Ideas people have about integration are often vague. Some of these ideas are romantic, others scary but usually they include imagery that doesn’t tell us how integration is supposed to work and ends up being inaccurate. That is why we will look into the basic elements of integration and explain the meaning of synthesis, realization, […]
theory
Balancing in Therapy
In nature, balance is never static. It is achieved by constantly re-adjusting and adapting to changing influences. It never stops, there is no time when a perfect balance exists for long. Balance is really a verb, not a noun. It is natural that all our therapy work is happening with ups and down, constantly shifting, […]
DBT Skills, chronic dissociation and a polyvagal perspective
When we learn how to stop dissociation we often get in contact with DBT skill training. It teaches us how to recognize dissociation early and then use different skills that we chain to help us regulate and return to our window of tolerance. Theoretically that is a good plan that can work really well. It […]
Titration in Trauma Therapy
Titration is a chemical term that was taken out of context to explain a technique to approach psychological problems. Say we want to neutralize HCl with NaOH. Mixing the acid with the base should, with an easy calculation, give us H2O and NaCl, harmless water and salt. The problem is that an acid and a […]
Containment (in body work)
There is a crucial part of emotional regulation that has to happen somewhere between identifying a feeling and expressing it. Because it is physical in its nature, not a mental concept, it makes it difficult for me to explain it with words. So I will use pictures in the hope that you can translate them […]
Understanding thoughts ‘bottom up’
There is a feedback-loop between our thoughts, emotions and body. A picture you will often see to describe it is this It is the foundation of CBT interventions. We change the thought, that will change our emotion and physical state. It is called top-down approach and it works well with many psychological problems but its […]
The Polyvagal Ladder
When I first wrote about the polyvagal theory I didn’t expect you to be interested. But there has been an ever increasing demand for more information, so here it is. We are still leaving out most of the neuroscience behind the polyvagal theory to make it easier to work with. People used to think […]
The Rhythm of Regulation
My first encounter with the word resilience was not in psychology but in physics. In a psychological context the term is usually used to describe an inner strength that can prevail under a lot of pressure. So the goal of interventions is to make people more resistant to stress by adding positive resources. You can […]
Powerful people – powerful relationships
All people are powerful. But some don’t know it yet. Or they confuse being powerful with being controlling or intimidating. At the core of being a powerful person is self-control: the ability to make choices and follow through with them, to regulate our own emotions and needs and take responsibility for our own life. Self-control […]
The Circles of Relationships
All relationships are not the same. It is a myth that we could (or should!) treat people in our life equally and not everyone should have free access to us and our resources. We don’t have enough time, energy, attention, money etc to invest into every relationship in the same way. The circles of relationships […]
Being with our Selves: Integration for structural dissociation
If we experience repeated and ongoing trauma, especially as a child, our ability to make sense of us and the world will get hurt. We can’t integrate our experience of pain and apparently normal life, a perpetrator being a caregiver and an abuser, us being innocent and feeling guilty, feeling shame and anger and helplessness […]
Staying with ourselves – integrating our trauma history
Trauma is full of pain and unbearable feelings. It is a natural response to not want to feel that. So we numb our emotions, disconnect from the awareness of our bodies and avoid the memories. This is a very useful strategy to get through the trauma without having to experience all of it. But it […]