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welcome to night eating!
Please read the following as it contains important information for optimal site
navigation!
  If you haven't visited the homepage, you're missing out on some important info, so I'll just give you a "heads up" here!
You've reached "night eating," part of the emotional feelings network of sites. If you scroll
down to the footer on this page, you'll see the complete listing of all the sites in the network!
All of the sites
in the emotional feelings network of sites are linked together thru a very complete network of underlined link words. Anytime you see an underlined link word, if you should be
interested in more information concerning that word, simply click on it & a new browser window will appear. The page that
opens up will give you an entire page filled with information concerning the word of
your interest.
the emotional feelings network
of sites was designed like this because as an ex-night eater, I was also faced with many other life dysfunctions,
mental illness I was unaware of, domestic violence, a lack of any positive self esteem & so much more....
As I began my recovery,
I began to slowly discover how all of the subjects contained within the emotional feelings network
of sites are connected to each other. Soon I also discovered that there's power in educating yourself about it
all.
As you gain power thru your newly acquired knowledge, you begin to regain a
sense of control. As you begin to feel better, you become stronger & you're more able to begin your own journey
thru recovery & personal growth. Once you begin, you will see how the subjects contained within this network of sites
really is... all pertinent information for you - as a night eater!
visit the homepage for a better understanding of what's contained within the emotional feelings network of
sites!
thanks for stopping by.... i hope that something
within the network will be of use to you today....
kathleen
please read...
explaining the physical aspect of how our thought processes
affect our health...
. . . this, in a nutshell, is how your autonomic nervous system translates how your
view of your world impacts the state of your health.
The language spoken by the autonomic nervous system is translated to the rest of your body by hormones.
The primary messengers of the sympathetic nervous system are hormones called norepinephrine & epinephrine,
which are often referred to together as adrenaline.
They're produced in the brain & in the adrenal glands. Every time adrenaline levels go up, levels of another adrenal
hormone, cortisol, also goes up.
While cortisol provides a much-needed boost in the short run, helping you get through an occasional crisis, it
has its dark side.
If you live in the Sympathetic Nervous System's "fast lane" for
a long time, prolonged elevation of cortisol can cause a number of problems.
Initially cortisol sparks up your immune system, but if stress keeps the body in a constant
state of "flight or fight" readiness, cortisol's effects on the immune system quickly become a liability.
White blood cells get pumped into the bloodstream, flooding the system w/germ fighting
warriors. Over time, the immune system & the bone marrow become depleted.
Long-term overexposure to cortisol causes your skin to become thin, your bones to become weaker, your muscles & connective tissue to break down, your
body to develop abnormal insulin metabolism, your tissues to retain fluids, your arms & legs to bruise more easily &
your moods to tend toward depression.
Emotional & psychological pain is held in our bodies, recorded in our neural networks. This is why, when we're scared, anxious or angry, we have physical reactions like:
Working through emotional & psychological pain toward forgiveness allows our bodies as well as our minds, to let go of pain.
This isn't to say that all physical pain is emotional, but certainly
some of it is. Most of us know the feeling ofself-recrimination, being mad at ourselves & how it makes us feel in body, as well as mind.
It's one thing to consider forgiving someone else, but what about all the stuff we're holding against
ourselves? Do we owe ourselves the same consideration we may be giving to someone else?
There are 2 manifestations of self-forgiveness that people struggle with. The
first is "rational." When our actions have directly hurt others & we need to
forgive ourselves in order to move on in our lives.
An addict, for example, inevitably wounds those close to him during his addiction. Until he forgives himself,
he may have trouble staying sober because the guilt & remorse he'll feel
will trigger him to want to self-medicate.
This is why the amends part of the 12 steps is so important: The addict needs to make amends to those
he's hurt & take responsibility for his own behavior.
The second is "irrational." We hold ourselves responsible for pain that others have caused us,
even though we could do nothing to change the situation & didn't deserve to be mistreated.
Sure, there's always something we might have done to make a bad situation worse, but the victims of child
abuse, spousal abuse or rape didn't deserve what their abusers inflicted upon them.
The same goes, in my mind, for excessive criticism, manipulation or neglect. Especially for children who're
totally dependent on their parents, these can constitute an abuse of authority.
And they, too, leave us feeling bad about ourselves & in need of redemption of some sort. For many
people, self-forgiveness is the hardest to come by. Often, we're harder on ourselves than we are on other people.
The feeling that our actions have caused another person pain can be very uncomfortable. So rather than
feel it, we do one of those pathological rewrites we talked about earlier, "What I did wasn't all that bad. They'll get over
it."
Or maybe, "They're being too sensitive," or "I don't really care if they're in my life, anyway."
But even if we tell our minds a story, our
bodies usually know the truth of our deeper emotions.
And when it comes to pain that we've internalized from childhood, though whatever
happened may not be our fault, it's our responsibility
to work w/it & resolve it & forgiving ourselves is often an important piece of that resolution.
Many people get marooned at this juncture, where pain from the past is getting mixed
up w/pain from the present, causing a sort of psychological & emotional log jam.
At some level, they may still believe themselves to be "bad" as the victims of abuse. Though they blame the abuser relentlessly, underneath that is usually the unbearable
feeling of the unhealed inner child, that something they did drew this abuse toward them.
In this case, they need to forgive themselves. Even if it's only forgiving themselves for being to blame in their own minds:
Forgive me for holding myself responsible for something that was out of my control as
a small child, forgive me for my own self-hatred, for this dark narcissism that holds me in its grip & keeps me glued
to a tragic place w/in myself.
This is a piece of forgiveness that we sometimes miss.
Because we feel we did nothing wrong, or a friend or therapist tells us we did nothing
wrong, doesn't necessarily fix the deep & negative attitude toward the self that we carry.
Our neural systems respond to reparative relationships, not only to insight; healing takes time & new relationships
in which we can experience ourselves in different ways & explore new patterns of behavior.
Until we honestly confront & work through our deeper truths, our bodies will hold us responsible. We may respond to situations in the present day as if the earlier pain
were happening all over again.
This is often referred to as "getting triggered." We'll meet the situations in our current life, bracing
ourselves w/our fight/flight/freeze (or connect & nurture) apparatus in full gear, assuming, at some unconscious level,
that a crisis is at hand.
Our adrenal system goes on high alert & our bodies pump out stress chemicals & experience feelings that accompanied
previous hurt, even if none is intended in the current situation.
The line between the present & the past blurs & we feel as if were being hurt all over again, even though it may
be mostly yesterdays pain that's being triggered.
But we don't know that; we see it as belonging exclusively to todays offence. We get caught in a negative feedback loop,
in which the stress chemicals in our bodies trigger or stimulate painful memories & our painful memories stimulate more
stress chemicals.
This becomes a place that its tough to get out of & our thinking can become distorted & fuzzy. Our bodies &
our minds are interacting in a way that sinks us further into a stuck place. This is why we need to resolve deep emotional
issues that we may be carrying from our past.
Otherwise, we interpret situations today through yesterdays distorted lens. Seeing current situations through the lens
of our hurt thinking places us repeatedly at that center of our old pain, both physically & emotionally.
If the meaning we make of the situations of our current lives is based upon the meaning we made as helpless children, in
circumstances we could do nothing about, we live by that old interpretation, whether it's currently appropriate or not.
Our bodies, minds & spirits are living off an old script. Forgiving ourselves, whether or not we're actually at fault,
can be harder than forgiving someone else; it makes us feel vulnerable, needy, confused & hurt all over again, but it's critical for full healing to take place.
Think of September 11&
the constant TV replays of the planes crashing into the Twin Towers. Many children across
America thought that this disaster was happening over & over & over again.
They had no way of understanding, as youngsters w/limited capacity for reasoning, that these were instant replays. Their
line between reality & replay was blurred.
So many of the especially young ones experienced September 11th as being as many days' long as the replays that appeared
on our television sets if no adult explained otherwise.
Our child minds are really not much different. They stretch out our past through the landscape of adulthood,
replaying over & over again those memories that we found traumatic as youngsters.
Often, the adults in our lives were too preoccupied w/their own pain to help us make
sense of a painful situation; or they thought that because we were silent or uncomplaining we weren't being affected.
How often I've heard adults say, "Kids are so resilient." Because children have the capacity to laugh & seemingly let go of pain, we assume they aren't being
affected. But nothing could be further from the truth.
Children are like sponges, soaking up their environment & holding it in all the tiny spaces they have inside.
The brain is uniquely wired to best remember memories that are powerful in emotional content, whether the memory is of
a wonderful clown at a child's 5th birthday party, the circus w/grandparents who made it seem magical, or repeated abuse by
an adored or feared relative.
However, if the memory was traumatic, the mind also has the capability to block it
out, to selectively "forget" what made life as a dependent child feel too threatening.
Here's a case in point:
How Emotion Travels Through the Body
"The body is the unconscious mind," says Georgetown University research professor, Candice Pert in Molecules of Emotion,
"repressed traumas caused by overwhelming emotion can be stored in a body part, thereby affecting our ability to feel that
part or even move it . . . there are infinite pathways for the conscious mind to access & modify, the unconscious mind
& the body."
Until recently, emotions have been considered to be location specific, associated w/emotional centers in the brain such
as the amygdala, hippocampus & hypothalamus. While these are, in fact, emotional centers, other types of centers are strewn
throughout our bodies.
Emotions travel through our bodies & bind to small receptors on the outside of cells, much like tiny satellite dishes.
There are many locations throughout the body where high concentrations of almost every neuropeptide receptor exist.
Nuclei serve as the source of most brain to body & body to brain hookups. Nuclei are peptide, containing groups of
neuronal cell bodies in the brain.
Emotional information travels on neuropeptides & is able to bind to its receptor cells through the binding substance
of ligands. The information is sorted through the differentiation of receptors. That is, certain information binds to certain
receptors.
So our emotions are constantly being processed by our bodies. This clearly paints a dynamic, rather than static, picture
of development; not nature vs. nurture, but nature & nurture.
The brain & body are exquisitely intertwined systems that are constantly interacting w/the environment. All 5 senses
are connected to this system & feed information that determines our unique response to anything from petting a soft rabbit
to being slapped.
The more senses involved in an experience,
the more the brain remembers it.
The smell & taste of Grandma's cooking as
well as her gentle touch, familiar voice & the sight of her standing at the stove, all engrave themselves
onto our memory systems, along w/the feelings associated w/them because every sense is involved.
The same is true in the case of trauma:
Karen remembers the smells of the house in which
her abuse occurred, various details of how it looked, along w/the sound of her uncles voice, his touch, the bitter taste of
fear in her mouth & how she felt (or shut down feeling) at the time.
One way the commonality among all humans of this mind-body connection can be illustrated is in the study of the universality
of facial expressions. Emotions seem to have an inborn genetic mechanism for expression.
Whether you're observing Hungarians, Indians, Africans or Eskimos, their facial expressions for anger, disgust, sadness,
anticipation & joy will be the same.
Not only are we a vast mind-body network for the processing of the everyday emotions we feel, we also carry a genetic coding
for experiencing basic emotions.
So the emotional system is more or less like the endocrine system & moves throughout our mind-body. So to review, emotions
travel on neuropeptides, attach to tiny receptors on cells through the binding agent in ligands & are sorted through as
to type & to binding site because each receptor is designed to bind to particular emotional messages.
Darwin felt this system was highly conserved throughout evolution because emotions were so critical to our survival. The
cavewoman who got scared when she sensed danger from a potentially threatening animal & removed her baby, whom she wanted
to protect & nurture into adulthood, was the one who survived & kept our species alive.
She's the DNA strain that led to us.
The Positive Function of Fear & Anxiety
Sometimes, though one part
of our bodies is clearly relaxing, another part may still be holding onto stress.
This is part of the split between the conscious & the unconscious mind. The following
studies show how blocking our anxiety or fear can put us at risk.
Fear can be productive in aiding some part of our minds, conscious or unconscious, to prepare for impending events like
childbirth or surgery.
Larry Dossey, M.D., in his book Healing Words, cites these studies that illustrate our need to be aware of feelings
like fear so that we can use them to warn us of impending danger or discomfort.
In a study done at the University of Cincinnati Medical School, it was discovered that pregnant women who had anxiety ridden,
threatening dream images toward the ends of their pregnancies had shorter, easier labors than those who had only happy thoughts
& blocked their fears.
"It's as if the threatening dreams are acknowledging the painful event that is to come, while the more pleasant dreams
deny that reality, just as perhaps the woman who is dreaming them is denying the pain that will be sure to accompany the birth,"
surmise Jayne Gackenbach & Jane Bosveld who conducted the experiment.
The women who were unable to block or deny their fears, even if only in their remembered dreams, could better use & integrate them in order to prepare for the pain
they were about to experience & that preparation served them well.
Similarly, British psychologist Anne Manyande of University College in London, "examined blood levels of two stress hormones,
adrenaline & cortisol, in patients just before surgery & two days following surgery."
The patients were divided into 2 groups. The patients in the first group were taught relaxation techniques & had lower blood pressure, lower heart rate
& required less pain medication after surgery than the 2nd group who received no training.
In other words, though the "relaxed group" had lower blood pressure, lower heart rates & needed less medication (which
is a good thing), their levels of stress, as represented by elevated adrenaline & cortisol went up, (which is not such
a good thing).
Again, the split between the unconscious & conscious mind manifests in the body. Even though we can seem to be in control
of our stress response, another part of us clearly isn't.
The hypothesis of the researchers was that our bodies seem to need a little worry & fear before surgery so that we
can accurately plan for potential pain & immobility. Wipe out the worry & fear & we wipe out some of our conscious
connection w/the real experience.
Our unconscious seems to be aware of what's coming
up & expresses its fear through elevated levels of stress in the body.
So blocking our ability to experience feelings of, let's say, "normal" fear &
anxiety, even w/something as seemingly helpful as relaxation techniques, means we cant feel, integrate & interpret their
messages to us.
Again, in Candice Perts words,
"The body is the unconscious mind."
We need access to our authentic feelings so that we can use them to guide us toward
what we need to do to resolve our life situations. We need to know how we really feel, or our bodies will let us know in some
other way, usually in the manifestation body aches or disease.
The Power of Thought
What we think about all day becomes who we are. We're the product of our own thoughts,
at least to some extent. In a study done to explore the connection between thoughts & their relationship to health, people
from similar backgrounds & of similar age were divided into 2 groups.
The 1st group was repeatedly shown movies of Nazi war acts while the 2nd group viewed films of Mother Teresas work attending
to the sick & needy.
After viewing for the same length of time, each group was given blood tests. Group #1 exhibited a reduction in immunity
while group #2 showed elevations in immune function.
These results persisted over a period of 20 minutes then returned to normal. When this test was repeated, the testers asked
the subjects to continue to "rerun the movies or imagery through your minds throughout the day."
When the groups continued to image what they had seen on the screen & allowed it to play in their thoughts throughout
the day, the group imaging Nazi war acts experienced a depressed immune function throughout the day, while the
group imaging Mother Teresa showed elevated immune functions throughout their day.
We are what we think about all day.
The thoughts we think stimulate emotions, which stimulate specific biochemical reactions
w/in our bodies. We can't get away from ourselves. And our bodies won't let us get away w/negative thinking. Our systems translate
our thoughts into biology.
The Role of the Limbic System
Altering deep emotional patterns is slow & painstaking work.. Limbic bonds imprint
themselves onto our emotional systems. The limbic system:
- sets the mind's emotional tone
- filters external events thru internal states (creates emotional coloring)
- tags events as internally important
- stores highly charged emotional memories
- controls appetite & sleep cycles
- directly processes the sense of smell
according to Dr. Daniel Amen, author of Change Your Brain, Change Your Life.
Our neural networks are not easily altered, "early emotional experiences knit long-lasting patterns into the very fabric
of the brains neural networks," says Thomas Lewis, M.D., in A General Theory of Love, "changing that matrix calls for
a different kind of medicine all together."
Our emotional life is physical, it imprints itself on our bodies. When we have problems in our deep limbic system they
can manifest in:
- increased negative thinking
- negative perceptions of events
- floods of negative emotion
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- appetite & sleep problems
- decreased or increased sexual responsiveness
says Amen. Our neural system carries w/it our emotional sense memories from childhood.
Familiar smells, sounds or places can send a cascade of memories flooding through us that either wrap us up in their warmth,
or challenge us to maintain our composure. Along w/the memories, comes the cognitive sense we made of what happened at the
time.
Thats why when we go to the circus w/our children we, too, can "feel like a kid again"; or when we get hurt by someone
we love, we can also "feel like a kid again," but this time, that means vulnerable & helpless.
Our early emotional memories are being relived in each case. When the memories are wonderful, this is a great boon in life,
our child selves color our current experience w/innocence & gaiety.
When the memories are painful, they can color our current experience in darker hues. We were naturally disempowered as
youngsters to a greater or lesser extent because of the inevitable power imbalance between parent & child. This power
imbalance can affect us in all sorts of ways.
We can have the wish as adults to restore that secure & comforted feeling we had as children, which is why most of
us enjoy creating a comfortable home. Or, if we felt overly disempowered, we may have a deep wish to "get our power back,"
which can manifest in healthy or unhealthy ways.
All of us experienced some sort of power imbalance, it goes w/the territory, but these imbalances can vary greatly along
the continuum. We need to find real & sustaining ways to feel whole & solid.
Relationships are part of what helps us feel we have a comfortable place in the world. Damage from youth needs to be repaired
so that we dont pass it along in harmful ways & so that we can have reasonably healthy relationships in our current lives.
Psychotherapy is one way of repatterning our limbic systems,
along w/other healing relationships of all kinds. Because "Describing good relatedness to someone, no matter how precisely
or how often, doesn't inscribe it into the neural networks that inspire love or other feelings," says Lewis.
"The
limbic system is associated w/our emotions & the neocortex is associated w/critical thinking. Both are operative in processing
emotions."
While the neocortex can collect facts quickly, the limbic brain doesn't. Physical mechanisms are what produce
our experience of the world & we need new sets of physical impressions to change or alter those impressions.
Emotional impressions shrug off insight but yield to a different persuasion: the force of another persons "Attractors"
reaching through the doorway of a limbic connection. Psychotherapy changes people because one mammal can restructure the limbic
brain of another. . . . The mind-body clash has disguised the truth that psychotherapy is physiology.
When a person starts therapy, she isnt beginning a pale conversation; she's stepping into a somatic state of relatedness.
Evolution
has sculpted mammals into their present form: they become attuned to one anothers evocative signals & alter the structure
of one anothers nervous systems. Psychotherapys transformative power comes from engaging & directing these mechanisms.
Therapy is a living embodiment of limbic processes as corporeal as digestion & respiration.
The body is part of the therapeutic process. One of therapys ultimate goals is to restore our ability to care
& be cared for in reasonably functional ways, to learn to love & be loved. The 3 neural "faces" or "expressions"
of love are limbic resonance, regulation & revision.
It's relationship that heals. We've probably all had the experience of loving a subject in school, not because of
the subject but because of who was teaching it, we responded to them so we responded to it.
Most research
done on the efficacy of therapy arrives at the same point: Ultimately, it is the quality of the relationship between client
& therapist, or between group members, that is core to the healing process.
Insight is helpful in understanding & cognitive restructuring, but the relational patterns encoded into the limbic
system don't necessarily respond to insight, they respond to the slow repatterning or recoding of the complex brain &
body systems that hold the story of us, the sum total of our experiences written on them.
We take in information through all of our senses; the more senses that are involved in
our learning, whether its the alphabet or emotional learning, the more the brain absorbs & stores it.
The more powerfully the memory is encoded in us, the more it takes to alter the patterning.
All self-help books should probably come w/a warning that reads something like: Caution! This book must be accompanied
by a network of sustaining relationships. Do not attempt to get better in isolation.
Most women don't need to
be told that relationships are core to our sense of well-being, we're wired to understand this. And most therapists have always
understood intuitively; that there's a repatterning of neural networks that accompanies a long & successful therapeutic
relationship, no matter what name or discipline it has operated under.
It's Never Too Late to Limbically Revise
My own discipline is psychodrama, sociometry &
group psychotherapy, the brain child of Viennese psychiatrist Jacob Levy Moreno & later his wife Zerka Moreno.
It's essentially a role-playing method & a
group-therapy method combined to allow clients not only to talk about their lives & passions, but act them out as well. In psychodrama, clients have the opportunity, i.e., to speak to an empty chair or a role-player
representing a person to whom they have something to say.
This allows more senses to get involved more directly
in the therapeutic process which, we believe, creates more opportunities for healing. To quote Moreno again,
"The body remembers what the mind forgets."
If it didn't, none of us would breathe, walk or
ride a bike. Scene-setting is also important in psychodrama. Memory is "state dependent"; that is, we tend to recall something
more fully when similar conditions re-present themselves.
Creating the environment in a psychodramatic
enactment tends to encourage a more complete recall of a particular situation which, when used properly, can be therapeutic.
This of course assumes that clinicians
will keep in mind that recalling something with full intensity isn't always desirable & should be used carefully. But therapy that allows us to reconnect with our deepest selves, our passions, hopes & dreams can open a door to living more fully & passionately in the present.
So, if it's the relationship that ultimately heals, let's take a deeper look at what's
going on with this process of neural repatterning.
Limbic Resonance
We're always giving off emotional signals or rather
an emotional essence for other people to pick up on. Our brains are designed to pick up on these signals & translate them.
We know much about people without exchanging a word, we get a sense about them, what their essence is & how we relate
to them.
In psychodrama we call it tele, the connection
between people that is nonverbal but says everything, what we "get" about another person and they about us.
Lewis likens it to listening to a piece of music:
The first part of therapy is to be limbically known, having someone with a keen ear catch your melodic essence. A child with emotionally hazy
parents finds trying to know herself like wandering around a museum in the dark . . . she can't be sure of what she senses.
. . . Those who succeed in revealing themselves to another find the dimness receding from their own visions of self.
Like people awakening from a dream, they slough off the accumulated, ill-fitting
trappings of unsuitable lives.
The experience of being seen for who we really are, of feeling understood & "gotten" by another person or people can be fundamentally altering & healing.
Limbic Regulation
We, as humans or mammals, are physiologically patterned
to resonate to each other at a deep neural level. Lewis says,
Our neural architecture places relationships at the crux of our lives, where, blazing
& warm, they have the power to stabilize. When people are hurting & out of balance, they turn to regulating affiliations:
- groups
- clubs
- pets
- marriages
- friendships
- masseuses
- chiropractors
- the Internet
All carry at least the potential for emotional connection. Together those bonds do more good than all the psychotherapies on the planet. A parent who rejects a childs desire to depend raises a fragile person. Those children, grown into adulthood, are frequently those who come for help. . . .
If patient & therapist are to proceed down a curative path, they must allow limbic
regulation & its companion moon, dependence, to make their revolutionary magic.
Working in the addictions field over the past 3 decades has taught me endless lessons about limbic regulation.
People who have been traumatized by inadequate parenting, (notice that the author states, "inadequate parenting" & doesn't go as far as
"abusive parenting") who're living with addiction or are addicts themselves, need to put in the time that it will take to heal in therapy & 12 step programs.
The ones who do poorly are invariably
the ones who, for some reason or another, won't put in their hours. Maybe they go to 12 step meetings & are bothered by
what people do or don't say, maybe the idea of groups creeps them out, makes them feel vulnerable, but sooner or later they'll need to come to terms with their aversion to connection that makes them want to pick up a book, read it & walk away better.
Books like this one can point us in the right direction,
but words alone don't make for a full healing, they need to open the door to deeper, more meaningful connections with others, to light a path toward the right kind of healing experience. Lewis feels that because
. . . people don't learn emotional modulation as they do geometry or the
names of state capitals. They absorb the skill from living in the presence of an adept external modulator & they learn it implicitly.
Knowledge leaps the gap from one mind to the other, but the learner doesn't experience
the transferred information as an explicit strategy. Instead, a spontaneous capacity germinates & becomes a natural part
of the self, like knowing how to ride a bike or tie ones shoes.
The effortful beginnings fade & disappear from memory....
As a client depends, she internalizes this regulation & it becomes a part of her.
Gradually, she feels more whole, capable & confident, until eventually she's ready for independence & self-regulation.
Limbic Revision
According to Lewis:
When a limbic connection has established, a neural pattern, it takes a limbic connection to revise it . . . coming close to the patients limbic
world evokes genuine emotional responses in the therapist, he finds himself stirring in response to the particular magnetism of the emotional mind across from him.
His mission
is neither to deny those responses in himself nor to let them run their course. He waits for the moment to move the relationship in a different
direction. . . .
And then he does it again,
ten thousand times more. Progress in therapy is iterative. Each successive push moves the patients virtuality a tiny bit further
from the native Attractors & closer to those of the therapist.
The patient
encodes new neural patterns over their myriad interactions . . . with enough repetition; the fledgling circuits consolidate
into novel attractors. When that happens, identity has changed. The patient is no longer the person he was.
This underscores the notion that a therapists first responsibility is to do her own personal work so that she can pass along as resolved a self as possible.
The same would apply to parents, partners, teachers
& so on. Who we are speaks louder than what we say on a neural level. It's the total self that instructs & enlightens, not simply the right words. This is also why we can't will ourselves to forgive.
As Lewis says,
A person cannot choose to desire a different kind of relationship, any more than he can will himself to ride a unicycle, play The Goldberg Variations,
or speak Swahili. The requisite neural framework for performing these activities does not coalesce on command.
It takes time to change our neural patterning & learn new relationship styles &
skills. Lewis continues, The physiology of emotional life can't be dispelled with a few words.
As we've already discussed, describing good relatedness to someone, no matter
how precisely or how often, does not inscribe it into the neural networks that inspire love.
Or forgiveness.
Many people miss this critical aspect of therapy & our current health-care system
misses it as well. Deep limbic healing can't occur in 6 office visits; rather, it happens slowly & over time.
When I work with clients I do my best to help them to understand the importance of a
safety net, a network of recovery relationships & activities that'll support their personal growth.
This network can include 12 step programs or faith-based groups. I also find that exercise
& good nutrition play a critical role in a clients healing. Oftentimes, clients want to get better fast, a lets-figure-it-out-&-get-out-of-here
sort of thing. And that can work to some extent for some people.
But this quick-fix mentality ignores the limbic repatterning that is so critical to full
healing. New awarenesses about how your parents divorce tore you up inside doesn't necessarily heal the tear. It may be the awareness that starts the wheels in motion for other emotional learning, but healing is a process & it takes the time it takes.
12 step programs are one self-help option that often have a Tran formative effect on the lives of millions of people world wide. People changing people.
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Learn Deep Relaxation Techniques
Deep relaxation refers to a distinct physiological state that's the exact opposite
of the way your body reacts under stress or during a panic attack.
This state was originally described by Herbert Benson in 1975 as the "relaxation response." It involves a series of physiological
changes including:
- Decrease in respiration rate
- Decrease in blood pressure
- Decrease in skeletal muscle tension
- Decrease in metabolic rate & oxygen consumption
- Decrease in analytical thinking
- Increase in skin resistance
- Increase in alpha wave activity in the brain
Regular practice of deep relaxation for 20 - 30 minutes on a daily basis can produce,
over time, a generalization of relaxation to the rest of your life.
After several weeks of practicing deep relaxation once per day, you will tend to feel more relaxed all the time.
Numerous other benefits of deep relaxation
have been documented over the past 20 years. These include:
- Reduction of generalized anxiety
- Many people have found that regular practice also reduces the frequency & severity of panic attacks.
- Prevents stress from becoming cumulative
- Unabated stress tends to build up over time. Entering into a state of physiological quiescence once a day gives your body
the opportunity to recover from the effects of stress. Even sleep can fail to break the cumulative stress cycle unless you've
given yourself permission to deeply relax while awake.
- Increased energy level & productivity
- When under stress, you may work against yourself & become less efficient, this is when relaxation breathing is useful.
- Improved concentration & memory
- Regular practice of deep relaxation tends to increase your ability to focus & keeps your mind from "racing."
- Program yourself to focus on positive self affirmations instead of negative self talk
- Reduction of insomnia & fatigue
- Learning to relax leads to sleep that is deeper & sounder. Relaxation is a part of good sleep hygiene.
- Prevention &/or reduction of psychosomatic disorders such as hypertension, migraines, headaches, asthma, ulcers, &
so on.
- Increased self-confidence & reduced self-blame
- For many people, stress & excessive self-criticism or feelings of inadequacy go hand in hand. You can perform better,
as well as feel better, when you're relaxed.
- Increased availability of feelings. Muscle tension is one of the chief impediments to an awareness of your feelings.
How can you achieve a state of deep relaxation?
By teaching yourself abdominal breathing exercises.
Your breathing directly reflects the level of tension you carry in your body. Under tension, your breathing usually becomes shallow & rapid &
occurs high in the chest.
When relaxed, you breathe more fully, more deeply & from your abdomen. It's difficult to be tense & to breathe
from your abdomen at the same time.
A few benefits of abdominal breathing include:
- Greater feelings of connectedness between mind & body. Anxiety & worry tend
to keep you "up in your head." A few minutes of deep abdominal breathing will help bring you down into your whole body.
- Abdominal breathing by itself can trigger a relaxation response.
Abdominal Breathing
1. Note the level of tension you're feeling. Then place one hand on your abdomen right beneath
your rib cage.
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