing strategy, to run for our life. In this response, the body is running its own show, hardwired from evolution to engage only with the lower parts of our brain. The cognition, the pre-frontal cortex, is largely parked in neutral.

From this place of super-activation, we can go one step further. If all the doors are blocked, and our assailants armed with multiple machine guns, we will become aware of the hopelessness of both fight and flight, and move in an instant to “freeze”. We often talk about dissociation, or being out of our bodies. Addicts will often relapse in this fog, reporting that it was almost as if someone else was doing it. This seems inconvenient, but in that initial moment of self-protection, the freeze response was a vital defence against a terminal overload of the nervous system.

Animals which survive such a stage of being attacked in the wild can recover. If their predator is distracted and does not kill them, the frozen prey will emerge from this biological stasis, and begin to recover its vital functions. Over and over again Levine observed this process; and every time it was a natural reversal of the biological stepping stones which led to it.

Coming out of freeze brings us right back to fight or flight, and through the discharge of this energy back to a calm, regulated place for our nervous system and latent threat response. Polar bears can do it, bunnies can do it, impalas can do it; we can’t. We seem to have a problem with running around like a wild animal in the throes of self-defence, when we are in fact minding our own business at a bus stop, alone on a wet Wednesday afternoon. That extra piece of our brain, the wonderful verbal meaning-making pro-frontal cortex gets in the way.

When I am discharging energy from a frozen fight/flight response and I’m just sitting in a safe place with safe people, I feel pretty silly. But I used to find it terrifying, and impossible. In fact I had to learn to do it all over again; I had lost the natural arc of letting my body return to health years ago, probably in infancy. The consequences of losing this birth right of my nature have been severe.

The Effects of Unfinished Business

Imagine all of that energy trapped inside me, struggling to get out, unable to stay in or to leave. That would be pretty uncomfortable. Then imagine getting a big cattle prod and sending an electric shock into the middle of that unexploded bomb. That’s what trauma is like, both when dormant, and when activated.

In its resting state, it will simply dysregulate my nervous system, so that my response to threat is either constant, or binary (on/off rather than proportionate). This leaves me highly reactive, and is a cornerstone of mania and anxiety. To compensate, I may sink from this sympathetic nervous system response into the place where my body is programmed to spend time at rest, the para-sympathetic nervous system; and when I overdo this, it will look like lethargy, despair and depression.

When this background dysregulation is hit by a specific trigger, all hell typically breaks loose. The pressure on my system to discharge this energy may only be matched by the resistance to the danger of this discharge signalled by the parts of my brain that prefer to stay in control. It is this tug of war between the pro-frontal cortex and the limbic system that keeps me in a place of extreme biological discomfort and might lead to other people treating me like an unexploded bomb, at best. Sound familiar?

What It Does To Us

Over a few thousand years, humankind has become quite adept at coping with biological dysregulation, which is epidemic in our species. Since it is a biochemical problem, introducing chemicals into the biology can be a great temporary cure; so drink, drugs, food and medicine have all become popular choices. But external chemicals aren’t the only way to change my biology; sex, love, fantasy, gambling, risk, intensity, these are all great ways to change my relationship with my body, my nervous system and my biology.

The other great escape is to recreate the initial conditions of the trauma itself. This sounds paradoxical, but actually if your limbic system is sending constant alarm bells into your cognitive system telling you that there is great danger, right now, in your body, then getting into an environment, or a relationship, or an activity which matches these non-verbal signals is a great relief; often it’s the only time when a person with trauma feels “whole”. Hence, “I know he’s bad for me, but it just feels so right, etc. ad nauseam.”

Of course, if it works the relief is tremendous, and the desire to return to it can be overwhelming. Couple this with an addictive nature, genetic predisposition, or whatever else you subscribe to as the pre-conditions for an active addiction, and the outcome is guaranteed, with all of the ensuing problems we know about. There is much work to be done on the behavioural choices when faced with biological dysregulation, and the cognitive activity that goes along with so much unexpressed energy, but the real cure, if you like, is to work from the bottom up, removing the drive for all of this in the first place. That’s whyy both me and my roommate got well in treatment, me from my anxiety and him from his addiction; we both had the same fundamental problem, addressed by the same fundamental treatment, even though our more complex functions expressed this problem in different behavioural and cognitive ways.

And What To Do About It

The first injunction of Peter Levine is to go slowly. Our resistance to resolving our trauma is due to the way that this discharge itself overwhelms us and pushes us back into a trauma response, so you can’t rush it. Once that is established, the key idea is to simply allow the body to do what it needs to do, and to get the brain largely out of the way. This is obviously much harder done than said.

You can start the process as simply as with a book. A well-known addiction therapist recently said to me that he had lost count of the number of clients who had read Peter Levine’s first book “Waking The Tiger” and immediately felt better about themselves. There is a lot of shame reduction in understanding the biology of behaviour, and on a deeper level, the more the cognitive brain knows about the process the less it will resist the body’s instinct to resolve trauma.

Therapeutically there are a number of body-based systems of psychotherapy (usually guiding the awareness into the body rather than touching it), and Levine’s, Somatic Experiencing, is one of them. In its most basic form, it is an invitation to the client to become aware of the sensations in his or her body, much like Gendlin’s focusing, and then to track this “felt sense”.

If a client has a difficult sensation, or thought or feeling, then the idea is to “pendulate” from here to a much safer sensation, memory or feeling; and to iterate this process a number of times. So for example when I am working with a client cognitively (which is my training) and they mention that they are feeling something in their body, I will pause to check that out.

Me: so just take a moment to notice that sensation

Client: my chest feels really tight

Me: see if you can just be with that feeling without trying to change it and let me know what happens next, if anything.

If this resolves itself, then you can move on, if not, you might like to bring the client back to a safe place, either in their body or via an external resource

Me: is there a place in your body which feels good right now?

Client: no

Me: can you think of a place, or a memory which helps you to feel good/safe/in control?

Client: yes, my uncle’s cabin in the woods.

And help them to transition their felt-sense back to something which promotes an internal feeling of security. This can then be gently and carefully iterated if necessary. The key is to just offer a brief window into what the body is trying to express. It is not necessary to try to do all of the work which a trained practitioner might do with these techniques.

Just this simple idea has allowed so many of my sessions with clients to stop cycling around a series of baffling ideas, and to begin to ground in the resolution of a discharge of somatic energy. If this works for a client, or they seem to get something from it, I will often recommend that they go to see a specialist in this work.

This got so frequent in my practice once I returned from treatment and began working again that I actually set up my own residential clinic in the UK, modelled on Mellody House, to make this work available for the people who, like I did, continue to suffer so much with so little effective help.

The body is a vast resource of untapped intelligence in treatment. Addiction is usually a compulsion to medicate. This work allows a route into the source dysfunction which requires the medicine. Resolution in that place can be life-long and life changing. I recommend it!

Benjamin Fry works across a range of services and media using personal, professional and scientific expertise to help people to a baggage-free life. A published author, and a past columnist for The Times and Psychologies magazine, Benjamin is a social activist in mental health. He founded Get Stable in 2010 to get effective treatment paid for by the state and his great passion is to bring treatment, which works, to all levels of society and across all severities of conditions.

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