Why Childhood Trauma is in the Little Things too

Image by Oxana Lyashenko

When we think about childhood trauma, we often think of the worst things. And as a therapist who specialises in trauma healing, I work with many people who have experienced truly awful childhoods. Hearing their stories can be heartbreaking – and if you went through something like this, my heart goes out to you, as it may well have caused internal wounds that you are still struggling to heal.

But experts in the trauma field increasingly understand that smaller, less obviously hurtful experiences can also be traumatic for children. Dr Francine Shapiro, founder of EMDR, calls these ‘little t’ traumas, which she argues be just as problematic as ‘big T’ traumas like being in a car crash, or on a battlefield. What does this mean in reality? Here are some common little t traumas:

• Being bullied, at home or in school

• Witnessing domestic violence in your family

• Being invalidated, unsupported or belittled by your parents

• Experiencing racism, or any other kind of prejudice

• Being neurodivergent in a school designed for neurotypical kids

• Having a sibling who is clearly loved and cherished more than you

• One of your parents abusing substances on a regular basis

• Losing a parent, or another beloved family member, suddenly and traumatically

• Being forced to move home, or school, often throughout your childhood

Your developing brain

One of the reasons experiences like these are so impactful on children is that, when you are small, your brain and the rest of your nervous system is still developing. For example, in small children the right hemisphere of the brain is dominant, with the left hemisphere developing later in childhood. And the right hemisphere is (broadly, although as with everything in the brain it’s more complex than this!) focused on emotion, with the left hemisphere specialising in language, detail and rational thinking. This is one reason small children are so emotional, because they lack the brain structure needed to self-soothe, or understand their experience in a rational way. Little kids just feel, deeply and overwhelmingly, whatever they are experiencing.

If you are a parent, or have kids in your life for any other reason, you will know exactly what I mean. Children feel their emotions – anger, hurt and sadness, or joy and excitement – in a beautifully rich and profound way. Also in a deeply somatic way – watch a toddler having a tantrum, face screwed up, kicking their legs and pounding their little fists to see what this looks like. Feeling intense and and frustration is a whole-body experience for them. They also struggle to make sense of what’s happening, to give it context or make meaning of it, because their developing brain just doesn’t have the neural architecture to do this yet.

Changing the story of your life

This is why trauma-informed therapy can help you make sense of what happened to you, using your high-powered, fully developed adult brain to tell a new story about your traumatic childhood experiences. For example, if you were bullied at school, your adult brain can understand that this was not a sign of weakness or some other character flaw on your part – it was all about the bullies, unhappy kids trying to gain some sense of power and control by taunting their more sensitive classmate. If your parents favoured a sibling over you, your mature brain can see that this is just bad parenting – it’s Parenting 101 to love all your kids equally, to make them feel cherished and valued, so had nothing to do with your likeability or lovability as a child.

And this is one reason I write these posts – sharing key ideas with you from the worlds of psychology and psychotherapy, to help you make sense of painful life experiences and tell a new, more hopeful and self-compassionate story about your life. This is step one of the healing process, alongside learning coping skills to help regulate your nervous system, process traumatic memories and build healing, compassionate relationships with the hurt parts of you. There are many trauma-informed therapies that can help with this process, including sensorimotor psychotherapy, trauma-informed stabilisation treatment, EMDR, schema therapy and internal family systems.

I hope that helps – and please do find a good trauma-informed therapist if you are struggling with the impact of childhood trauma. You may also enjoy this practice I created for Insight Timer – The Story of You: How to Build Self-Compassion. Click on the button below to listen to it now.

Love,

Dan ❤️

Why Attunement is Crucial for Children (and Parents too)

As a trauma therapist, I hear some truly awful stories. Very sadly, some of my clients endured the worst kinds of childhoods imaginable – and, as adults, find day-to-day life a real struggle, because the wounds of their childhood are so hard to heal. When we hear the word ‘trauma’, these are the kinds of experiences we think about, but it’s important to understand that much milder, albeit highly painful experiences, also shape children’s personalities in surprisingly powerful ways.

I’m currently writing a book on healing childhood trauma (not due to be published until 2026 I’m afraid, but watch this space for details), so am thinking about these kinds of problems non-stop. What is it that causes childhood trauma? Why are some kids profoundly affected by seemingly quite mild problems in the family? How much of that is nature and how much nurture – meaning, are these vulnerabilities primarily genetic, because of the parenting we receive, or a mixture of the two?

There is obviously a lot to talk about here and the answers to these questions are nuanced and complex – that’s why I’m writing a book about it! But I would like to focus on one key idea for this post, which is the concept of attunement. This refers to the ability of your caregivers to attune to you, from birth onwards. The focus here is often on the mother-baby relationship, because our mother is often our primary caregiver, especially in our early years (if someone else fulfilled this role for you, like a father, older sibling, grandparent or adoptive parent, please adapt the language to fit your experience).

How secure attachment forms

Let’s bring in a related concept, which is that of attachment. Ideally, your attachment bond with your mother would have been secure, helping you form a secure attachment style for the rest of your life. Research consistently shows that around 50 per cent of children are lucky enough to experience this, while the other 50 per cent normally have either an avoidant or anxious attachment style. If you were one of the lucky ones who experienced secure attachment, being in your mother’s arms would have felt like the safest, most delicious place in the world. (There’s a reason researchers call this state attachment bliss, because it feels wonderful for both the little boy or girl and their attachment figure).

She would have fed you, kept you clean and dry, comforted you when you cried and entertained you when you were bored. This is how secure attachment forms, because you would have felt warm, happy and deeply connected to her, with an in-your-bones kind of trust and safety. And attunement is the skill your mother would have needed for that secure attachment to form.

That would have meant attuning to you, on a moment-by-moment basis, to figure out what you needed. Especially in your pre-verbal years, this would have been tricky, because of course you couldn’t let her know whether you were too hot/cold, hungry, wet, bored, needed a nap, scared of the dog, dazzled by those bright lights, overstimulated from too much play, mad at your brother for stealing your favourite toy, or whatever else may have been going on in your little mind and body. As any parents out there know, learning to interpret what your baby’s noises, movements, body posture and facial expression means is no easy task!

But good-enough mums – and dads too, of course – are able to attune to their baby, learning their language before they have the power to express it with words. And when your caregivers were not able to attune in this way, I’m afraid it can be subtly but profoundly hurtful and cause lifelong problems. I call it a subtle ‘missing’, when your mother doesn’t really listen to you, is always a bit distracted or simply lacks this crucial parenting skill, probably because she never received it from her mother when she was little.

The impact of feeling unseen

Think about that: not feeling seen, heard, understood or validated over and over again, thousands of times throughout your childhood and adolescence, into your young adulthood and probably right up to this moment. One of my mentors called this ‘the air we breathe’ as children – not something bad that only happened rarely, but a lack of warmth, kindness, care or attention, happening all the time in your family.

So if you now struggle with low confidence or self-esteem, have negative self-beliefs about not being good enough, likeable or lovable, find intimate relationships baffling and unsatisfying, or feel like there’s a big hole in your chest that can never be filled, no matter how much love you get as an adult, this subtle but repetitive missing could be the reason.

If you are struggling, you might find my Insight Timer practice, Taking in the Good: IFS Meditation, helpful. This guided imagery practice will help you take in positive new feelings and nourishing beliefs that will help ease that feeling of not being enough, in some way. Repeated exercises like this, perhaps alongside the help of a skilled therapist, will start to undo the years of misattunement you experienced as a child, and so help you feel more confident and build a sense of inner peace, warmth and self-compassion, which you so deserve.

Love,

Dan ❤️

What Can We Learn from Autumn? That Life is Beautiful, But Impermanent

Image by Jeremy Thomas

What’s your favourite season? They all have their pleasures and joys, but for me it’s a toss-up between spring and autumn. Spring is hard to beat, especially after a long, dark winter. The vibrancy and effervescence of life bursting forth as the first green shoots appear, the frothy joy of blossom, that delicious day when your winter coats get banished to the back of your wardrobe. Who doesn’t love spring?

But autumn is surely close behind. The colours – the colours! Even in my decidedly urban slice of north London (well, for now anyway) the roads are lined with trees clothed in glorious shades of yellows, oranges and reds. It’s just so lovely and keeps cycling through new palettes daily as the leaves morph from luscious green to lifeless brown, before drifting languidly to the pavement below.

As I often write in these posts, we have a great deal to learn from the man we call the Buddha, who lived in northern India 2,500 years ago. His teachings, wisdom and guidance on how to live a happy, meaningful life remain as fresh and true today as they did millennia ago. One of his core ideas was that of impermanence: that everything, including us, is in a state of constant flux and change. Like those beautiful leaves, nothing stays the same, however much we might want it to.

We are all connected

Another of the Buddha’s ‘three marks of existence’ is that of interconnectedness. As with all the Buddha’s teachings, this concept is a bit complicated and it’s easy to get lost down internet rabbit holes if you try to research it! What I think he meant is that all life is interdependent, none of us existing in isolation. Those trees on my street can only exist because the water cycle creates clouds and then rain, because there is carbon dioxide in the atmosphere plants can breathe in (luckily for us, allowing them to breathe out oxygen), because there is just the right amount of sunlight, and so on.

Like the trees, we too are interdependent – on all living beings, but especially other humans. One of the sad things about our angry, polarised times is the idea that there is an ‘us’ and ‘them’, members of our tribe to be welcomed and cherished, while outsiders should be shunned and kept at bay. In reality, we are all ‘us’. You, beloved reader, are part of my family – if we traced our family trees back far enough we would reach a common ancestor, from whom we both descend.

On a more intimate level, we are interconnected with those in our immediate families, our colleagues and neighbours. Humans are tribal animals and we do well in loving, supportive connection with a web of other humans. This is one reason loneliness is so painful for us, because we are not designed by evolution to live alone. That’s why calm, loving people help soothe your nervous system, because your brain, nervous system, hormonal system and every other part of your body is designed for attachment, connection, relationship. Buddhists knew this long before Western psychologists discovered the idea that human-to-human attachment is key. (Of course, the idea of attachment is a tricky one in Buddhist theory, but that’s for another post).

Pain is inevitable, suffering is not

The third fundamental aspect of existence, according to the Buddha, was that of dukkha. This has many translations, but among the most widely accepted are ‘stressful’ or ‘unsatisfying’. Meaning, life is inherently painful and, unfortunately, we can’t escape that hard truth. I love autumn and don’t mind winter overly much, but many people I know just hate it. They struggle with seasonal affective disorder, their mood dipping with the temperature and light levels. For these folks autumn brings a tinge of dukkha, because it leads inevitably to winter, and so months of struggle before spring ushers light and hope back into their lives.

Although I have great compassion for anyone who struggles in this way, I do think it’s an example of the Buddha’s teaching about how humans turn inevitable pain into avoidable suffering. Some aspects of winter – cold, dark days; wild, destructive storms; leaden grey skies – are certainly painful. But suffering comes when we think ‘I just cannot abide winter – I wish it were spring!’ on 1st November. Thinking this way every day for months will of course lead to low mood, unhappiness and frustration, which could also be called suffering.

Instead, it’s far more helpful to remember that change is inevitable and a normal part of life. We are all connected, in countless magical webs of life, to the trees, each other and all living systems on Earth. And that pain – illness, ageing, loss, many things not being as we wish them to be – is also part of life. When we resist this, fight against it or fervently wish it was not so, it becomes suffering. Life is hard enough already without doing that to ourselves!

The practice

You might find my Mountain Meditation helpful, as a practice to experientially explore some of these Buddhist concepts. I adapted it from the brilliant Jon Kabat-Zinn’s guided meditation and it’s one of my most popular tracks on Insight Timer. A deep bow to him, for being at the forefront of the mindfulness revolution for decades – and helping millions of people experience the transformative power of mindfulness.

I hope it helps – and that you enjoy this glorious, ever-changing season as much as I do.

Love,

Dan ❤️

How to Embrace Change, Even if it’s Scary

How are you with change? Some people love it, finding new relationships and experiences exciting and invigorating. Others find change a bit scary, unsettling or discombobulating, preferring familiar places and comfortable routines. I think I have parts of me who like both – I am excited to learn new things all the time, enjoying the feeling of having my mind stretched and preconceptions challenged. But in other ways, I like things to be comfortable and familiar. I enjoy going to my favourite restaurants, drinking the same smoothie every day after the gym, watching beloved movies over and over.

My friends and family tease me about this, knowing how much I like these well-grooved, familiar patterns of life. But my wife, Laura, and I are now embarking on a major new adventure – moving to the country. It’s exciting, as we have been on the brink of this move so many times over the years. We are finally going for it, with a range of push factors meaning it’s time to leave our cosy little flat in north London; and various pull factors drawing us to the lush countryside of East Sussex.

So if you’re more on the change-avoidant side, here are three things I have learned from this unsettling-but-exciting process of moving house, which you may find helpful too…

Feel the fear and do it anyway

In the classic self-help book by Susan Jeffers, Feel the Fear and Do it Anyway: How to Turn Your Fear and Indecision Into Confidence and Action, readers were encouraged to confront their fears, rather than letting them run their lives. Almost 40 years on, this remains good advice – if we let worry and anxiety control us, we would never do anything new or difficult and stay in a narrow comfort zone where everything was predictable and familiar.

It’s helpful to remember that, for all humans, uncertainty is anxiety-provoking, as is feeling out of control. This is why we constantly seek certainty and try to be in control of everything, even though this is clearly not feasible. One of the Buddha’s great insights was that we try to be in control of everything, which is impossible, so this search for control only creates more suffering – in this case stress, frustration and anxiety. I don’t know how it’s going to be living in a small town in East Sussex. I hope it will be enjoyable, that our lives there will find a new rhythm, that we will meet kind, like-minded people. But I have to embrace the uncertainty around that, accept the loss of control I have in my familiar environment, otherwise I will inevitably suffer.

Life is constantly changing, whether we like it or not

Another of the Buddha’s profound insights was that we seek safety, certainty and comfort by wanting things to stay the same. We don’t want to age, so we spend a fortune on anti-ageing products or cosmetic treatments in a desperate attempt to slow an inexorable process. We can no more fight growing older than we can control the tides. Western science now backs up the Buddha’s 2,500-year-old wisdom, helping us understand that everything, from the atomic level on up, is in a state of flux and change.

The more I accept that I am growing older – and that my life goes through stages, different relationships, homes, phases of my career – the calmer and more content I will be. Counterintuitively, accepting change makes us far more comfortable with it. Fighting change over which we have no power only causes suffering.

How might this apply in your life? Do you find yourself clinging on tightly to things that are, in actuality, beyond your control? How are you with ageing? Do you fight or embrace it? This is not to say that we should passively accept our fate and never try to grow or change, or resist destructive forces like climate change or injustice. But the old AA saying applies, that we should try to change what we can and accept what we can’t. Otherwise we inevitably suffer.

There are cycles and seasons to Life

Laura says she thinks in 10-year cycles of her life, which I think is characteristically wise. We have lived in this flat for around 10 years. And we lived in the last one for about 10 years before that. So maybe this next stage will last around a decade, then we can try something else, maybe somewhere else. And this is how life goes, no? We have the big, meta seasons of life: childhood, young adulthood, middle and old age. Other cultures knew this and people lived their lives accordingly. There were rituals, stories, rhythms to life. This shared understanding helped make ageing easier, as it was a communally shared flow, not an individual struggle.

What are the cycles of your life? Are they clear? This might be a good journalling exercise, to look back at your life in decades and think where you lived, who your friends/partners were in these different life stages, your values and goals, hopes and dreams. It’s interesting to see these change through life, even the things we thought were profoundly important to us or a bedrock of our existence when we were younger.

For example, I used to have a deep, burning desire to be a novelist. I even wrote three (unpublished!) novels when I was younger, had an agent and was on the cusp of becoming a published author, but it didn’t work out. Although that was painful at the time, I now see that this was how I learned to write – through the process of writing. This led to a first career in journalism and later as a psychotherapist who writes extensively, including posts like this one. I don’t think I will ever write another novel and I’m fine with that. Different life stage. Different season.

So as we start the somewhat gruelling process of packing boxes, clearing 10 years of unloved and unwanted stuff from our loft and all the other mundanity of buying and selling a property, although parts of me are nervous about all this change, most of me is excited, ready. It’s time for a new season – one which will, I hope, make us both happy. In the peace and tranquillity of the countryside. Watch this space to find out how it goes!

The practice

Whenever you feel anxious or stressed about change, it’s always helpful to breathe your way through it. This will calm and soothe your nervous system, giving you a little more mindfulness and non-reactive space in which to make a calmer, clearer decision. You can try one of my breathwork practices on Insight Timer, Ease Your Stress with Colour Breathing, which you can listen to now by clicking on the button below. I hope it helps.

Love,

Dan ❤️

To Find Greater Inner Peace, Let Go of Hate

Image by Mattia Faloretti

I have long been interested in Buddhism, both personally and professionally, because the Buddha’s teachings offer such a rich, deep seam of wisdom, knowledge, love and compassion. And you can draw on that wisdom even if, like me, you are not a religious person. It seems clear that the Buddha was a real person, living in northern India around 2,500 years ago. He was a teacher, psychologist and healer, who laid out a system of thought and principles for living that offered freedom from suffering – which all humans naturally seek, Buddhist or not.

Despite my longstanding interest, having been raised as an atheist, it’s hard for me to fully immerse myself in Buddhism. I don’t believe in the afterlife, heaven and hell, reincarnation or many of the more esoteric practices that some schools of Buddhism embrace. One of the best descriptions for my particular spiritual path is that I’m a ‘Buddhist atheist’, a term coined by the former monk and brilliant teacher Stephen Batchelor (if you haven’t read his books, I strongly recommend them – his Confession of a Buddhist Atheist is a great place to start).

But I do try to live my life according to the five Buddhist precepts, which are:

1. Not killing (anything at all, which is why most Buddhists are vegetarian).

2. Not stealing (anything from committing major fraud to avoiding paying tax).

3. Not misusing sex (having affairs, using pornography, being sexually inappopriate in any way).

4. Not engaging in false speech (not lying, essentially).

5. Not indulging in intoxicants (not drinking alcohol or taking drugs that lead to ‘heedless behaviour’, meaning saying or doing something you would not do when mindful and sober).

These deceptively simple guidelines are incredibly helpful if you are trying to live an ethical life, and be a force for good in the world. One of the many reasons I like Buddhism is that these precepts are guidelines, not commandments – it’s a good idea to follow them, but if you make a mistake there’s no need to beat yourself up. The Buddha would definitely not want that.

Try letting go of hate

We live in a world where hatred and anger seem to proliferate, from the many awful wars raging across the globe to the rise of the far right, hating, demonising and othering refugees and people of colour, the LGBQT community and anyone who seems somehow different to them. As I elaborated in a recent post about the far-right riots in the UK this summer, this fear gets ruthlessly exploited by unscrupulous politicians and other bad actors. On my less-optimistic days, I despair about the levels of anger and fear we see around the world.

But there is a small, positive act you can take, today, both to help yourself and create a ripple of positivity in your family, community, society and the world. And that is to delete the word ‘hate’ from your vocabulary. I did this a few years ago and it really seemed to help. As I adopted the five precepts and thought deeply about how I operated in the world, I started noticing how often I thought or said I hated things. Those unscrupulous politicians. Traffic. People who hurt animals. Racism. Violence. Bullying.

Just a constant stream of micro-hatreds throughout the day. Often in my own head, so the only person I was hurting was myself. The Buddha called hatred a ‘poison of the mind’. Such a powerful phrase, because if you think about what’s going on inside when you are hating, it really feels that way, doesn’t it? Hatred is a corrosive emotion that feels bitter, hostile, dividing the world into people or things that are good, lovable, to be embraced and approved of; and people or things that are bad, wrong, to be rejected and hated.

I really got what the Buddha meant, on a deep level, so I just stopped using the word hate, in my thoughts and speech. And I felt a little lighter. A bit less angry, frustrated and tense. With less of a tendency to see everything through binary lenses of good vs bad, like vs dislike. Even far-right politicians – who are definitely not my favourite people – are just scared. Scared of change, of losing power and control, of the beautiful and unstoppable forces of multiculturalism, progress and change. They know the world is changing and they really, really don’t like that, because it makes them feel powerless and frightened. So they use hate as a way to feel powerful again.

The practice

If you would like to stem the flow of poison in your mind, try changing your language today. Another simple change is to stop using any bad names about yourself, like stupid, weak, useless or failure. This is another poison, which constantly saps your self-esteem and self-worth. You are none of those things – you are a complex, beautiful, multifaceted human being doing the best you can to navigate this tricky thing we call life.

You have strengths and weaknesses, good days and bad, areas in which you thrive and others where you struggle. Just like me – and the eight billion other humans with whom we share the planet. Let go of hating others, but also let go of hating yourself. You don’t deserve it. In fact, as the Burmese monk Mahasi Sayadaw says, ‘A person who deserves more love and affection than one’s own self, in any place or anywhere, cannot be found.’

I hope that helps. And that you have a blessed day.

Love,

Dan ❤️

Stuck for Summer Holiday Reading? Try These Superb Self-Help Books

Image by Angello Pro

If you’re lucky enough to have a summer holiday – and I very much hope you are – it offers many pleasurable changes from everyday life. No frazzling commute, boring meetings or stressful emails. Just that most precious of commodities: time. Days unfolding slowly as you move slowly from breakfast to beach, beach to lunch, lunch to beach, and so on. Dolce far niente, as the Italians say – the sweetness of doing nothing.

Amidst all this slothful bliss, one of my favourite things to do on holiday is read a book or two. I tend to read novels, as the holidays are the only time I’m not reading psychology books, but I might pack a self-help book or two just to mix things up. If you’re about to start packing and are stuck for holiday reading, here are my top three self-help books of all time…

The Highly Sensitive Person: How to Thrive When the World Overwhelms You, by Dr Elaine Aron

I remember so clearly reading this for the first time, mouth agape, feeling like Dr Aron had written it just for me. Her groundbreaking theory that around 20 per cent of the population are Highly Sensitive Persons (HSPs), with exquisitely sensitive nervous systems, was life-changing for me. I had always known I was more sensitive than most people, but realising I was an HSP was deeply validating and helpful.

I especially like the way Dr Aron explains that being highly sensitive is just a neutral genetic trait, like having blue or brown eyes, blond or black hair. It’s neither good nor bad. But it does make life a real struggle, because it means you are far more affected by the noisy, busy, overly stimulating world than non-HSPs. I am very sensitive to bright lights, loud noises, crowds and strong smells. As a youth, I thought this was a sign of weakness, that I just needed to man up and – as I was told a million times – stop being so sensitive.

This book has been part of a long journey in embracing my sensitivity and realising that it also brings great gifts – of empathy, insight and the ability to attune to other humans. I couldn’t be a therapist without these gifts, so would never give up my sensitivity, despite the challenges it brings. I have recommended this book to so many clients, because I realised that most of my clients were also HSPs. They love it and I think you will too.

No Bad Parts: Healing Trauma & Restoring Wholeness, by Dr Richard Schwartz

Regular readers of my blog won’t be surprised to see this one included. As an Internal Family Systems Therapist, I devour everything I can about this incredible model. But this book is my favourite because it explains IFS in straightforward language, and makes it incredibly easy to understand. It can be a tough model to explain, or sell to sceptical clients, so I often direct them to read this before we begin IFS therapy.

If you’re new to IFS, this is a great place to start. You will learn all about the different parts of us – both young, hurt parts and their protectors – as well as the existence of Self, a wise, loving resource we all possess, even if it gets hidden if we struggle with our mental health. Dr Schwartz is such a wonderful human being – he really embodies Self-energy, teaching and writing with wisdom, compassion and, above all, great humility. His warmth and deep insights really shine through in No Bad Parts – I hope you enjoy it and that it’s the start of a long, healing journey with IFS.

The Good Life and How to Live it: Lessons from the World’s Longest Study on Happiness, by Robert Waldinger and Marc Schulz

I saved the best one to last – this is my favourite self-help book of all time. It’s so warm, moving and uplifting I just can’t recommend it highly enough. Written by the programme directors of the 80-year-long Harvard Study of Adult Development, this book is brimming with insights about what it takes to lead a happy, fulfilling life. The study alone is remarkable – it began by enlisting 268 Harvard sophomores in 1938 and has run ever since, expanding all the time to include 456 inner-city Boston residents, as well as 1,300 of the men’s offspring. It is the world’s longest-running study on human happiness.

I won’t give you all the study’s findings here, but the biggest takeaway is that of the many things you can do to lead a happy life, creating warm, supportive, loving relationships is the most important. The men, whose lives were pored over in regular interviews and questionnaires, reported that loving relationships were more important than money, status or success. And their wives and children backed this up.

The authors report all this data in a light, accessible way, including moving and inspiring stories of the men who found happiness and those who struggled. It’s just a lovely book, so I hope you enjoy it as much as I did. I may even pack a copy to re-read on holiday!

Whatever you are doing this summer, I hope you find it nourishing and manage to recharge your battery. I think mine is on around 3 per cent right now! Have a great summer and look out for my next post in September.

Love,

Dan ❤️

Harnessing the Healing Power of Self-Energy

Image by Daniel Mirlea

How do you feel on your best day? When everything just seems to flow, you feel calm and steady, dealing with life’s stressors without getting blown off course. A day when you feel – perhaps unusually, if you struggle with your mental health – that life is good. It may not be a whole day, of course, but even a good hour. An hour where you feel calm, wise and compassionate. Where you are glad simply to be alive.

This state of calm, grounded, authentic aliveness, is one we all aspire to. It’s why you’re reading this post, right now. It may be why you engage in therapy, read self-help books or meditate. When you taste it you want more, because it just feels so good. But it’s also elusive – very few humans feel this way all the time, unless they are enlightened. The Dalai Lama seems to embody this energy every time I watch him speak, but he wakes up at 3am and meditates for two hours every day, which is perhaps too much dedication for most of us!

If you struggle with your mental health in any way, and especially if you have experienced trauma, feeling this way even fleetingly may seem even more out of reach. If so, I’m sorry – it’s incredibly hard to live that way. But I also have good news, even if this calm, grounded state feels impossible to attain right now. Internal family systems (IFS) teaches us that everyone has an inner resource they can learn to access, with a little help. In IFS this resource is called your Self, and the energy this Self generates is known as Self-energy.

The idea of Self is not a new one

Although IFS was created by Dr Richard Schwartz in the 1980s, this notion of an inner resource is not new. In fact, every religious tradition has a similar idea, even if it has different names. As an atheist, I have long struggled with that notion, but the tradition I am most drawn to is Buddhism, which calls this inner resource Buddha Nature. You could also think of a life force, both in Nature and inside all living beings, which has an innate drive to health. The same force that heals your cuts, regenerates your cells, cleanses toxins from your bloodstream and removes viruses before they make you sick could be seen as Self-energy.

The only difference is that this energy is psychological, healing your trauma, wounds from the past and, through an IFS lens, your hurt young parts, who carry all of that old, unprocessed hurt. Self-energy is the only resource in you that can heal your hurt parts, or the ones who sometimes go to extreme lengths to protect them from further hurt. This is the arc of IFS therapy – and in fact of all therapies, whether that’s the overt goal or not.

The thing is that, as Dr Schwartz says, until you experience this for yourself it’s all just words. So I would encourage you to try the meditation below, or one of my other IFS practices on Insight Timer. You will also find meditations by Dr Schwartz there, as well as other leading IFS practitioners. Give them a try and see what you think. I hope you will enjoy them – and that you will be able to start accessing more and more Self-energy in your day-to-day life.

And if you would like a taste of Self-energy right now, try my Insight Timer practice, Accessing Healing Self-Energy, by clicking on the button below.

Love,

Dan ❤️

How to Comfort Your Inner Child

Learning to comfort your inner child is key to self-soothing, especially if you are feeling stressed, anxious, upset, or some other strong emotion. In my brand-new practice – How to Comfort Your Inner Child: IFS Meditation – I guide you through a process of first connecting with, then calming, and soothing the little boy or girl inside.

This short, simple practice could be transformative, especially if you try it every time you are struggling in some way. Over time, you will establish a warm, loving connection with your inner child – and so begin to feel calmer, happier, and more at peace in your day-to-day life.

Try it now by clicking the button below or visit my Insight Timer Collection.

Love,

Dan ❤️

How is Trauma Passed Down Through Generations?

Image by Markus Spiske

As someone who specialises in helping people with childhood trauma, I have long told my clients that trauma gets passed down from generation to generation. This always made sense to me, when I heard someone’s story about the trauma or neglect they experienced in childhood, and the painful experiences of one or both of their parents, their grandparents, and so on. The pain clearly cascaded from one generation to the next.

Heartbreakingly, we can see this trauma being created before our eyes in war zones around the world, as well as countless angry, chaotic, impoverished, substance-abusing, harsh, cold or otherwise unhappy families all around us. As much as humans can be kind, loving, altruistic and compassionate, we can also treat each other with great cruelty. Sadly, these two forces – light and dark – do constant battle in our minds and souls. Too often the dark side wins.

But it remained a mystery to me to understand exactly how trauma moved between generations, until I read a brilliant book by Mark Wolynn recently – It Didn’t Start with You: How Inherited Family Trauma Shapes Who We Are and How to End the Cycle. Wolynn is a family therapist and explains the various mechanisms through which trauma passes along a human chain, from parent to child, through the ages.

Some of these mechanisms are common sense – for example, if your father had a terrible childhood and grew up to numb his pain with alcohol, his drinking will almost certainly inflict suffering on his own family, especially his children. He might come home from the bar in a drunken rage, being violent to his wife and children, smashing up the living room before passing out in a stupor. Clearly, his traumatic childhood shaped the man he became, who then inflicted suffering on his poor, traumatised wife and kids.

The genetic inheritance of traumA

Wolynn also explains the way trauma gets expressed through your parents’ genes, which is somewhat mindblowing but also makes sense if you think about it. Let’s say your mother grew up in a high-stress, high-conflict family environment. Her bloodstream would have been awash with stress hormones such as cortisol and adrenaline, her fight-flight-freeze response would have been triggered on a daily, if not hourly basis, her brain and nervous system would have been dysregulated and on high alert for danger, all the time. Then she grew up, traumatised child becoming a traumatised adult, got pregnant and passed her genes (as well as your father’s) on to you, as you grew from a collection of cells into a baby in her womb.

In evolutionary terms, to optimise your survival your gene expression (which of those inherited genes were switched on and off) would have prepared you for a stressful, hostile world. It’s like you were born ready to survive, prepared for a dangerous environment, not a calm, placid, happy one. And that is how trauma gets handed down genetically, because it shapes us to be hypervigilant, on alert, pre-stressed before we even encounter anything stressful. Your genes created a little human born ready for battle, not peace.

You can break the chain

Something I also tell my clients is that, although their trauma was passed down a long chain of ancestors, they have the power to break that chain. And you do too. Because if you get help from a skilled trauma therapist, you can heal the wounds of your childhood trauma, so you choose not to pass them on to your children and grandchildren. This is vitally important, because we can help the forces of light in our world flourish, bringing an end to senseless war, violence and cruelty, by healing the world’s trauma – starting with our own.

Like a ripple in a pond, your healing profoundly shapes your children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren and on through the generations, forging a chain of healing, not harm. We live in a time of such enormous challenges – escalating war, rampant inequality, climate change and more – that it’s our responsibility to do everything we can to promote peace, harmony and flourishing for every human on this planet.

Let’s all break that chain, starting today.

Love,

Dan ❤️

What Happens to Your Body When You Repress Emotions?

Image by Kira auf der Heide

I have never understood Western medicine’s separation of mind and body, as if they are two distinct entities. How can this make sense? Your mind is generated by your brain, an organ in your body. Your moods and emotions are regulated through the production of hormones. And you feel those emotions, where? In your body, usually in your chest and gut but also in the flushing of your skin, tensing of muscles or clenching of your jaw. In countless ways, both large and small, your mind and body are intertwined. In fact, it’s more helpful to think of mind-body symptoms and experiences, combining rather than artificially separating them.

Your mind, brain, nervous system, hormonal system, organs, musculoskeletal and many other systems all work together, every second of your life, to help you think, speak, move, digest food, sleep, breathe and countless other things beyond your conscious awareness. So you are a system, or rather a system of systems. All, ideally, working as one.

This helps explain the impact of your thoughts and emotions on your body, something which is explained with customary skill and clarity by Dr Gabor Maté, in his seminal book When the Body Says No: The Cost of Hidden Stress. I am currently re-reading this book and finding it gripping, because Dr Maté makes such a strong case for the impact of both chronic stress and emotional repression on the body.

Why we repress emotion

I have explored the impact of chronic stress in numerous recent posts, so today let’s focus on the all-too-common problem of emotional repression. As with so many of the problems we experience as adults, this repression usually begins in childhood – and often as the result of trauma. If you’re told, again and again, that you are too emotional, too sensitive, naughty, or difficult when you get sad, scared, angry or hurt, over time you will learn not to show those emotions, especially to the person who is shaming and criticising you for having them. At the same time you might be praised and complimented for being rational, grown up, nice, sweet or caring, as long as you maintain a sunny, compliant, smiling disposition.

So you learn to swallow your emotions, bit by bit. For many of my clients the most common emotion to be repressed in this way is anger, which was deemed too much, too intense, and generally unwelcome in their family of origin. Over time, this emotional repression also serves to repress other systems in the body, especially your immune system (remember that these systems are interlinked – make changes in one and you inevitably affect the others). So your immune system becomes compromised, leading to a whole host of ailments, from vulnerability to viruses and infections, to skin complaints like eczema, migraines, digestive issues like IBS or acid reflux, and more serious autoimmune diseases such as MS, lupus and rheumatoid arthritis.

It’s important to be clear that, if you are suffering with any of these ailments or diseases, it’s not in any way your fault. I have a number of them myself, so I’m not blaming anyone – including myself – for their struggles with physical health. Also important is that there are a whole host of other reasons we become ill, from genetic inheritance to our diet, sleep, smoking, alcohol consumption, toxic chemicals in the air we breathe and water we drink. It’s just helpful to understand that chronic stress in general, and emotional repression in particular, clearly have an impact on your physical wellbeing and mine – so we should do all we can to address these problems.

The practice

Because so many of my clients struggle with their emotions, in a whole host of ways, I created this practice to explain, in a step-by-step way, the optimal way we should feel, process and release our emotions. It’s called The Four Fs and you can listen to my talk and practice in my Insight Timer collection.

Many clients have told me they found it useful in understanding how they were supposed to feel emotions, how to notice them in their body, release them and then find comfort, for example with a soothing hug. I hope you find it helpful too – and do check out Dr Maté’s book. He is a remarkable teacher, so if you haven’t soaked up his wisdom yet, I strongly recommend that you do.

Love ❤️

Dan

Are You in the Washing Machine of Confusion?

Image by Jeremy Sallee

So, I’m writing a book. Or, to be more accurate, I was writing a book and now have a whole host of options – a veritable library of potential books – whizzing through my mind. For reasons too complex to go into here, I started writing a self-help book, had a potential publishing deal on offer and had the book all mapped out from first chapter to last, but it didn’t work out. So now I have to figure out what to do next. Do I write that book? Some other version of it? Or one of the many other books I would love to write, some of which have been slowly gestating in my head for years now.

It’s confusing. And hard to choose the right path, as whichever book I eventually choose will take intense focus, a great deal of hard work and creativity – and probably a year of my life. It’s not a decision I want to take lightly. So for now, I am very much not writing a book. I am, as (my wife) Laura and I call it, in the Washing Machine of Confusion.

What’s that? Well, it’s a metaphor which viscerally describes the discombobulating, confusing and decidedly uncomfortable sensation of having to sit with not-knowing, not-deciding, not-being-certain about the road ahead. Definitely not fun, but sometimes it’s the best place to be.

Why humans hate uncertainty

The reason we both find the Washing Machine so uncomfortable is that, like most other humans, we don’t love uncertainty. I think, as with so much of what goes on in our brains, the reason for that goes back millions of years, when the architecture of the human brain was being shaped by evolution. And for most of that time, we lived in hard, hazardous environments, where other creatures/humans were trying to kill us, food was often scarce and even minor medical problems could be fatal.

So for our ancestors, being uncertain, unsure, feeling in some way out of control, all felt dangerous, because they were. If you didn’t know what lay around that bend in the path, it might be a hungry leopard. If you couldn’t tell whether that squiggle on the ground was a stick or a snake, you might tread too close and get bitten. And that would be the end of you.

Life was so hard, and so precarious, that you would want to be damn sure of as much in your environment as you possibly could. And so our fear of uncertainty was born. Which is why uncertainty makes you anxious, while being certain makes you feel safe. And feeling out of control can be horrible – especially if you’re prone to worry and anxiety – while being (or, rather, imagining that you are) 100% in control helps you feel calm and secure.

Why the washing machine is bad/good

The Buddha taught that this is how human brains operate – they seek certainty, try to be in control all the time, for the above reasons. But he also taught that this is how we create suffering, because you can’t be certain and in control all the time. It’s an illusion – like the idea of perfection. Doesn’t exist, except in the human mind. The more we try to chase after or cling on to it, or think that’s the only way we can feel calm and safe, the more anxious and stressed we become.

So with my book dilemma, a part of me wants to just make a decision. Now! Just start writing! But my wise, mature, big-picture-seeing Self knows that’s not a good idea – and has led to poor decisions in the past. Instead, I need to sit in the Washing Machine, tolerate the discomfort of not knowing, let my unconscious work away at the various book ideas until my path becomes clear.

If you struggle with this – and find yourself in the Washing Machine right now – you might find the idea of taking a mindful pause helpful in making better, more considered decisions. Here’s a practice I created for Insight Timer on that very subject: Learn How to Take a Mindful Pause. You can access it using the button below.

I hope it helps – and that you find your way out of the Washing Machine soon.

Love ❤️

Dan

Should You Quit Drinking for Your Mental Health?

Image by Pesce Huang

Giving up drinking was a slow, organic process for me. I had been drinking increasingly moderately for over a decade, mostly sober with a few glasses of wine at the weekend. But I increasingly felt that my body had just had enough. And the turning point came at a friend’s party, when I was still getting over a bout of Covid. I drank half a glass of prosecco and it tasted weird. I felt weird. And everything in me just said, ‘No!’

I literally felt like I was drinking poison – which, of course, I was. Research increasingly shows that any amount of alcohol, however small, is detrimental to your health. This all sounds a bit dramatic, but it just felt like an epiphany. I knew I had to make a change. At first I thought I would give it a month and see how I felt. ‘Never say never – I might have the odd drink,’ I would say, or ‘I’m just giving it up for a while and let’s see how that goes.’

But as time went on I realised that I was done. Enough. And that this was part of my spiritual journey, wanting to be calm, clear and mindful all the time. I try to live my life according to the five Buddhist precepts, one of which says, essentially, don’t drink or take drugs. And in recent years I have found that, even after one glass of wine, I just didn’t feel quite like me. I said things that felt a bit off, or clunky, or made jokes that didn’t land. And the next day I would wince at the memory, wishing I hadn’t said/done the things I had.

The rock ‘n’ roll years

A little context would be helpful. From the age of 17 I was pretty hedonistic. I grew up in north London and everyone I knew drank, partied and had a bit too much fun. And I kept being hedonistic for decades, sometimes really struggling with my drinking/excessive partying with friends, especially after traumatic events like bereavements and divorce. It was only when I retrained as a therapist, started meditating daily and met my lovely wife, Laura, that I was able put those hedonistic years (what I call the ‘rock ‘n’ roll years’) behind me.

And, although I now see all that madness through the lens of internal family systems – that the parts who drank and partied were just trying to numb my pain the only way they knew how – I still feel a deep sense of regret, even shame about it. Even though I managed to reduce my drinking to normal, moderate, middle-aged levels, something in me knew I just needed to quit.

Getting sober at 56 feels like an act of deep self-compassion. It’s been three months now and I feel great. I love being clear and fresh all the time, especially in the morning. I no longer berate myself for silly comments I made the night before. It just feels… calm. And right. I only wish I had given up sooner.

Should you quit too?

It’s important that I say here, I’m not putting pressure on anyone else to quit the booze. It’s a personal decision and we all have a different relationship with alcohol. You may drink moderately, enjoy a glass of wine with dinner sometimes, and that’s totally fine. Enjoy that Rioja!

But for people like me – with a history of childhood trauma and decades of working on my mental health – I do think sobriety is a powerful, healing choice. At 56 I’m just done with beating myself up. I have engaged in more than enough of that for one lifetime! My Critic can take a well-deserved rest too.

I still have parts which are very addictive, so have a compulsive relationship with other things – coffee, sugar, work, tech. I’m working on those, but I reckon one thing at a time. Let me bed in this newfound sober lifestyle first, because although it’s mostly easy, there are definitely wobbles and moments when it feels a bit tough. I’m off to Barcelona this weekend, which was always party central back in those crazy years, so let’s see how I manage that! I’m sure it will be fine, but it’s amazing how much context matters – being with the people you used to party with, or going to places that have somewhat hazy/regret-filled memories. It will be good to have fun and come back with brand-new, entirely clear, positive memories to replace them.

If you do struggle with addiction, to alcohol or anything else, I strongly recommend the IFS approach to treatment. It’s warm, kind and accepting – as well as offering a revolutionary way of thinking about and managing addiction of all kinds. My colleague and dear friend Claire van den Bosch is a brilliant therapist, thinker and teacher, as well as being a leading expert in this area, so do check out her site at www.atimetoheal.london

And whatever path you choose in healing your addictive processes, as they are called in IFS, I wish you love and strength on your journey,

Dan ❤️

What is the Point of Anxiety?

Image by Francesco

If you struggle with high levels of anxiety you may, understandably, wish you could never feel anxious again. If there was a big switch marked ‘Anxiety’, you would probably flick it to the OFF position and hope it stayed that way for the rest of your life. And no wonder – anxiety is a horrible feeling, especially when you experience it intensely and on a regular basis. No-one likes feeling anxious.

But when I am helping my clients with chronic anxiety, one of the first things I do is explain why humans experience anxiety, the function of this uncomfortable emotion both in terms of evolution and neurology – how it shows up in your nervous system, including your brain. The first thing to understand about anxiety is that it’s supposed to feel uncomfortable. That’s so you can’t just ignore it and carry on with your day.

To understand this properly, let’s jump into a time machine and journey back 10,000 years, to meet one of your ancestors living on the African savannah. She would be living with a small tribe of hunter-gatherers, in a village surrounded by a fence constructed from the spikiest branches they could find. Why? Because outside that fence would be very large, very hungry animals who wanted to eat them.

Anxiety is an alarm signal

Let’s say your ancestor left the village with two other women to forage for berries, roots, plants and whatever they could find to feed their families that day. As she walked across the savannah, she noticed the grass to her left start rustling. And she froze, as the threat system in her brain first detected the threat and then – in split seconds – decide how to respond. Thinking it might be one of the lions that often hunted near this spot, her brain cycled through the options of fight, flee or freeze and decided fleeing was her best chance of survival.

So her amygdala – a small structure in the brain whose primary job is mobilising the rest of the brain and body to deal with threats – gave her a massive jolt of anxiety to signal, Run! At the same time, the amygdala engaged with other parts of her brain to give your ancestor a shot of adrenaline and cortisol, quicken her breathing and heart rate to pump oxygenated blood to the major muscles in her arms and legs. And she ran, fast, until the potentially-a-lion threat was far behind her.

And this is what anxiety is for – to tell you that:

1. There is a threat.

2. And you should do something about it, urgently.

For your ancestor, this whole mind-body process might just have saved her life. And even in our 21st-century world, which is far safer than the one she lived in, anxiety will probably have saved your life, or the life of a loved one. This is why we should never try to get rid of anxiety completely, even if we could, because it can quite literally be a life-saver.

Calming your nervous system is key

I hope that gives you some idea of why you feel so anxious – and why that’s not necessarily a bad thing. The problem is, for most of us, our anxiety is not triggered by lions in the grass, but by a nasty email from your boss, warning letter from the bank or critical comment from a family member. These are all threatening, hence the spike of anxiety they trigger, but not in the life-or-death way those rather primitive parts of your brain are designed to save you from.

So rather than trying to shut down your anxiety, or get rid of it, the key is first learning to accept this normal, healthy and in fact vital emotion. Then finding tools and techniques to bring your dysregulated nervous system back into balance, calming, soothing and reassuring parts of your brain like the amygdala that are yelling ‘lion!’ when there is none.

If you are really struggling with your anxiety, I would encourage you to find a skilled therapist to help heal whatever wounds from your past are making you feel so anxious right now. And this therapy, as well as any other healing tools you employ, should focus on helping calm and soothe your overheated nervous system. You can do that right now, using this Compassionate Breathing technique I recently blogged about.

I would also recommend anything that feels calming or soothing for you, like self-help books and podcasts from therapists/other healers you trust, yoga, tai chi, hugs from your beloved pet/partner/kids/close friends or family members, relaxing massage or soothing music/TV shows/movies. Really anything that helps you feel calmer, safer and more at peace will be good for your anxious brain. Over time, this will reduce the flow of stress hormones like cortisol into your bloodstream, while increasing pleasurable, calming hormones like oxytocin and endorphins.

If you would like to know more about anxiety and how to manage it you may also find my latest Insight Timer course, Easing Worry & Anxiety with Internal Family Systems, helpful – if so, just click the button below to find out more.

And my Insight Timer collection has a wide range of meditations, breathwork techniques, guided imagery, sleep stories and much more to help with problems like stress, anxiety and depression.

I hope that helps – sending you love and warm thoughts ❤️

Dan

Feeling Anxious or Stressed? My Colour Breathing Practice Will Help

Colour Breathing is a highly effective technique to help when you’re feeling stressed, anxious, upset, angry or any other negative emotion. In this short video, I guide you through the practice, which will help you feel calmer, more relaxed and at peace. Used daily, Colour Breathing will help calm your mind, body and nervous system.

I hope that helps – for more techniques like this, including breathwork, self-compassion, IFS and mindfulness techniques, visit my Insight Timer collection by clicking on the button below.

Love ❤️

Dan

Why I Love Being a Meditation Teacher for Insight Timer

I am honoured to be a Featured Teacher on Insight Timer's home page for the upcoming week. I love this app and am so proud to be part of a global community of teachers, producing – mostly free – content for the 26 million meditators who use Insight Timer across the globe.

If you would like to try one of my breathwork practices, mindfulness, self-compassion or IFS meditations, or guided-imagery practices, check out my collection at: insighttimer.com/danrobertstherapy

Love ❤️

Dan

Announcing My New Course: Easing Worry & Anxiety with Internal Family Systems

Image by Giulia Bertelli

I am pleased to announce the launch of my second Premium Audio Course for Insight Timer – Easing Worry & Anxiety with Internal Family Systems. If you sign up to this six-day course today you will learn why you feel so anxious, starting with the evolutionary and neurological roots of anxiety, explaining why it’s a crucial emotion for us all to feel, because it alerts us to threats and helps us react to them, quickly if need be.

Understanding why you feel so anxious is a key step in learning to accept it, because anxiety is something we all feel and is an important alarm signal when things need our attention. And then helping you ease it over time – this course will help you start to feel calmer, safer, and more at peace, step by step.

Over the six days you will also learn about internal family systems therapy, which is one of the fastest growing and most popular models of therapy in the world right now. As an Internal Family Systems Therapist, I use this warm, compassionate, and highly effective treatment approach with my clients and in my teaching, because it offers a revolutionary way of understanding problems like chronic anxiety.

Meeting your young, anxious part

You will learn that this anxiety comes from an anxious young part of you, holding painful thoughts, feelings, and memories of difficult experiences in your childhood. To ease your anxiety, you need to learn how to connect with, understand and soothe this anxious little boy or girl inside.

I will also teach you that worry comes from another part of you, called the Worrier. Again, you will learn how to accept and even value this protective part, because it’s just trying to help, even if the way it does so can be stressful and exhausting at times.

I hope you join me on this transformative six-day journey, which includes theories and techniques drawn from my many years of helping clients better manage their anxiety. As well as trauma-informed teaching about the mind-body source of problematic anxiety, I will lead you through powerful calming techniques including breathwork and guided-imagery exercises, drawn from IFS and other trauma-informed therapy models.

The course is free if you become a Member Plus Supporter. This costs just $60 for 12 months of high-quality content like this on the Insight Timer app from me and thousands of other leading teachers. ⁠

Try it now by visiting my Insight Timer collection or clicking on the button below. ⁠

I hope you find it insightful and healing. ⁠

Love ❤️⁠

Dan

Try this Powerful Exercise to Manage Difficult People in Your Life

Image by Nik

One of the frustrating aspects of being human can be dealing with other humans. Not the nice, kind, reasonable ones. But the annoying, rude, disrespectful ones – I’m sure you have a few of those in your life. And managing these tricky customers is not easy, especially if they are partners, family members, close friends or colleagues. If someone says or does something hurtful or annoying, you may respond in all sorts of unhelpful ways, like firing off an angry message, giving them the silent treatment, people-pleasing or suppressing your own needs, desires and opinions to keep the peace.

Viewed through the parts-based lens of internal family systems therapy, we can take a more compassionate view, as everyone (including me!) has tricky protective parts, who might get angry, judgemental or even hostile to protect your younger, more vulnerable parts from being hurt. This may be especially important for you if you were harshly criticised, bullied or shamed as a child – that’s when those protectors came online for you and why they will fire up with great speed and ferocity if they sense something similar happening to you now.

So when you are in conflict with someone, it’s like a war between their protectors and yours. Their angry protector fires up and says something hurtful or mean. So your angry protector gets activated and fires a verbal volley at them, which comes back at you and so it goes until somebody ‘wins’ or backs down. Entirely understandable, but not usually very productive, because one or both of you could get hurt, or you might damage a relationship that’s important to you. Many marriages end in divorce precisely for this reason.

There is another way

Happily, there is a more productive, kind and effective way to resolve conflict. In order to do that, you need to approach this difficult person from your Self, asking your protectors to relax and let you (strong, confident, adult you) handle the situation. I have written a few posts about Self, but as a refresher, in IFS Self is described as you who is not a part, or who you are deep down. This is the you who is calm, sturdy, robust and resilient. When you are in Self you also feel authentic, compassionate and kind. With this energy, you can approach conflict without out-of-control anger or hostility, but a firm, steady, assertive energy that both protects you and diffuses the situation.

If you would like to see the human embodiment of Self-energy, watch the wonderful Netflix documentary featuring the late Bishop Desmond Tutu and the Dalai Lama, Mission: Joy – Finding Happiness in Troubled Times. Both are wise, kind and deeply spiritual, in their own ways. There is a deep strength to them (one who successfully fought apartheid and the other continues to combat oppression by the Chinese government) coupled with huge-heartedness, warmth and a deep sense of playfulness and joy. Two remarkable leaders and qualities we can all aspire to, or develop, the more we live in Self and are less in thrall to well-meaning but unhelpful parts.

If you are struggling with a difficult person in your life, here is a guided-imagery practice – Fire Drill: IFS Meditation – I adapted from the classic IFS meditation, developed by the wonderful Dr Richard Schwartz, founder of IFS. Click the button below to listen to the recording on Insight Timer.

Love ❤️

Dan

Are You an Orchid, Tulip or Dandelion? Why Your Temperament Matters

Image by Zoltan Tasi

There is a Swedish term, maskrosbarn, which means ‘dandelion child’. The Swedes have long believed that a proportion of kids were like dandelions – they were hardy, resilient and could grow anywhere. Just as dandelions can grow in lawns, parks or cracks in the pavement, so these unusually robust children can manage in any family, even if from the outside they look like tough environments in which to grow up.

Psychologists Bruce J Ellis and W Thomas Boyce, when studying genetics and child development, coined a new term in 2005: orkidebarn, meaning ‘orchid child’. Unlike their hardier counterparts, orchid children are – like the flower – highly sensitive, needing just the right environment to flourish. If the parenting/family dynamic is not what they need, orchids struggle mentally and physically, and can go on to suffer from long-term mental-health problems.

In new research, Dr Francesca Lionetti and colleagues identify a third category: tulips. These are medium-sensitivity children, somewhere between dandelions and orchids. The authors write that in their study of 901 healthy adults, 31 per cent were orchids, 29 per cent dandelions and 40 per cent tulips. These numbers vary from study to study, but what is clear is that some children are born with highly sensitive temperaments (also known as Highly Sensitive Persons), with less-sensitive children at the other end of the scale, and medium-sensitive in the middle. This temperamental sensitivity, or lack of it, stays with people into adulthood.

How temperament shapes your personality

Why does this matter? As I am always telling my clients, your temperament is crucial because it shapes you from the moment of your birth (and probably before that, in the womb). It is a combination of nature and nurture – the genetic inheritance you received from your parents combined with early parenting, attachment with your primary caregivers, family dynamics, and so on. If you were born a dandelion, you would have been pretty thick-skinned as a child, managing to cope even in high-conflict, volatile or otherwise less-than-ideal family environments.

But if you were an orchid, the same families would have been far too much for you, causing you persistent stress which would, in turn, have affected your developing brain. We know, for example, that high levels of the stress hormone cortisol negatively impact brain development, starting in the womb. This can harm a tiny baby’s growing brain, affecting its shape, size and connectivity.

Put simply: if you were an orchid in a stressful, chaotic or otherwise dysfunctional family, you would have suffered. And, very sadly, that suffering might have continued throughout your life – Dr Boyce writes that orchids account for a disproportionately high percentage of every society’s physical and mental-health problems. That’s because your highly sensitive temperament made you unusually vulnerable to things going wrong at every level of your mind-body system.

Why orchids can thrive

If you – like me and most of my clients – are an orchid, this may all seem a bit depressing. You were born with a highly sensitive temperament, your family wasn’t great, so then you suffer for life, right? Wrong. In fact, research also shows that, given the right care, orchid children thrive. They do better educationally, financially and in every other way than dandelions. Just like their horticultural namesakes, these kids can bloom into the most beautiful adults, they just need a little care, the right emotional nutrients, and some time.

There are two take-home points here. First, your temperament is key, whether you are an orchid, tulip or dandelion. It plays a huge part in making you, you. It is mostly inherited, but is profoundly affected by your environment.

Second, none of this is inherently good or bad. Sensitivity is an inherited neural – and neutral – trait. Just like being short or tall, having green eyes or brown, it’s something you are born with. But unlike your eye colour, it can change because of your environment and throughout your lifetime. And the problems that high sensitivity makes you vulnerable to can be mitigated by all the usual methods of healing and change – reading mental-health blogs like this one, self-help books, podcasts, therapy, meditation, yoga, loving relationships and all the other good stuff I am always writing about.

I hope you find these ideas eye-opening. If you would like to know more, try Dr Boyce’s book: The Orchid and the Dandelion: Why Sensitive People Struggle and How All Can Thrive. It’s a great read and has helped shaped my thinking around temperament and child development.

Sending you love and warm thoughts ❤️

Dan

What is Avoidant Attachment? And How Does it Affect Your Relationships?

Image by Beth Hope

Do you know which attachment style you have? This style, which describes the ways you think, feel and behave with current/potential romantic partners, is either secure or insecure – this is further divided into anxious or avoidant. Understanding your attachment style is profoundly important, for your mental health in general and particularly the way it impacts your closest relationships.

In a recent post, I described the impact of an Abandonment schema, which might give you a sensitivity to and fear of rejection or abandonment by your partner. This schema is often associated with an anxious attachment style, which means moving towards your partner by thinking about them all the time, messaging/calling them often, and worrying that they might be losing interest in you or having an affair. People with this attachment style can experience periods of intense worry and anxiety, until they get reassurance that everything is fine, their partner still loves them and nothing has changed.

In this post we will explore the other main type of ‘insecure attachment’, which is the avoidant attachment style. It’s thought that 25 percent of the adult population have this deeply rooted way of relating to others (with 50 percent secure, 20 percent anxious and five per cent anxious-avoidant). If you are one of them, you may find relationships – especially romantic ones – tricky in all sorts of ways.

What is avoidant attachment?

Essentially, avoidant attachment is the complete opposite of the anxious style, involving moving away from your partner, or potential partners. While anxiously attached folk constantly activate their attachment system, which helps them feel/be closer to their partner, avoidant people unconsciously suppress their attachment system all the time. They use deactivating strategies like criticising or finding fault with their partner, finding reasons not to spend time with them or have intimate conversations, avoiding physical contact and fantasising about the perfect partner – who might be just round the corner, if only they were free.

I recently read a brilliant book on attachment styles and how deeply they affect us throughout our lives – Attached: Are You Anxious, Avoidant or Secure? How the Science of Adult Attachment can Help You Find – and Keep – Love, by Amir Levine and Rachel Heller. I highly recommend it if you are interested in psychology, or just need some help in finding/maintaining a loving, supportive relationship.

One of the things that struck me was the authors’ claim that, if you are avoidant, when you hit a crisis point in your life – like a painful divorce – your avoidance can melt away and you become anxiously attached. And this made so much sense to me, when viewed through a parts-based lens. It means that people with an avoidant style have an Avoidant Protector, who keeps intimacy and (especially) vulnerability at bay.

But hidden behind that protector is a young part who craves love, support, connection, warmth, intimacy – all the normal, healthy relationship needs that every child is born with. Sadly, that protector constantly blocks these relational nutrients, so avoidant folk often feel isolated and lonely. They too want love, they just don’t know how to let people in enough to give and receive it.

Healing your attachment system

As I am often saying in these posts, the good news is that none of this is fixed or set in your brain. Your attachment style can change over the course of your lifetime. How? Well, finding an attachment-based therapist using a model like schema therapy would be one route to healing. Another is finding a securely attached partner – we know that this is often profoundly healing and transformative for insecurely attached folk. This kind of person makes relationships easy, because they are calm, confident and consistent. They just love you, no matter what, which helps your protective parts calm down enough for your hurt little boy or girl to receive all the love they have long craved.

So don’t give up. There is always hope, even if you have always avoided or struggled with relationships. Perhaps give a bit more thought to the kinds of people you typically choose, taking it slow at first so you can get a sense of your partner’s way of relating before you plunge in. Of course, if you are avoidant you will never plunge in, but you can still think before embarking on a relationship to try and find a secure person to be with. It will make a big difference, trust me.

I hope that helps – and wishing you luck on your healing journey.

Sending you love and warm thoughts ❤️

Dan

Be Careful What You Think: The Power of Mind Over Body

Image by Milad Fakurian

I recently listened to a radio programme about the effectiveness of smart watches – the hi-tech gadgets many of us strap to our wrists to measure heart rate, step count, sleep quality and much more. According to the presenter, they vary wildly in accuracy, especially in measuring the depth, quality and stages of your sleep.

He also cited a study that intrigued me. In this research, participants had exactly the same amount of sleep, measured by highly accurate kit in a specialist sleep lap. But one group was shown the accurate data about their slumber, while the other was given deliberately false data, showing they had a terrible night’s sleep.

What was so fascinating was that these poor souls then felt exhausted, had poor cognitive functioning and reported feeling unpleasantly sleepy all day. Purely because they believed they had had a bad night’s sleep, so their body reacted accordingly.

Studies like this are intriguing, I think, because they illustrate the power of ‘mind-body symptoms’. These are powerful physical symptoms with no biological cause – they are created solely by our thoughts. And this may be hard to believe, but these symptoms can include full-body paralysis, blindness and seizures (known as ‘functional symptoms’, or ‘medically unexplained symptoms’).

It’s important to note a couple of things here: first, people with these conditions experience the exact same physical problems as those with biologically driven illnesses. They are really ill and need compassionate help, treatment and support. Second, no doctor thinks people with functional symptoms are making their illness up, faking it or that it’s all in their mind. This is to misunderstood the nature of our mind-body connection – and the power of your mind to influence your body.

What are Mind-body symptoms?

Let’s take a better-known case – the placebo effect. Study after study finds that patients taking sugar pills – with no medicinal content at all – experience significant benefits, including pain reduction for conditions like migraines. The exact amount is hotly debated, but most experts agree that placebo plays some part in the effectiveness of any medical treatment, including surgery!

That’s because if we receive medical treatment from someone in a white coat, who seems like an expert in their field, also caring and trustworthy, we believe that they will help us. And this makes the treatment more likely to succeed than not. The opposite of this, by the way, is called the ‘nocebo effect’ – we think something will make us ill and it does, which is also very powerful.

An example of mind-body symptoms from the realm of psychology is the research into mindfulness for management of chronic pain. Vidyamala Burch is a brilliant meditation teacher, long-term Buddhist and truly inspiring person, who sustained spinal injuries at 17 that required multiple surgeries and left her with a complex back condition, chronic pain and partial paralysis. She is now a wheelchair user.

Vidyamala is so inspiring because she learned to manage her pain through daily meditation – having experienced the power of mindfulness to help with chronic pain and illness, she developed the world’s first Mindfulness-Based Pain & Illness Management (MBPM) programme, which has helped over 100,000 people around the world. She is also one of the most positive, upbeat teachers I know! Here’s her story, if you’re interested – it really is heartwarming and inspiring.

Vidyamala (her given Buddhist name) explains that we experience primary and secondary pain. So if you cut your finger with a knife, the primary pain comes from damaged tissue, and these signals are sent to your brain via your nervous system. Your brain then interprets this data, taking into account your thoughts about it – so if you think, ‘Help! I’m a concert pianist and this could finish my career!’ your brain turns up the pain dial, making the symptoms more severe so you take action about this career-threatening problem. This is secondary pain – and it is largely due to your interpretation of the injury, not the physical damage.

The takeaway here is that your thoughts have a tremendous impact – on your emotions, your internal system of parts and the many biological systems in your body, such as your nervous system, hormonal system and musculoskeletal system. This is more proof that learning to think in a kind, helpful, compassionate way really can change your life. Just ask Vidyamala…

If you would like help in developing more positive thoughts and beliefs, try my Insight Timer practice – Taking in the Good: IFS Meditation, by clicking on the button below.

I hope you find it helpful – and if you are struggling with your health right now, for any reason, sending you love and warm thoughts ❤️

Dan