Our attention is one of the most basic tools we use in therapy and it is also an area of struggle for many. Sometimes we narrow our attention too much. It limits our awareness to that one area of experience that is painful or problematic. That way we are unable to notice all the other things that are going on, including that the world today is different and that we are safe now.
Other times we use our attention to flee from uncomfortable experiences. Instead of noticing the quality of what is going on we avoid focus and let our attention drift somewhere else. To heal, we need to be able to stay with our experiences, even when they are uncomfortable, that is why gently training our attention not to leave us altogether is important. It builds up tolerance for our own experiences. We need both kinds of attention, at the right time.
Open attention
The first thing we can practice is open attention. It means just being while we take in all that we can sense. If paying attention is new to you, you can start with noticing what you can see, hear, smell etc. for grounding first but the main goal is to eventually turn the attention inward to notice what is happening within our own body. Practice when you feel at least neutral or ok.
Don’t judge, just notice. Keep your awareness broad without narrowing it down on one experience and let it roam. You might notice your breath, the state of your muscles, aches and pains, different qualities of tightness or expansion, where in your body you can feel stress or relaxation or different emotions, thoughts or inner voices etc. When your attention narrows down on one experience, gently let it zoom out again to include all that is there. Make sure to take your experience in like a scenic picture, all these things are happening all at once. There is a lot going on. People who live with chronic dissociation need to titrate this exercise.
We practice open attention when we notice that our awareness gets too narrow. That way we can perceive all the things that are present as well. It gives our mind a place to go to when an experience gets overwhelming. We don’t have to leave the whole experience behind and dissociate. When something gets too much we just zoom out, open our attention and take in all the other things that are also happening. This is especially helpful when working on overcoming the phobia of the experience of inner parts in DID. When awareness of parts gets too much we can zoom out and ground ourselves in our body awareness instead of letting go of awareness completely.
Open attention is what grounds us in the present and it is often much better at it than mindfulness, which is usually understood as a form of focused attention. Mastering staying with our experience in open attention is the foundation of emotional regulation and integration.
Focused attention
Focused attention is used in mediation and mindfulness. Our awareness is narrowed down intentionally to explore only a specific part of our experience. This is needed to process deep feelings and experiences but we tend to have a mind that would prefer avoiding difficult experiences and being somewhere else. That is why sticking to focused attention needs some practice too.
We would use this exercise when the mind is all over the place or we feel disconnected from our inner experience. To practice we can focus on one area of our body, the breath, an emotion, inner picture or thought. Do not use anything trauma-related for this practice, leave that for your therapy sessions.
Zoom in on the experience you chose and try to stick to it. Deepen your focus and hold it. Notice how maybe the experience shifts or changes slightly as you pay attention to it. If this is boring or you want to avoid it, stick to it a little longer. After a while the attention will naturally be drawn to open and you can gently allow that.
Natural emotional regulation uses this kind of focus to follow the changes in the quality and intensity of emotion (more about that coming soon). It will eventually be an important tool when it comes to trauma processing too.
Transitioning with our attention
Our attention naturally moves between open and focused. That dynamic just gets lost when we are stressed, triggered and outside our window of tolerance. That is when we get stuck in focus and we lose our grounding. We can use pendulation with our attention to foster regulation. It works for stress regulation just as much as for emotional regulation. We will need at least some ability to pay attention though, which means that high levels of hyper/hypoarousal might need a more physical approach first. Make sure you have practiced both open and focused attention separately before trying this.
Start with open attention and take in as much of your experience as you can. Then move your attention to an area you would like to explore. What is there? Stay with it for a slow breath or two before zooming out again.
What else is there? Notice how all kinds of things are going on in your body and stay there for a breath or two.
Then return to the place you focused on before, try to focus on it even deeper. Take a slow breath or two before zooming out again.
After a while it can feel like there is a place between the 2 different attentions, like a moment of stillness before moving on. If you can sense it, see if you can stay with it for a little while before going back to pendulation.
This is a 5 minute exercise. After a while you can notice that transitions get easier and more fluid. You will also naturally get slower until your attention doesn’t want to swing that much anymore. You can just gently let that happen and find stillness. Notice how your arousal levels or emotional distress have changed.
If you choose to process trauma with EMDR and it is done properly you will recognize the transitions between focus within the exposure intervals and the open attention during reorientation and rest intervals. It can be easier to step out of the trauma scene when we have practiced this inner movement. It makes processing safer.
Being able to move your attention in this way is a condition for any body work therapy and that is the more common place to learn this technique. It is key in regular trauma therapy as well, but often gets overlooked or it is assumed that we know how to do it or therapists have their own tools to help us out of attention that is all over the place or too focused. I think that we need to learn to do this for ourselves for many reasons. We cannot always wait for someone to offer an intervention from the outside. Practicing the transitions will help our therapy tremendously and increase our ability to regulate ourselves.
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