Would You Like Help With Your Worry and Anxiety?

Due to unforeseen circumstances, this event has been cancelled. If you were interested in attending, do book the online version of this workshop, which will run on 10th December 2022. Bookings for that workshop open in November. We apologise for any inconvenience caused.

---

Coping with Anxiety: How to Worry Less, Feel Calmer and More at Peace features teaching, powerful exercises that will help you feel calmer and more relaxed, and the chance to put your questions to Dan Roberts, a leading expert on trauma and mental health.

In this powerful, highly experiential webinar you will learn:

• Why high levels of anxiety are a common problem for people with a trauma history – and how that’s linked to a ‘dysregulated’ nervous system, as well as elevated levels of ‘stress hormones’ like adrenaline and cortisol in your bloodstream

• How anxiety is the brain’s ‘alarm’ emotion, warning you that something bad is about to happen and that you should do something, immediately, to keep yourself safe

• Why anxiety is linked to the fight-flight-freeze self-protection responses – useful for escaping from a hungry lion, but not if you’re sitting at your desk in a quiet, safe office

• Simple, evidence-based strategies to calm your anxious inner child, quickly and effectively

• Why anxiety (an emotion) and worry (a thinking process) are inextricably linked – and how to reduce both overwhelming emotions and unhelpful thinking

• Key experiential exercises – such as Compassionate Breathing and 4-7-8 Breathing, guided meditations and imagery – you will learn to help you cope with your anxiety, reduce unhelpful worry and feel calmer and more in control

• And throughout the day, you will get the chance to put your questions to Dan Roberts, Founder of Heal Your Trauma and an expert on trauma healing and managing anxiety

Don’t miss this chance to learn from a leading trauma therapist and expert on mental health and wellbeing – watch the video for more information and book your place now using the button below.

Warm wishes,

Dan

Listen to My Guided Mindfulness of Breath Meditations on Insight Timer

Image by Hari Nandakumar

Mindfulness of Breath is the core meditation practice in both Buddhist and Western, secular mindfulness traditions. When you have established a regular meditation practice, it’s beneficial to sit in silence, mindfully focusing on your breath, sounds, thoughts, body or any other point of focus. But if you are a beginner, it’s a good idea to listen to guided meditations first, as sitting in silence for long stretches of time can be challenging (and will quickly introduce you to your busy, restless mind!).

That’s why I have recorded a series of Mindfulness of Breath meditations for Insight Timer: five-minute, 10-minute, 15-minute and 20-minute versions. All of these practices are free (as are tens of thousands of meditations by myself and other teachers on the InsightTimer app), with optional donations if you so wish.

You will also find Loving-Kindness practices, a Body Scan, a Safe Place Imagery, Box Breathing and Compassionate Breathing techniques, a Four-Stage Self-Compassion Practice and much more. I will continue adding to my collection of meditations on the app – including trauma-sensitive mindfulness practices. I hope you find these and my various other Insight Timer meditations helpful – use the button below if you would like to listen to them now.

Warm wishes,

Dan

Watch My New Heal Your Trauma Video: What is Trauma?

We hear the word ‘trauma’ used often these days – in the mainstream media and on social media, by experts, celebrities and normal, everyday people who have gone through traumatic events. But what do we mean by psychological trauma? Which kinds of experiences can be traumatic for us? What are the short- and long-term effects of those experiences? And, crucially, can traumatic wounds ever be healed?

In the first of a series of short webinars I will be recording for my YouTube channel, I attempt to answer the above questions. In this 20-minute webinar I explain:

• Why I think that the standard clinical definitions of trauma are too narrow

• Why traumatic events don’t necessarily cause post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) or complex post-traumatic stress disorder (CPTSD)

• How trauma affects every level of your mind-body system

• And, most importantly, why it is never too much and never too late to heal, whatever you might have gone through and however wounded you may be as a result

I am currently working on a series of full-length webinars for my Heal Your Trauma project, which you will be able to watch either live, or access the recording to watch at a later date. In the meantime, do check out my YouTube channel, listen to my guided meditations on Insight Timer, and you can sign up for my newsletter, using the form below, so you can be the first to hear about these resources as I make them available.

I very much hope you enjoy the webinar and find it helpful.

Warm wishes,

Dan

Learning to Deal with Loss is Part of Living a Human Life

Image by Valiphotos

One of the Buddha’s many great insights was that humans cause a great deal of our own suffering by constantly wanting things to be different than they are. He realised (2,500 years before Western psychology) that it’s in our nature to grasp after pleasant, enjoyable experiences; and push away and avoid ‘aversive’, or unpleasant experiences. We all do this, all the time, including me.

And one of the aversive experiences we all struggle with is that of loss. This is why bereavement is so painful for us, or the end of a cherished relationship. As I write this, leaves on the trees in my garden are turning orange, red and yellow, then fluttering to the ground, signalling the end of summer and the slow but inexorable slide into winter. As spring signifies life – green shoots everywhere, flowers bursting into bloom, days getting longer and warmer – so autumn reminds us that time marches on, summer ending, days shortening and growing colder.

Why loss is so painful

I have lost deeply loved people in my life, and felt that loss reverberate for months or even years. I have also had my heart broken many times, so deeply understand from the inside what it is to lose and why that is so viscerally painful. But I wouldn’t change any of these experiences, however hard they were, because that sorrow meant something. It meant that I loved these people deeply. It meant that losing them was big, and significant, and mattered.

It’s a cliche, I know, but to love deeply means making yourself vulnerable to being hurt. And that’s because we open our hearts, letting our defences and barriers down – because we have to, or we would never truly feel love. And what is life without love? Well, it’s safe, (reasonably) predictable and feels somewhat more in control. But it’s also lonely, flat and a bit empty, because humans are wired for love.

I have written extensively about attachment and the way we are wired to attach to our mother (then father, siblings, grandparents, and so on) from the very moment of our birth. I have also written a lot about the way our hunter-gatherer ancestors lived for millions of years – in small bands, out in the wilds, connected to each other in tight, tribal bonds for life.

Learning to accept loss

So you are wired for love, connection, attachment – it’s in your DNA. But of course, for some people, this is not easy. If you have a trauma history, forming long-term, loving, stable relationships might be difficult for you. But I would very much hope you get some help in changing that, in making your attachment style more secure. That is, in my opinion, one of the key goals of any trauma-informed therapy – it’s certainly something I aim for with all of my clients.

I also hope you work on accepting the hard fact that loss is part of living a human life. We all lose people we love. We all get our hearts broken sometime. We might lose a job, a business, our health. And, of course, in the end we all lose life itself. This is probably the hardest thing we all have to face – and it’s why Buddhists practice a wide range of meditations specifically designed to help the meditator accept the inescapable reality that we will all die sometime.

“Don’t run away from grief, o soul,
Look for the remedy inside the pain,
because the rose came from the thorn
and the ruby came from a stone.”

— Rumi

This may all seem a bit gloomy – if so, I’m sorry. But to me it’s not gloomy, it is actually deeply freeing to accept that loss comes to us all, in many guises. Because what’s the alternative? To spend our lives desperately trying to avoid the truth of our mortality? Then we also probably hate the fact that we’re ageing, spending a small fortune on this magical, ‘age-reversing’ serum or that surgical enhancement. That’s no way to live, in my opinion – we all age, whether we like it or not, so why not embrace those wrinkles, your lovely grey hair? I know it’s hard, but the alternative is much harder.

I strongly believe that we only have one wild, beautiful, miraculous life. This is it. So shouldn’t we embrace life in all its joy and sadness? Shouldn’t we learn to cherish each second, to feel everything, fully and deeply? Otherwise we may be wasting precious days and weeks and months running away from something that can’t be outrun.

Allow yourself to be sad. To cry. To grieve for the beautiful people and things that you have lost.

Only then will you be fully alive.

Warm wishes,

Dan

Listen to My Guided Meditations on Insight Timer

Image by Sage Friedman

I recently joined Insight Timer as a teacher – and will be recording and uploading breathing techniques, guided imagery and meditations over the coming weeks. If you haven’t tried it yet, Insight Timer is a free meditation app – you can choose to make a donation, if you want to, but there is no obligation to do so and you can find thousands of free meditations from hundreds of teachers.

These cover every length of practice and subject you can imagine – you will also find meditations, teaching and courses from leading figures in the trauma therapy field, such as Richard Schwartz, Kristin Neff and Dan Siegel.

I have used the app myself for many years, so am excited to be joining its global community of teachers. My first practice is the Compassionate Breathing technique I teach to all of my clients, and use myself, on a daily basis. (I wrote about this in my last post, which also features a step-by-step video guide).

This is a simple but highly effective practice that you can use any time you’re feeling stressed, anxious, angry, agitated or upset. Over time, it will help regulate your nervous system – which is important, especially if you have a trauma history – and help you feel calmer, more relaxed and at peace in your daily life.

If you would like to try this, or any of my other practices, just click on the button below.

I very much hope you enjoy them.

Warm wishes,

Dan

Which Part of You is Driving Your Bus?

Image by David Henderson

When my clients tell me, ‘I really hate myself today!’ or ‘I need him to call me, even though I know he will just hurt me again,’ I often ask them, ‘Which I?’. So, which I hates and which feels hated? And which I is so attached to this guy that she doesn’t care if she’s hurt – or perhaps finds that hurt familiar, because it reminds her of her painful relationship with mum or dad.

And people often look at me with a bewildered expression on their face, because we are all used to thinking of ourselves as just me. So of course, I feel like I am Dan all the time. I think Dan thoughts and have Dan experiences and everyone who speaks to me calls me Dan. Just me. Just one, homogeneous self.

We all have many parts

But we now know that this is not how the human brain works. Your brain creates many selves, which fulfill different roles in your internal system. For example, you may have a self that goes to work every day, even when you would rather stay in bed, and can be assertive and deal with your prickly, critical boss. But you have another self that is much less confident and secure when you are in romantic relationships (which is, of course, deeply frustrating and mystifying! ‘Why am I so confident at work but crumble when my boyfriend’s mean to me?’).

You find yourself feeling and behaving differently when you go back to your family home, when you are with this (kind, supportive) or that (abrasive, critical) friend, and so on. You have many selves, or parts (and in schema therapy we call these modes). This is just how the brain works, even if we are fairly healthy and high-functioning.

But if you have experienced trauma, your brain will have created many more parts to help you cope. One part may hold particular traumatic memories, enabling you to get on with school, or work, without being flooded by painful memories and feelings all the time. Another part makes you drink to numb painful emotions. Another might push you to self-harm, or restrict food, or whatever it is you need to get through the day.

We know that trauma survivors have many parts and that these parts might be more separate and distinct than for those lucky enough not to have experienced trauma. At its most extreme, this separation of parts leads to a dissociative disorder, where people frequently move between their parts, with little awareness of this change or the other parts in their system, which clearly makes life very difficult. This can lead to ‘dissociative amnesia’, where people lose parts of their day, not remembering where they have been or what they were doing.

One bus, many passengers

Whether you are a trauma survivor or not, it’s helpful to know the bus metaphor, which my clients really like. It goes like this… There you are, driving along, with all of your parts on board a bus. There may be one or more child parts, some happy, some sad, some running around and causing all sorts of trouble. There might be a Critical Part, giving you a hard time about something or other.

Maybe there is an avoidant part, who doesn’t want to be on the bus at all – too many people! Too much noise! Or even an entitled part, who thinks he’s pretty great (certainly better than all the other loser parts on the bus). The point is, all of these parts are on your bus. And you need to make them all welcome, whether you like them or not, because they’re not getting off any time soon!

But there is only one part you want driving the bus – and that’s your Healthy Adult. He or she is the strong, resilient, mature, wise part that knows what’s best for you. And loves you – even those parts of you that are a bit hard to love. And your Healthy Adult is, or should be, in charge of all the other noisy, opinionated, impulsive parts – like the teacher in a nursery, or parent of a large family. The kids can have their say, but mum or dad should be the one making all the big decisions.

Don’t let these guys drive

Because if the angry part if driving, you might find yourself letting your irritation bubble up and snapping at your kids, which feels horrible. Or if the part who wants you to drink is at the wheel, you find yourself in the pub, alone, on a sunny Saturday morning, drowning your sorrows. And if the Critical Part is driving, it will park up, turn around and berate you about your latest ‘failing’ for an hour.

You get the idea. All of your parts are welcome to be passengers on your bus. They can all shout out ideas, opinions, suggestions. And your Healthy Adult listens, takes note, then he or she makes the decisions. Wisely. Calmly. Sensibly. And so you drive off down a road that leads to a happier, more fulfilling life – not the familiar roads that end up in dead ends or dark alleys.

If you want to know more about how to help your Healthy Adult take charge, do keep reading my blog (for example, here’s a post about using mindfulness to quiet a noisy mind), see a good schema therapist; or check out Internal Family Systems therapy, another great model which is all about getting to know, integrate and have compassion for every part in your system.

Warm wishes,

Dan

How to Protect Your Mental Health in a Pandemic

Photo by Matt Duncan on Unsplash

As the pandemic nears a deeply unwelcome anniversary, many people are struggling. In the UK, it’s nearly a year since the first lockdown – a year like no other in most of our lifetimes. And that year has, of course, taken its toll on us, both physically and mentally.

When I speak to my clients about how to cope right now, I always start with this idea – it’s just a really hard time. It’s OK to be struggling. That doesn’t make you weak, or lacking in resilience, or whatever self-critical thoughts you might have. It just makes you human, like everyone else – and it’s a really hard time to be human right now.

Reasons for hope

That said, of course it’s crucial that we all do everything we can to look after our mental health at the moment. It seems to me that, having run a 12-month marathon, we are on the home straight. As I write this, 15 million people in the UK have received at least one dose of a Covid-19 vaccine.

This is a wonderful, miraculous thing. We should all be deeply grateful for the brilliant, unbelievably hard-working scientists who produced a vaccine in record-breaking time (as well as the tens of thousands of volunteers around the world who made successful vaccine trials possible). And to the heroes of our NHS – the doctors, nurses, physios, cleaners, receptionists and every other person who has risked their lives to save ours.

The vaccine, bit by bit, will give us all hope and eventually help us end this long, incredibly difficult time. But that doesn’t mean there is nothing we can do to help ourselves, right now, to make daily life easier.

Try these three things

As a therapist, I would like to share the three most important things I think you can do, today, to stay well as we tough out the final stretch of this hard year:

1. Remember that you have been through tough times before. Very few among us have never had to cope with tough times in our lives. Most of us have had our hearts broken, been divorced, or otherwise suffered for love. Many of us have dealt with bereavement (and all of us will, at some point in our lives). Maybe we have had tough times financially, lost a beloved home, or friend, or even a pet.

   To be human is to suffer sometimes. But we humans are also remarkably strong and resilient. Usually, we find a way through, bounce back, even emerge from tough times feeling stronger. If any of that’s true of you, then you can cope with this too – you are way stronger than you think.

2. Find beauty in small things. There have been times this year, I must confess, when I found it hard to feel positive or hopeful about anything. Especially on cold, grey days in January, when every day was like Groundhog Day (wake up, breakfast, shower, dress, work, eat, Netflix, sleep, repeat), my mood was hovering somewhere down there with the temperature.

   But even on those days, thanks to a long love affair with mindfulness meditation, I remembered to find beauty and meaning in small, beautiful things. A hug from my wife. A warm text from an old friend, or a grateful client. A goldfinch guzzling away on my bird feeder. Children laughing in the playground.

   Even when things seem bleak, there is always beauty, always meaning, always reasons to be grateful for this one precious life, if we just stop, breathe and look for them.

3. Do something for others. There is a Pali word, Dana, which is roughly translated as generosity, or giving from the heart. And in every major religion – Buddhism, Hinduism, Sikhism, Islam, Christianity – there is a similar word or guidance to give selflessly to help others.

   This could be volunteering at a foodbank, or training to be a volunteer vaccinator, or just checking in on an elderly neighbour from time to time. Not only does this help those who are struggling right now, there is good evidence that practicing altruistic giving is highly beneficial for your mental health. The very definition of a win-win situation, I would say.

Finally, please remember that just making it through the day is as much as some of us can do right now – and that’s perfectly fine. Just try to take care of yourself, be self-compassionate (I wrote about this in my last post) if you can. And remember that one day, this will all be over. We all just need to hang in there until it is.

Warm wishes,

Dan

How do Online Sessions Work for Schema Therapy?

Image by ConvertKit

During this stressful time, many of us will be struggling with anxiety or low mood, especially if you are self-isolating or on lockdown, with few chances to leave the house. If you are finding it hard to cope during the coronavirus outbreak, first and foremost connect with your friends and loved ones.

Social distancing is, in my opinion, not the most helpful term right now. Instead, we should all be physically distancing but socially connecting – by phone, social media, Skype, Zoom or any other way that lets us stay in touch with those we love, while keeping them and ourselves safe.

If you need more help than that, do reach out to me or another mental-health professional, who can offer guidance and support during this hard time. I have long worked with clients online via Zoom. It also means I can help people all over the world, which is wonderful. I am offering both short-term and long-term therapy during the current crisis.

Here are a few guidelines about how online therapy works:

1. I use Zoom for online sessions – it has revamped its privacy/security recently, so I am confident it’s a secure and confidential platform for therapy. Using Zoom is very simple. Before your session, I will send you a link via email, which you click on to join an online ‘waiting room’. At the start of the session, I click on your name to begin our session, then lock the meeting to ensure complete confidentiality.

2. I will create a shared folder on Dropbox, so that we can share important documents like an intake form, or notes I want you to read after a session. This means that all communication is confidential (Dropbox also has strict security measures in place).

3. You may feel uneasy about having therapy online. But, having provided hundreds of online sessions over the years, I find it works very well for schema therapy. We get to see each other and hear each other’s voice. And clients tell me they feel safe and connected to me.

4. That said, we need to be flexible to make it work. Exercises like chair work are obviously a bit trickier online! But I do them, regularly, and will explain how to make them work. After the session I will send you an iZettle invoice, so you can pay quickly and securely. And that’s it!

If you have any questions about online session with me, email dan@danroberts.com or use the contact form to get in touch.

Warm wishes,

Dan

How to Manage Your Coronavirus-Related Health Anxiety

Image from CDC

Do you struggle with health anxiety? If so, you’re not alone. Millions of people around the world face a daily battle with this anxiety disorder. I often tell my clients that, if you’re prone to anxiety, your health is one of the easiest things to obsess about, because of course humans are vulnerable to health problems.

We all struggle with our health, dealing with everything from mild problems like the common cold to serious illnesses like diabetes and cancer. And we are all mortal, so have to accept that one day, our life will end. It’s natural — in some ways even logical — to worry about your health.

Now, of course, we are facing an unprecedented public health crisis. In the UK, as I write this over-70s are encouraged to self-isolate, many businesses have shut down and all schools are closing from tomorrow, we are all being encouraged to adopt social distancing and stay home as much as possible. And I’m sure the restrictions will get more and more severe.

The reality is that Covid-19 is a scary, unpredictable and long-term problem that we are struggling to understand and contain across the globe.

Kryptonite for the health-anxious

So I am anxious. My friends, family, colleagues and neighbours are anxious. Anxiety is a normal, healthy, proportionate response to a global crisis like this. It’s hard for everyone right now.

But I think — as well as the high-risk groups of people who are especially vulnerable to a serious reaction to the virus — this crisis is extremely tough on people with two types of mental-health problem: contamination-focused OCD and those with health anxiety (formerly known as hypochondria). I am going to focus on the latter problem in this story, but there is a huge amount of information about, and help with OCD on the MIND website, if you need it (mind.org.uk).

Health anxiety is one of the anxiety disorders, in which people develop an unhelpful preoccupation with their health. A useful definition I once read is: ‘The catastrophic misinterpretation of benign physical symptoms’.

That means that, if you have health anxiety, you will catastrophise — one of the common forms of unhelpful thinking styles treated with cognitive therapy — about benign physical symptoms. This means that, if you get a tension headache, you start Googling symptoms (always a bad idea!) and become convinced you have a brain tumour.

If your heart rate speeds up, because you’re stressed, anxious or engaging in physical exercise, you are 100 per cent sure you have a heart problem. You notice a tiny mole on your forearm and worry obsessively that it’s skin cancer.

Coronavirus-related anxiety

If this sounds familiar, I feel deeply compassionate for you right now. It must be hell. Every time you look at a newspaper, Twitter or your Facebook feed, you are confronted with frightening, doom-laden headlines about this awful virus that is sweeping through the global population. You, like so many of my clients right now, must be overwhelmed with anxiety.

But you can’t let anxiety dominate your life. This crisis is likely to go on for months, so you need to take swift and decisive action to help yourself. Here are three pieces of advice to get you through this:

1. Engage your rational brain

Because this all feels so threatening, the ancient, emotional parts of your brain have taken over — primarily your ‘threat system’, which is on red alert right now. This system triggers the fight-flight-freeze response to danger. If you’re super-anxious, you are in flight mode much of the time.

One answer to this is to use your rational brain — the frontal cortex — to calm down the parts that are freaking out. This virus is truly awful, but the vast majority of those who contract it will only develop cold- or flu-like symptoms, then make a complete recovery. Many health-anxious clients I have worked with are young, fit, healthy, often vegan and teetotal — some of the healthiest people I have ever met!

If that’s you, remember that it is overwhelmingly likely you will be fine, even if you get it. So stop catastrophising and take sensible precautions to minimise your risk of contracting the virus: social distancing, mask-wearing, regular hand-washing, and so on.

2. Breathe

When the fight-flight-freeze response has kicked in, your breathing goes haywire. Basically, you start breathing like a hot dog panting — rapid, shallow breaths that will make you feel dizzy, tight-chested and breathless. Not good, if you’re already worrying about a virus that targets your lungs.

So you need to slow your breathing right down, breathe abdominally, for roughly four seconds in and four seconds out. Do that for at least a minute, more if possible. I call this ‘compassionate breathing’, but it’s just deep breathing, so you can do it anywhere, any time if you need to calm yourself down.

Trust me: it’s awesome and it really works.

3. Get some help

Please don’t suffer alone. We are all struggling right now and need all the help we can get. There are plenty of charities set up to help with health anxiety and other anxiety disorders. Here are just a few for those living in the UK:

• Young Minds (youngminds.org.uk)

• Anxiety UK (anxietyuk.org.uk)

• OCD Action (ocdaction.org.uk)

If you need more help than this, I would recommend either cognitive or schema therapy. I have helped dozens of health-anxious people with both approaches and they are proven to be the most effective forms of psychotherapy for anxiety disorders. In the UK, you can get cognitive therapy on the NHS, but it will probably be a long wait. If you’re looking for a qualified private cognitive therapist, visit BABCP’s site (babcp.com).

If you would like schema therapy from me, use my contact form to get in touch.

So if you are having a tough time right now, know that help is out there for you. We will get through this. Humans are remarkably resilient. We will develop a vaccine and treatments for Covid-19 are already being trialled.

Wherever you are in the world, sending you love and warm thoughts from London,

Dan