Those of you who have read books on DID treatment have seen the phrase ‘the phobia of the inner experience’ and noticed that the reflection about this experience is a basic skill for all inner work. But scientists always forget to explain what the Inner Experience is supposed to be. How would we know? Nobody […]
Emotions
Working with things that are overwhelming
During our healing journey we will experience quite a few things that will be too big for us, too intimidating and scary, so frightening that we are kicked outside our Window of Tolerance because we don’t have the capacity to work with them. When we are faced with memories we can always try to contain […]
Reasons for Shame
Shame has been a major issue in my own life ever since I can remember and it is a problem characteristic to complex trauma and DID in general. That is why I have written more about shame than about any other emotion. In my struggle with shame it has become important to take a […]
Emotion surfing for cPTSD
One of the more trendy tools for emotional regulation right now is called emotion surfing. We can imagine emotions like waves. They start, build up intensity, reach a peak and then they go down again. Maybe we experience only one wave, maybe there will be more. But they will all go down again and the […]
Conversations with Shame
Sometimes shame is very persistent. All our efforts to silence it aren’t working. Getting rid of it is not an option because in the end we have to admit that it is part of us. It means we need to embrace and integrate instead of trying to remove. To be able to do that we […]
Emotions: Explore, Express, Expand
If we are within our window of tolerance and there is an emotion we are experiencing and there is no need to regulate it down but a curiosity about what is happening to us, that is when we might want to explore. To do that, creative approaches are indispensable. We won’t try to suppress an […]
Negotiating Emotion
It is normal for traumatized people to avoid the sensation of emotion. TraumaTime taught us that it is too much to handle. Since we are not living in TraumaTime anymore and emotion is a big part of feeling alive and happy, it is time to get in touch with our feelings again. The level of […]
Exercise: influencing emotion
Emotions are involuntary. It means we can’t just choose to feel one emotion instead of another. But we can influence emotions to increase or decrease in intensity and that will make a difference too. The following is an exercise that is incredibly valuable and that you can repeat over time. You will need pen and […]
Emotional Regulation
Emotional regulation can be challenging when we get overwhelmed with a feeling and we don’t have a plan how to manage it. I will share with you the systematic approach we are using, in the hope that it will give you some guidance as well. . Before we do anything else We need to regulate […]
Mindfulness for emotional regulation
Many trauma survivors are annoyed by their therapists persistence in trying to teach them mindfulness. The exercises seem weird and we can’t comprehend how that is supposed to help us with our PTSD. We might not understand it right away, but mindfulness is the key to emotional regulation. As we have explained here, trauma changes […]
Emotions
Humans feel emotions for a reason and it is not to torment us. Our brain is created with different levels. Roughly speaking there is a part that we share with reptilians that holds reflexes and instincts, a part we share with mammals that is responsible for emotions and a part that is limited to humans […]
The problem with emotional regulation
There are a couple of reasons why emotional regulation is so difficult for trauma survivors, especially those with developmental trauma and cPTSD. They are intertwined and sometimes create a fatal cycle of reinforcement. Parenting Some of our struggles are created by inadequate parenting. Children are supposed to learn emotional regulation from their parents and […]