If You're Struggling, Remember That This Too Shall Pass

Image by Eberhard Grossgasteiger

How are you doing, right now? I hope you’re OK and that the day is going easy on you. But, as you are human, you may be having a tough time, struggling with some kind of pain or anguish. And if that’s the case, let me start by sending you some love and warmth and I hope you feel better soon.

If you are struggling, one of the hardest things might be the feeling that it will never get better. I think this is especially true of depression (because everything seems very negative and hopeless when we’re depressed), but can be the case with any kind of suffering, mental or physical.

This thought came to me this morning, after an early trip to see my osteopath – a kind and brilliant man called George. Since he has been treating me, I have had two acutely painful episodes: one a nasty back flareup and the other a decidedly-not-fun rib injury, which I am currently overcoming.

And I realised today that I had fallen into the trap of thinking/feeling the ribs would never get better, despite all of George’s sterling work and my daily rehab/exercise programme – I have had this problem for over a month now. But, you know what, after my treatment it is feeling better today. I think, finally, we are on an upward trajectory and I can see the end in sight. No more sore ribs, which will be blissful (rib injuries are not great, let me tell you! Laughing hurts. Sleeping hurts. Coughing hurts. Breathing hurts).

This too shall pass

My (hopefully) healing ribs reminded me of that somewhat over-used but still brilliant piece of wisdom, ‘This too shall pass’. A quick Google tells me that this stems from a fable written by Persian Sufi poets, but whoever said it first, they captured something vital for us all – as I am always saying to my clients and when teaching Heal Your Trauma events, no matter what you went through, however bad it was, it’s never too much and never too late to heal.

This applies as much to backs and ribs as it does traumatic experiences in childhood, episodes of acute panic and anxiety, depression, or whatever you might be struggling with right now. It may not seem like it, but it will pass. You will get better. The anxiety will ease, your mood will lift, your ribs will stop hurting.

And you may need help from your very own George (everybody needs a George, I think), from me or another therapist, from wise writers and teachers, yoga instructors, mentors, friends, partners and loving family members. But whatever you are struggling with right now, remember: this too shall pass.

Sending you love and warm, healing thoughts,

Dan

Struggling with Your Mental Health? Try Changing One Thing Today

Image by Taylor R

If you’re having a tough time right now, you might try a whole host of things to help you feel better. And in many ways, that’s great – I am all for working hard to make a positive change in your life. But something I often see with my clients and those I teach is that they are trying too many things, all at the same time.

So, in addition to our therapy, they are practising yoga and one or more forms of meditation, reading three different self-help books at the same time, microdosing psychedelics, having couples therapy and life coaching, intermittent fasting, giving up gluten/dairy/sugar, wild swimming/Wim Hof-ing, cleansing their chakras and trying, shall we say, many other less-reputable forms of healing…

Sound familiar?

Now, I am not casting aspersions on any of this stuff (apart from the chakra cleansing – sorry, that’s a step too far for me). I am 100% passionate about healing, growth and change, both yours and mine. I spend almost every waking moment thinking about, studying and practising this stuff. And I support you trying all sorts of healing – from mainstream, evidence-based therapies like schema therapy CBT, EMDR or internal family systems and Eastern traditions such as yoga, Buddhism and various schools of meditation.

My general rule is, if it doesn’t do you any harm – and you’re not using it instead of a more reputable/effective treatment – be open-minded and give it a try. Why not?

The 10,000 kicks rule

But it can be a real problem when people try too many things at once, then give up because they’re not working or just find them a bit ineffective, so get discouraged and disheartened. Let me tell you a story, which comes from my former life as a health journalist and speaks to this problem.

Men’s Fitness magazine sent me off to a branch of the world-famous Shaolin Temple, in Tufnell Park, of all places! This really is a branch of the actual Shaolin Temple, in north London, which blew my mind from the outset. (Here’s the website, if you don’t believe me: shaolintempleuk.org).

I went to interview a tiny but terrifying Shaolin monk, who taught me all sorts of kung-fu magic, which was great fun. But he also told me something, which has always stayed with me. He said, ‘It’s better to practice one kick 10,000 times than 10,000 kicks once.’

Let that sink in for a moment…

I often tell my clients this story, especially when I feel they are trying to pack in too many personal-growth strategies at once, or want to learn lots of new breathing techniques, etc every session. It’s much better for me to teach them one thing, like 4-7-8 Breathing, say, then get them to practice that every day until we next meet.

What can you change today?

If you’re struggling right now, feeling depressed, upset, lonely, anxious, hurt or overwhelmed, first of all I’m sorry. No-one likes to feel those things. As well as reading this blog, let’s thing about one thing you can change today that might help. Here’s a list of helpful things you could try – please read it and choose only one:

• Start practising yoga (Yoga with Adriene is free on YouTube and a great place to begin)

• Establish a daily meditation practice. You can check out my ever-expanding Insight Timer collection, or find one of the many thousands of teachers on Insight Timer who resonates with you (if it helps, some of my favourite teachers are: Sharon Salzberg, Tara Brach, Richard Schwartz, Kristin Neff, Chris Germer, Elisha Goldstein, Vidyamala Burch and Melli O’Brien)

• Visit a Buddhist Centre near you – if you live in London, I recommend Triratna Buddhist centres like this one. You might bump into me there! That’s a great way to learn all about Buddhism, as well as mindfulness, metta and other forms of meditation from serious, long-term practitioners

• Start exercising – jogging, swimming, cycling, going to the gym, dancing… Whatever you enjoy and will be able to commit to long-term

• Begin therapy – if you have a trauma history, make sure you find a trauma-informed therapist like me. There are so many great therapy models, but I suggest schema therapy, CBT, EMDR, IFS, compassion-focused therapy and TIST as good places to start

• Try wild swimming – there is a large and ever-growing evidence base on its benefits for mind and body. Cold water is best, if you can bear it!

I could go on, but that’s enough to get you going. Remember, your challenge is to try one and one only this week. Dedicate enough time and energy to whatever you choose to see if it’s helping (of course, some of these things will take more than seven days to make a difference, but that’s a good place to start).

I hope that’s helpful for you. Sending you love and strength on your healing journey.

Warm wishes,

Dan

Why All My Webinars & Workshops Are Affordable for Everyone

Image by Lina Trochez

I have decided to make all of my Heal Your Trauma events affordable for everyone. I am currently offering a range of webinars (via Zoom) and workshops (a mixture of in-person and online) – here are all of the events planned for 2022.

Why the change? Well, a couple of important reasons. Ever since I set up Heal Your Trauma, I have been wrestling with how to charge enough for the events to cover costs, but still make them accessible to as many people as possible. This is a labour of love for me, because I am passionate about helping as many people as possible to heal from their trauma and subsequent mental-health problems. After trying a number of different pricing models, I had one of those lightbulb moments last week – I realised that this was the best way to make sure that I can realise the project’s core value: Offering affordable help for anyone who is struggling with their mental health.

I am also deeply moved and concerned by the current cost-of-living crisis in the UK, throughout Europe and across the globe, where so many people are struggling with the impact of war, hunger and the climate crisis. In my country, the UK, millions of people will struggle to pay their heating bills this year, so even modest prices for mental-health support will be out of reach for many. So this is the second reason for the change – everyone can now access high-quality, evidence-based teaching, help and support.

The Buddhist concept of Dana

I have also changed the booking system for my events, so if you click on the Book Now button below you will be whisked off to the Eventbrite platform and offered three options for booking your place, either completely free, a Reduced-Fee Ticket or Supporter Ticket. If you are able to pay for your place, I would gently encourage you to do so. There are a number of expenses involved in running these events and the Heal Your Trauma project generally, so any donation you can make, however small, will help me cover those expenses.

It may also be helpful to understand the Buddhist concept of Dana – a Pali word (the language of the Buddha) which means, roughly, generosity or the voluntary giving of materials, energy, or wisdom to others. Dana works two ways – one, it is part of my commitment to Buddhist values (I try, with varying degrees of success, to live my life according to these ‘precepts’) in offering these events to most participants for free.

And second, if you are able to contribute in any way, you are making the same commitment. Your donation allows those who cannot afford it to attend the many Heal Your Trauma events I have planned, for this year and the next.

The new pricing system will start with my next Zoom webinar: Overcoming Depression: How to Lift Your Mood & Feel Calmer, Happier & More Hopeful, which takes place on Saturday 15th October 2022.

You can book your place now, using the button below – I hope to see you there.

Sending warm wishes – especially to those who are struggling right now, for any reason,

Dan

Come to My Overcoming Depression Webinar in October

Image by Patrick

If you struggle with depression, or care about someone who does, book your place on my next Zoom webinar – Overcoming Depression: How to Lift Your Mood & Feel Calmer, Happier & More Hopeful.

This webinar, which is both highly informative and experiential, is free to attend if you’re on a low income – or please do choose the donation option if you are able to support the Heal Your Trauma project. It will be held on Saturday 15th October 2022, from 3pm-4.30pm.

Overcoming Depression – How to Lift Your Mood & Feel Calmer, Happier & More Hopeful features 90 minutes of teaching, powerful exercises that will help you feel calmer and more relaxed, and a 15-minute Q&A with me, Dan Roberts, a leading expert on trauma, mental health and depression.

In this powerful, highly experiential webinar you will learn:

• What causes depression – and why it’s more helpful to think about ‘depressions’, because there are many possible reasons to get depressed

• The key role of core developmental needs – and why, if these were not met for you as a child, you will be vulnerable to depression as an adult

• Why research shows that self-compassion is a key part of the healing process for depression – I will teach you some key self-compassion skills in this webinar

• And, during a 15-minute Q&A, attendees can put their questions to me, Dan Roberts, Founder of Heal Your Trauma and an expert on trauma, mental health and depression

Watch the video for more information and book your place now using the button below.

Warm wishes,

Dan

How Do We Heal From Childhood Trauma?

Image by Melissa Askew

If you experienced trauma as a child, you may feel (understandably) hopeless about your chances of recovering as an adult. Trauma can have such a profound effect on you, especially when you are young, that it leaves you vulnerable to a wide range of problems throughout your life. These include psychological problems like anxiety, depression, low self-esteem or hypersensitivity to stress. You may also struggle with emotional regulation, so you are constantly riding waves of distress and discomfort, then find it hard to calm yourself down.

Other common trauma-related difficulties include substance abuse and other addictions, eating disorders like bulimia and anorexia, as well as problems forming long-term relationships and a lack of confidence socially and at work. You may also struggle with detachment and dissociation – coping mechanisms in your brain that cut you off from your emotions and can make you feel empty, numb, spacey or disconnected from yourself and other people.

This is just an abbreviated list of all the problems that can result from childhood trauma. If any of this resonates with you, I am so sorry. No child deserves to be hurt or neglected. And no adult deserves to carry these wounds, struggling through life as best they can, but feeling battered and bruised inside.

It’s never too much and never too late to heal

Even though the word ‘trauma’ has now entered many of our vocabularies, I don’t think it’s widely understood just how common trauma is around the world. There are varying estimates of how many people have experienced trauma, but a general population survey conducted in 24 countries in 2016 showed that more than 70 per cent of respondents experienced a traumatic event, and 30.5 per cent had experienced four or more events. This is shocking – but to a therapist like me, who specialises in complex trauma, not at all surprising.

I hope that helps you see how widespread trauma is – and helps you understand that you are not alone. This knowledge can be very helpful, as trauma survivors often feel isolated and different from everyone around them. But this research tells us that you are no different from 70 per cent of the people you will meet as you move through your life. Your experiences make you human, not weird or different in any way.

Another crucial thing that I always explain to my clients is that it’s never too much and never too late to heal. Meaning: whatever happened to you, however bad it was, you can be helped. And whatever age you are, it’s never too late to seek therapy (I have treated people in their seventies, with life-changing results).

How does trauma healing work?

I know this may be hard for you to believe. And that’s OK – I don’t expect you to read these words and have a Shazam! moment, where suddenly all becomes clear. That’s why my Heal Your Trauma project contains so many different kinds of resources, from blog posts like this one to guided meditations/imagery and breathing techniques, webinars and workshops, and much more. Bit by bit, step by step, I’m trying to plant helpful thought seeds in your mind that will flourish and grow into powerful ideas, beliefs and understanding of how to heal and change.

One last thing – let me explain what healing actually means in this context. And to do that, let’s imagine you went skiing (hard to imagine right now, I know, but it will get cold again!). And you had a great time up to the moment you took a tumble, landed awkwardly and broke a bone in your shin.

You would be whisked off to a local hospital, where doctors would make sure the bone was straight, then protect it with a cast, give you some crutches and wish you luck. You would then hobble homewards, with some tricky moments, but eventually get back and collapse on your sofa – where you would stay, with various toilet/meal breaks, for some weeks.

And then, gloriously, one day your leg would be healed, you would have the cast removed and have physio, until you were able to walk again. But – and here’s the key point – none of the things I have described here would have actually healed the bone in your leg. They would have been vital, but merely helpful aids to the real healing, which would have occurred inside your body.

Natural healing processes

That’s because your body has innumerable, miraculous healing processes that happen, every second of your life, mostly outside your awareness. These healing processes would have repaired your tibia, knitting the bone together so that it would be stronger then it was before you broke it.

And exactly the same healing processes occur in your mind, brain, nervous and hormonal systems when you recover from trauma. All you need to enable this to happen is the right help, support and guidance from someone like me – a trauma-informed therapist who knows about these magical-but-everyday healing processes and how best to facilitate them. It’s neither easy, nor quick. It’s a slow, steady process that requires a great deal of hard work, on your part and mine.

But it is doable. I promise you that if you find a skilled, trauma-informed therapist, come along to my webinars and workshops (and find others that resonate with you), read these blog posts and self-help books by my colleagues in the mental-health field, meditate, exercise and do all the other things that we know to be helpful and healing, you will get better.

And I will be here with you, every step of the way, as you embark on your healing journey.

Sending you love, strength and hope, wherever you are and whatever hand life has dealt you,

Dan

How to Manage Your Emotions in the Heat

Image by Clark Douglas

As I write this, I am sitting in my office in north London, struggling with the heat. It’s like an oven in here! The temperature is due to hit 33C in London today, which is crazy. Saturday will be 36C. These temperatures are not normal for a Northern European country with a temperate, maritime climate. But with climate change starting to hit us hard, sadly this is the new normal, so we all need to find ways to adapt to it.

As well as all the sweaty discomfort – especially in a country that is not geared up for hot weather – I have noticed my emotions being all over the place on these hot days. As my poor, patient wife will attest, I am definitely more irritable. I normally have a very long fuse and almost never raise my voice in anger. Most people who meet me describe me as a very calm person. But I’m not calm when it’s 33C outside!

And in many ways, this is not my fault. The human body is designed to exist in a narrow range of temperature, known as homeostasis. I just Googled a definition, which is: ‘A self-regulating process by which biological systems maintain stability while adjusting to changing external conditions’.

Translated into English, this means that we, like other animals, struggle when temperatures go above or below a fairly narrow range. We sweat. We mop our brows. We crave ice cream. And as we struggle to regulate our bodily temperature, we also struggle to regulate our emotions.

Heat makes us angry

Ever wondered why riots always happen in summer? It’s because everybody’s too damn hot. It’s also why domestic violence, air/trolley/road rage all spike on hot days and why everyone seems so impatient and irritable in London right now. Heat makes us angry, it’s that simple.

If you are struggling with your temper at the moment, start by naming what you are feeling, with as much specificity as possible. So for low-level anger you might be irritable, frustrated, annoyed, impatient or tetchy. Moving up the anger scale we hit angry, hostile or outraged. And when we hit the top of that scale we are into rage, fury, wrath and aggression.

It’s helpful to name your emotions like this, because research has shown that just doing that can help calm and reduce them.

Anger-management: some pro tips

Did you know that standard anger-management techniques often suggest cooling down physically, even on mild days? I use techniques drawn from dialectical-behaviour therapy (DBT) with my clients, because DBT is superb for emotional-regulation strategies. If you are losing your cool at the moment, here are some pro tips to help you calm down, quickly:

• If you’re getting into a heated discussion with your partner, family member or colleague, say to them, ‘I’m getting annoyed with you, and don’t want to say something I will regret, so need to take a moment to calm down.’ Leave the room. You can’t calm down if someone is still there, niggling at you. Try to cool your body down, even a little: splash cold water on your face and neck; take off any extra layers of clothing; press your face and forearms against an outside wall, which will be cool even on a hot day

• Do some deep breathing, to calm and soothe your overheated/dysregulated nervous system. I have recorded three different breathing techniques for Insight Timer, but you could try my 4-7-8 Breathing Technique first, which is incredibly effective

• Finally, here’s a weird-but-effective one: try going floppy. When we get angry we are in fight mode (the angry response in fight-flight-freeze). That means our muscles get tense and we focus on/move towards the threat, ready to fight. Do the opposite of that. Sit in a chair and let all your limbs, head and neck be floppy. Dangle over the arms of the chair. Be like a relaxed, sleepy cat

• Now try to be angry. Impossible, isn’t it? That’s because your brain has picked up on your body posture and thinks, ‘Oh, that’s fine then. We’re calm and safe. No need to fight right now.’

• When you feel cooler and calmer, rejoin the discussion, trying to listen, not interrupt, and be as assertive (not aggressive) as possible. You will probably find that the discussion goes a whole lot better than it would have done if you hadn’t calmed down first

I very much hope those techniques help. Wishing you a calm and peaceful day, wherever you are in the world right now.

Cool wishes,

Dan

Overcoming Depression: How to Lift Your Mood & Feel Happier

Image by Sankalp Suradkar

Depression can feel absolutely awful. When you’re really down, you might feel exhausted, as if the smallest task is utterly daunting. Your thoughts will probably be incredibly negative and laser-focused on everything that is ‘bad’ and ‘wrong’ about you. You might feel either agitated or empty and frozen inside. You may sleep all the time or very badly, eat too much or hardly at all.

The way depression affects us varies widely from person to person. That’s why Paul Gilbert, one of my heroes in the therapy field and founder of compassion-focused therapy, says it’s better to think of ‘depressions’, as there are so many causes and manifestations of this incredibly common mood disorder. But whatever the cause and however it affects you, depression can be grim.

I know this from personal experience. After my father died, suddenly and traumatically when I was 24, I struggled with depression for many years. As well as losing him, which in itself turned my world upside down, that single traumatic event unlocked all the pain and hurt of my life up until then. I spent years in therapy, trying different therapists and approaches, none of which (I now know, with the benefit of 20/20 hindsight), were that effective or helpful.

Like many people struggling with mental-health problems, I self-medicated with alcohol and other substances. Again, I now understand that these substances were mostly doing two things: first, numbing the pain; and second, giving me a much-needed hit of distraction and dopamine, so I felt happy and good for a few hours. Sadly, those short-term bursts of excitement were followed by even worse bouts of depression, as well as self-loathing and profound disappointment in myself for doing it again.

Emerging into the light

I knew something had to change. So I retrained as a therapist (more accurately, I returned to this field after a stint in journalism, having first trained as a counsellor in 1994-7) and slowly got my life together. I did a mindfulness-based cognitive therapy (MBCT) course, which helped me integrate a daily meditation practice into my life. I have relished those 20 minutes of silence and stillness almost every day since then.

I found a kind, loving partner who is now my wife. She was there for me in some extremely tough times, as I have been there for her when she struggled. This alone has been incredibly healing for me – I feel deeply blessed and grateful to have this wonderful person in my life.

I began to study in great depth the newer, more scientific, brain-based approaches to therapy, like schema therapy, internal family systems therapy, cognitive therapy, MBCT, compassion-focused therapy and many more. For the first time I started to understand what causes depression, anxiety, stress and all the other psychological problems we are all vulnerable to, being beautiful but fragile humans.

A mind-body approach

It’s not always easy for me to be so open about my struggles with mental health (and even harder to admit to the self-medicating, which I very much regret), but I do so in my writing, teaching and therapy practice to ‘normalise’ both psychological difficulties and the ways we try to cope with them, however unhelpful they may be. I am a flawed, fragile human being, just like you. But I also talk about this stuff to say, this is what worked for me, so it could work for you too.

As well as all the learning I have done about the mind, brain, nervous system, different theories and models of psychotherapy, I have to say that one of the most powerful tools I have found to boost and regulate my mood is physical exercise. As I write this, I have just come back from the gym. I exercise almost every day, partly to help with some chronic back issues, but also because it just makes me feel so good!

There is a huge amount of research into the beneficial effects of moving your body on your thoughts, emotions and mood, so if you struggle with depression please do try moving, even a little. You may hate the gym, which is absolutely fine. How about swimming, in the local pool or better somewhere wild? Or dancing – play your favourite tunes, loud, and jump around a bit.

Martial arts are great, especially if you have a trauma history and want to feel safer in your body and your life. Yoga is amazing, providing nourishment and exercise for the body, mind and soul. There is also a great deal of evidence supporting yoga as a trauma-healing practice.

If you have a bike, go for a ride. If you have a garden, get digging and feel your hands in the soil, which also reconnects us to Nature and answers a call deep in your bones to live a wilder, more natural life.

Start with small steps

Having spent years struggling with depression, I know that someone advising you to exercise can feel irritating, even condescending. Of course you already know this! Your GP has probably told you, along with your friends, social-media feed, newspaper, numerous mental-health documentaries, and so on. But I have to say, sometimes we can know all the right things to do, but the hardest thing is actually doing them.

So start small. If you haven’t left the house for days, just go for a walk around the block. Breathe some fresh air. Move your body, a little – it’s desperate to move, trust me. Tomorrow try two blocks. The next day three… and before you know it, you are walking for an hour and noticing a real uplift in your mood.

This is not rocket science, I know, but it really does help.

You may also be interested in a Zoom webinar I’m planning on Saturday 15th October 2022: Overcoming Depression – How to Lift Your Mood & Feel Calmer, Happier & More Hopeful. Take a look at my Webinars & Workshops page if you would like to know more.

And I very much hope that some of my story is inspiring for you. It may help to know that I don’t get depressed any more. I have up days and down days, like everyone, but those long, awful bouts of depression are mercifully in my past.

I barely drink, apart from a few glasses of wine at the weekend. I mostly live a sober, mindful life. And I have a job I love, that brings great joy and meaning to my day-to-day existence. If I can turn my life around – which was a mess, trust me – so can anyone. Including you.

Sending you love and strength, whatever you might be struggling with right now.

Warm wishes,

Dan

Can’t Stop Worrying? If So, This Simple Technique Will Help

Image by Nik Shuliahin

Why do we worry? It’s an important question and – if you struggle with worry and anxiety – one we need to answer before thinking about how to help you. One way to think about worry is anticipating stressful, threatening, upsetting or even dangerous events that might occur in the future. This is known as ‘bridge-crossing’. Your brain knows there is a challenge up ahead, so crosses every possible bridge that might lie in your path, to try and help you manage the challenge as best you can.

You could also say that worry is a wired-in, evolutionary response to threats and dangers. Let’s say you were a hunter-gatherer, walking through long grass on the savannah, 10,000 years ago. The threat system in your brain would have been (rightly) highly sensitive and hypervigilant, using all your senses to scan for predators lurking in the grass. You might even have imagined a lion leaping out and how you would try and fight them off, or make your escape. In doing so, you would have visualised the whole scenario, as if playing a video in your mind’s eye.

That would have required a uniquely human capacity: the ability to use a kind of virtual-reality simulator in your brain to imagine the future – sensing it, visualising it and even living through it – to help protect you from potential threats. When you worry, you are using these high-tech neural capacities to anticipate bad stuff on the horizon and how to protect yourself.

More simply, we can also say that worry is a kind of problem-solving thinking, helping you anticipate upcoming problems and then helping you find solutions by running through a whole host of possible options, until you find one that could work.

How anxiety leads to worry

Another key thing to understand about worry is that it’s the cognitive response to the emotion of anxiety. It’s important to emphasise this, because people often get the two mixed up. They say, ‘I feel worried,’ when what they mean is, ‘I feel anxious and am worrying to try and deal with that.’ (I’m sure my clients get fed up with me reminding them of this, but it’s important, so I brave their eye-rolling and say it anyway.)

If we add to this puzzle the fact that anxiety is a threat-focused emotion, triggered by your brain as an alarm call to let you know a person or situation is threatening and you should do something – right now! – to deal with it, you can see why anxiety is designed to feel so bad; and how it’s intended to provoke some kind of urgent, problem-solving action. And we’re back to worry – the urgent, problem-solving action that your brain takes when you feel uncomfortably anxious.

Getting to know the worrier

Yet another way of thinking about worry (last one, I promise) involves understanding that your personality is made up of a number of different parts. I have written about this extensively in previous posts and pages on my site, so if you need to know more I will just point you to either this page on ‘modes’ in schema therapy or this one on internal family systems.

One of the most effective ways of managing unhelpful worry is to speak to the part of you that does the worrying when you’re feeling anxious (usually named the Worrier, for obvious reasons). Here’s a step-by-step guide to doing just that…

The practice

Having a dialogue with your worrier

1. You can try this in two ways. One way is to use these guidelines just to have an internal dialogue with your Worrier part – this can happen many times throughout the day, whenever you find yourself worrying about something. But if you have time – and especially when you’re starting out with this talking-to-parts approach – I recommend trying this longer method first.

2. Start by switching your phone to silent and carving 10 minutes out of your busy day. If you are plagued by constant worry, which as you know can be very stressful and unpleasant, you should be highly motivated to find the time.

3. Now take two chairs and place them so they are facing each other. One chair is for the Worrier, the other your Healthy Adult. First sit on the Worrier chair and let rip about something you have been worrying about recently. It could be a problem at work, with your partner or kids, losing weight, health issues, or more global stuff like the cost of living crisis or climate change. Any subject will do, as long as it has been bothering you lately.

4. Now be the Worrier. Just act as if you are this part of yourself and (here’s the slightly weird bit) imagine that you are sitting on the other chair. So, if this was me, as the Worrier I would say: ‘Dan, I’m really worried about this post you’re writing. Honestly, it doesn’t seem that great. What if nobody reads it? What if they all think it’s crap and unsubscribe? And what if this whole Heal Your Trauma thing just crashes and burns? You’re not working hard enough on it, this is not your best work, so I think you should just scrap it and start again.’

5. Spend a couple of minutes being the Worrier, telling James or Jenny (you) in the other chair all the things he/she needs to worry about right now.

6. Then switch to the Healthy Adult chair. Plant your feet, roll your shoulders back and lengthen your spine. Close your eyes and breathe deeply, in through your nose and out through your mouth. Let your belly rise and fall with each breath. Keep breathing until you feel a little calmer, then open your eyes and respond to the Worrier from your (calm, strong, wise, compassionate) Healthy Adult.

7. Using myself as an example again, I would say, ‘Worrier, I know you mean well and you’re just freaking out right now. But I am working hard on this post – I always do. My writing is really important to me, so I try to make every post informative and interesting. And even if a couple of people unsubscribe, that’s OK, it’s not the end of the world.

   ‘It’s good to work hard but not helpful to have my whole self-worth riding on one post, that doesn’t make sense. So it’s all good – you can just relax and let me handle it. Thanks again for looking out for me.’

8. Notice that on the Worrier chair I say ‘you’ and on the Healthy Adult chair it’s ‘I’. This is important, because I want you to own what you’re saying on the HA chair more, for obvious reasons.

9. Try this, many times, until you feel the Worrier start to calm down. Make sure the way you speak to this poor, frazzled part of you is friendly and kind. It’s not a bad, or mean part – it is trying to help. But the way it’s helping is not very helpful! So you just need to learn how to empathise with, then reassure the Worrier. As ever, practice makes perfect so repeat, repeat, repeat until this is working for you…

I very much hope that’s useful for you. And if you would like some help with your worry and anxiety, do come along to my new one-day workshop: Coping with Anxiety: How to Worry Less, Feel Calmer and More at Peace. This powerful, highly experiential workshop takes place from 10.30am-4.30pm on Saturday 10th September 2022. It costs just £99 for the full day, including refreshments – there are also a limited number of reduced-fee places available.

Coping with Anxiety: How to Worry Less, Feel Calmer and More at Peace will be held at the Gestalt Centre, a short walk from King’s Cross Station in central London. Don’t miss this chance to learn from and spend a day with me – places are limited, so find out more and book using the button below:

I look forward to seeing you in September or at one of my upcoming workshops.

Warm wishes,

Dan

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

If You’re Struggling, Try Finding Moments of Beauty in Your Day

Image by Juliandra Durkin

Anyone who has ever been depressed knows that it’s a terrible thing. At its worst, depression can completely knock the stuffing out of you, making it impossible to leave the house, or even your bed. You might feel completely exhausted, finding the smallest task utterly daunting.

You may well struggle with sleeping, either lying awake for hours, with dark thoughts swirling round your head; or go to the other extreme, sleeping for long periods (and no wonder – I often tell my clients who sleep a lot that nothing helps us avoid painful thoughts and feelings better than sleep). And eating can go the same way, either completely losing your appetite and struggling to eat a mouthful, or comfort-eating junk food all day.

When depressed, your thoughts will probably be extremely negative and hopeless. People tell you that what you’re going through will end, or you will get better, but you probably don’t believe them. And rumination is a central feature of ‘depressogenic’ thinking, which is those thoughts that go round and round your head like, ‘I am so pathetic. What’s wrong with me?’ or ‘My life is a complete mess. How did it get this bad? And why did I make all those stupid mistakes?’

Asking these kinds of negative, existential questions is rarely a good idea, as there are no good answers, are there? And sadly, the more you ruminate, the more depressed you feel, which makes you ruminate more, which makes you more depressed…

More right with you than wrong

Sorry if this is all getting a bit gloomy, especially if you’re struggling with depression or low mood right now. It’s important to recognise just how awful depression can be, but let’s think about it a bit more positively, starting with this wonderful quote from a towering figure in the treatment of depression and other psychological problems:

‘As long as you are breathing, there is more right with you than there is wrong, no matter how ill or how hopeless you may feel’

Jon Kabat-Zinn

Dr Kabat-Zinn developed the mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR) programme in the 1970s. He later inspired a group of psychologists to develop mindfulness-based cognitive therapy (MBCT), which has helped millions of people both recover from and prevent future episodes of depression. And a key idea of both MBSR and MBCT is that where you place your attention – especially what you think about at any given moment – has a powerful impact on determining your mood.

As we saw with rumination, if you spend hours each day going over and over what’s wrong with you, your life, your choices, and so on, your mood will inevitably sink. It’s just common sense. So, rather than obsessively chew over all the negative stuff you perceive in your life, learning that you can choose where you place your attention and what you think about is a simple but potentially life-changing insight.

Finding moments of beauty

I should say here that I struggled with depression for many years, so I don’t say any of these things lightly. I know how awful it is. I understand only too well how hard it can be to shift your attention from the gloomiest subjects, the darkest thoughts, the seemingly hopeless future. Trust me, I have been there, many times.

But I’m also glad to say that I don’t get depressed any more. My mood can be low, from time to time, but that’s only human – and is a world away from the prolonged bouts of depression that used to floor me for days and even weeks at a time.

And one of the key parts of my recovery (apart from a lot of therapy) was taking the MBCT course myself. That course was so profound for me. It helped me start meditating and continue that daily practice for over 12 years now. It deepened my love of Buddhism, which is a wonderfully rich, compassionate and insightful system of philosophy and psychology.

MBCT also taught me to look for moments of beauty throughout the day, even when I’m struggling. One example: it makes my heart so happy to see little kids walking up the road, hand in hand with their parents. Because (and check this out for yourself) little kids never just walk! They do little skips and jumps, or dance, or sing a silly song. They weave along the pavement, skirting imaginary obstacles (crocodiles, lava, icy crevasses). It never fails to put a smile on my face, because they are so full of joy and completely un-self-conscious.

You are a walking miracle

Another example: do you ever stop and think, just for a moment, what a miracle it is that you’re actually alive? Think about the mind-boggling fact that you are, quite literally, made of stardust (every atom in your body originated from some star, billions of years ago, exploding and sending raw materials like carbon streaming out into the universe). Without those stars you, I and every other living creature on our planet would not exist.

How about the fact that your ancestor (and mine) was a single-celled amoeba, floating around in the primordial soup of Earth’s newly formed oceans, around four billion years ago. From a simple amoeba to the magnificent complexity of you, purely through the wonder of evolution and a trillion tiny moments of chance and good fortune that enabled you to exist.

Or all of the millions of life-preserving processes happening in your body, right now, allowing your heart to beat and lungs to breathe and blood to flow and food to digest… And we just walk about, eating sandwiches and playing Candy Crush, completely oblivious. The daily miracle of life, which we all take for granted.

And don’t get me started on cherry blossom, or sun shining through fresh spring leaves, or puppies, or the light of a full moon, or hugs, or the first juicy bite of a nectarine, or your football team scoring a 90th-minute winning goal… So much joy, beauty and wonder, if we just let ourselves see/feel/taste it.

Again, I know that none of this is easy, especially when you’re down. (And if you’re struggling with depression – especially if you are having suicidal thoughts – please do contact your GP or a mental health professional right away.) But it will help, I promise, if you can just shift the spotlight of your attention from all of the bad stuff (real and imagined) in your life to those moments of beauty, or everyday miracles, which are right under your nose.

I hope that’s helpful. And sending you love, strength and hope, whatever you may be struggling with right now.

Warm wishes,

Dan

Come to My New Heal Your Trauma Workshop – Coping with Anxiety

Image by Ravi Pinisetti

My first one-day Heal Your Trauma workshop will take place from 10.30am-4.30pm on Saturday 10th September 2022, at the Gestalt Centre, near King’s Cross in Central London. Our first workshop will be Coping with Anxiety: How to Worry Less, Feel Calmer and More at Peace with Dan Roberts, Advanced Accredited Schema Therapist, Trainer & Supervisor and Founder of Heal Your Trauma.

This event, which will be both highly informative and experiential, costs just £99 for the full day, including refreshments. There are also a limited number of reduced-fee places available.

Coping with Anxiety: How to Worry Less, Feel Calmer and More at Peace features five hours of teaching and powerful exercises that will help you feel calmer and more relaxed. You will also get to ask questions throughout the day to Dan Roberts, a leading expert on trauma, mental health and working with anxiety.

In this powerful, highly experiential workshop 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 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. Book your place now using the button below for just £99 – a limited number of places are also available for those on a low income (email info@danroberts.com for details).

Warm wishes,

Dan

How to Comfort and Reassure the Anxious Child Inside You

Image by Joseph Gonzalez

Whenever my clients tell me they are feeling anxious, after validating their feelings, my favourite question is, ‘Which I is feeling that way?’ Sometimes (especially if they are new) they look at me with a baffled expression, so I clarify by saying, ‘I’m wondering which part of you is feeling anxious? I know it’s not your Healthy Adult, because she just stood up to your boss when he was shouting at you. So who is it?’

And then they get it, so they say, ‘Oh right, it’s little me who’s scared.’

This may seem a bit pedantic, but it’s so important. When we say, ‘I’m scared/worried/stressed/panicky/lonely/overwhelmed’ we are saying that every part of us feels that way. Problem one: this isn’t true. And problem two: it means we are ignoring or missing the part of us that is not feeling any of that stuff, or perhaps just mild discomfort rather than huge and overwhelming feelings. In schema therapy we call this part the Healthy Adult. Freud called it the ego. In internal family systems it’s the Self, compassion-focused therapists would name this part the Compassionate Self, Buddhists speak of Buddha Nature, and so on.

In my opinion, it doesn’t really matter, as long as we are aware that we are not just one homogenous blob of a personality – just Dan, or David, or Daisy. Research by neuroscientists has proved beyond doubt that there are many parts of us – it’s just how your brain forms your personality, starting from birth.

And we also need to grasp the idea that there is a rich, powerful, healing resource, somewhere inside, that we can develop over our lifetime to heal from trauma or any other painful experiences in childhood – and that this inner resource can calm, soothe and comfort the anxious, hurt, depressed or angry young parts of us.

What is your vulnerable child?

The idea that there is an inner child somewhere inside us is not a new one. But Dr Jeffrey Young, the founder of schema therapy, took this idea and developed it with great wisdom and skill. Dr Young saw this part (or ‘mode’, in schema therapy language) in all of his clients, especially those with a history of complex trauma, whose young part was incredibly sensitive, easily triggered and highly emotional.

You have a Vulnerable Child inside you, as do I. And schema therapists like me call that part Little X, so I have a Little Dan inside me. This part of me is small, young, emotional, vulnerable and highly sensitive. He also holds all the painful thoughts, beliefs, memories and emotions from my childhood, which was not always easy. So he holds memories of me being bullied when I was 11, with all the painful thoughts and feelings associated with that extremely hard time in my life.

If you’re feeling anxious right now, it’s little you feeling that anxiety. He or she is probably scared that something bad is about to happen – perhaps that you will be criticised, shouted at, hurt, rejected or abandoned by someone important to you. Or you feel threatened about something you have to do, or somewhere you have to go (anxiety is always threat-focused, because the function of this emotion is to warn us about bad stuff that’s about to happen).

The practice

Comforting your anxious child

Next time you’re feeling anxious or are worrying about something, try this simple practice, which should help you feel calmer and more at peace.

1. Start by switching your phone to silent, so you won’t be disturbed. Then sit on a comfortable chair, with your feet grounded on the floor, gently roll your shoulders back and lengthen your spine.

   Close your eyes and take some slow, deep breaths, in through your nose and out through your mouth, roughly four seconds in and four seconds out. Just breathe for at least a minute, allowing yourself to settle.

2. Now locate the anxious feeling in your body. Anxiety often shows up in the stomach, or it might be your chest, especially around the solar plexus (between and just below your pectoral muscles). You might notice butterflies, tension or a knot in your stomach, a feeling of nervous energy, or tightness/tension in your chest.

3. Now send some breaths into this part of your body. Don’t try and switch off or get rid of the feelings and sensations, just breathe into them. Keep sending warm, friendly, compassionate breath into your throat, shoulders, chest or belly.

   Sit with that for a minute – and see if you notice those parts of your body soften, just a little.

4. Place a hand on your body wherever you feel the uncomfortable sensations of anxiety in a warm, soft, supportive manner – like you would place your hand on the shoulder of a friend who was upset. Feel the warmth from your hand begin to spread into the skin and muscles. Send that warmth, along with the breath, into the tense, anxious places in your body.

5. Now I want you to visualise yourself as a child. It can help to have a photo of yourself, especially at a young age and one you feel warmly towards (it’s common for us to have complicated feelings towards our Vulnerable Child, especially if we experienced trauma in our childhood).

   If you struggle to feel warmth or compassion towards little you, imagine your own child, niece, nephew or friend’s child you are fond of. Just imagine that they are feeling scared and think about how you would respond to them. What words would you use? What would your tone of voice be? You would probably speak a bit more slowly and use a warm, friendly, reassuring voice tone. That’s the tone you need to comfort the child inside you.

6. Now come back to the photo of little you, or just an image of yourself in your mind’s eye. Speak to them from your (warm, wise, compassionate) Healthy Adult. You can do this out loud, or just think the messages to them inside. Let them know you get that they are scared right now. Tell them that is perfectly natural – there is a lot to be scared about in the world, especially at the moment.

   But you can also reassure them, not in a fake ‘everything’s fine!’ way, but rationally and authentically, telling them that, for example, it’s OK if your spouse is angry with you, because adult you can handle a little conflict. Or you might say it’s normal to worry about problems with your health, but adult you will visit the doctor to make sure everything’s fine and most symptoms we experience are perfectly safe and benign.

7. Keep soothing and reassuring them in this calm, friendly, rational way. Then – don’t try and force this, just do what feels natural – let them know you care about or even love them. Sit with that for a few seconds, feeling that internal connection between your Healthy Adult and little you.

8. Finally, see if there are any good feelings inside – you might feel a bit calmer, more relaxed, lighter in your body, or a sense of warmth. If so, just enjoy those feelings for a while. Let them soak into your body for at least 30 seconds.

9. Then take a deep breath and open your eyes.

Try this often, whenever you feel anxious. Once a day is good, five times a day is better. Like all new skills, it will be tricky at first, but get easier with time and especially practice.

I very much hope that helps – sending you love and strength on your healing journey.

Warm wishes,

Dan

You Are More Than Good Enough, Just as You Are

Image by Daniel Hering

I’m going to tell you a secret. You are completely, 100% likable, lovable and more than good enough, just as you are. Who you are, right now. Not next year, when you’ve had therapy and lost 10lb and met the love of your life and bought a big house. Exactly as you are today – with all your strengths and weaknesses, things you’re proud of and things you’re not, successes and failures... Perfect, with all your many imperfections.

Don’t believe me? I thought not. And here’s why – because most of us don’t believe that we are good enough, deep down. We think we’re not clever, thin, pretty, successful, popular, strong, resilient, academic – or whatever our personal sore point might be – enough. And that’s because many of us have a schema, called Defectiveness.

When I take a new client on for schema therapy, I identify which of the 18 schemas they have (we all have at least some of them, including the person who’s writing this). And most people score highly for Defectiveness. It’s so common, I call it the ‘common cold’ of schemas. And like all schemas, it’s a neural network in the brain made up of thoughts, memories, beliefs, emotional and physical responses. These networks develop when we’re young to help us cope with repeated stressful experiences. They are like a template for how to respond when we encounter similarly stressful experiences in our lives.

And Defectiveness often develops when someone tells us we are stupid, or lazy, or weak, or some other hurtful thing, over and over. Not just once, but day after day, week after week, year after year, throughout our childhoods. And so, of course, we start to believe it. We think, ‘Maybe I am stupid.’

Sometimes it’s not what we’re told, but what we intuit from a situation. So if we have a sister and our dad clearly loves her more than us, we might start to think, ‘What’s wrong with me? Why does he dote on her and treat me like a waste of space? Oh, maybe it’s because I’m not as smart as her. Or perhaps I’m just not as lovable as she is.’

So that schema starts forming, slowly at first, but getting more and more wired in as we struggle through a painful childhood. And then you find yourself, at 30 or 40 years old, feeling deep in your bones that you are stupid, rubbish, weak or a failure. I must stress at this point, that none of this is true. It’s just a story you have told yourself for so long that it seems like a 100% accurate description of reality.

Schemas can be healed

Another crucial point is that, just because schemas are strongly wired in to your brain (because you have been thinking those self-critical thoughts and telling yourself that negative story for so long), they are not set or fixed in any way. If you often read my posts, you will know how much I like the idea of neuroplasticity, which basically tells us that our brains are malleable and can be rewired at any moment in our lives.

For example, if you travel to a new city, in a new country, there is a huge amount of new information to absorb – new language, new food, new transport system, new city layout, new customs, new currency, and so on. And when you engage that miraculous supercomputer in your cranium to learn all this stuff, you create new neural architecture to hold all that information. That’s what we mean by rewiring the brain – creating new synaptic connections between the neurons to hold brand-new and important information.

This is how schemas are formed, in your young, fast-growing brain. And this is how schemas can be weakened (or healed, in schema therapy language) when you’re older. Schema healing is always possible, for any of us, at any time in our lives. That doesn’t mean it’s easy, of course – but it is always possible.

The practice

Tell yourself a different story

One of the ways you can start healing your schemas, right now, is by rewriting the story you have been telling yourself since you were, probably, around five years old. And one of the ways to do that is using a technique I learned from the brilliant psychologist Dr Paul Gilbert, founder of compassion-focused therapy. To paraphrase Dr Gilbert, his story goes something like this.

‘When you were about to be born, imagine you could have looked down on the Earth and seen all the potential families you could be born into. Some of those families were warm, loving, kind and stable; and others were full of conflict, unhappiness, anger and criticism. Would you have picked the unhappy one? No, of course not.

‘Did you choose your tricky brain, with its highly developed threat system that made you vulnerable to feeling stressed, anxious and unsafe? Of course you didn’t.

‘Did you choose to have painful schemas, or a harsh inner critic, or negative and self-loathing beliefs? Of course not.

‘Did you choose to have debilitating anxiety and worry, depression, or overwhelming feelings of shame and a lack of self-worth? Nobody would.

‘So, as you didn’t choose any of those things, the thoughts, feelings and moods you struggle with on a day-to-day basis can’t be your fault.

‘But, as an adult, it is your responsibility to do everything you can to try and heal from your painful childhood. Read self-help books and blogs like this one. Go to workshops and webinars held by teachers and healers you respect. Listen to podcasts. Get some therapy. Choose a partner who is kind and supportive. Exercise, sleep, eat nourishing food – all of those things are within your power and you can start doing them right this moment.’

I love this idea, because fault is entirely negative and self-blaming, whereas responsibility is positive, hopeful and leads to proactive problem-solving. If you would like to put this into practice, why not try journaling about your own life – telling yourself a different story about all the things that were out of your control, so you clearly didn’t choose and cannot have been your fault.

Think about the way that all those things, when put together, made you the person you are today. And hopefully this compassionate, non-blaming story will help you feel better about yourself and your life, however much of a struggle it may be for you.

I hope you find that helpful – and that you can tell yourself a different story, starting today. Remember: You are likable, lovable and more than good enough, just as you are.

Warm wishes,

Dan

Feeling Anxious or Stressed? Try 4-7-8 Breathing to Feel Calmer, Quickly

Image by Joshua Earle

Sometimes, we have to acknowledge that modern psychology doesn’t have all the answers. With great humility, we also have to realise that some of the most powerful, deeply healing techniques have been around for thousands of years. Take mindfulness, which only entered the Western medical mainstream in the 1970s. Mindfulness techniques were developed and taught by the Buddha 2,500 years ago, so it took us a while to catch up!

Another set of powerful techniques that have increasingly become mainstream are deep-breathing techniques, which can be incredibly helpful for any ‘hyperaroused’ (high-energy) state such as stress, anxiety, anger or agitation. Many of these techniques are part of the yogic tradition, which has been around for thousands of years (it’s hard to know exactly how long, but 5,000 years is an oft-quoted figure – let’s just say a long time).

These pranayama breathing techniques involve a whole host of practices, but this post will focus on 4-7-8 Breathing, which is incredibly powerful – what I call a ‘break the glass in case of emergency’ breathing technique, as opposed to the gentler Compassionate Breathing, which is also a key part of my therapy toolkit.

When should you use 4-7-8 breathing?

The first thing to say is that this isn’t one of those deep-breathing techniques you can surreptitiously use on the Tube, or in a meeting. It’s kind of loud and pretty funky, so it’s one for a quiet room, alone (or with your therapist, partner or a trusted friend/family member). As with Compassionate Breathing and Box Breathing (another ‘emergency’ technique I often teach people), this 4-7-8 Breathing involves abdominal/diaphragmatic breathing to help you move from a stress response to a relaxation response.

First, a little science (feel free to skip this bit if you want to go straight to the practice, below). Your heart, lungs, digestion and various other systems in your body are controlled by the autonomic nervous system. And this is divided into two branches, the sympathetic nervous system (SNS) and parasympathetic nervous system (PNS). The sympathetic branch is all about action and is a key part of the fight-flight response (fight being linked to the emotion of anger, flight to anxiety).

Put simply, this branch of the nervous system helps you mobilise for action to escape or fight off a life-or-death threat. So it’s pretty handy. But not so useful if you’re on a bus, or in a parent-teacher meeting, and are flooded with panic and anxiety. And sadly, if you’re a trauma survivor, you will probably have way too much SNS activation and not enough PNS in your life, so we need to fire up that parasympathetic system, which is involved in the rest-and-digest response and feelings of calm, relaxation, peacefulness and safety. The good stuff that we all want more of, but which can be elusive, especially if you’re chronically stressed or anxious.

The good news is that just a few minutes of 4-7-8 Breathing can quickly and powerfully activate the PNS, helping you move from stressed to more relaxed. Here’s how it works…

The practice

I would recommend trying this on your own in a quiet room. Switch your phone off and make sure you won’t be disturbed – take a few minutes out of your busy day, just for yourself. You can just count the breaths, slowly, in your head.

When you’re first learning, try to practice at least twice a day, but you can do it as often as you want. Only do it for four cycles in a row in the beginning. After you get used to it, you can work up to eight cycles in a row, throughout the day.

1. Start by adjusting your posture – gently roll your shoulders back and lengthen your spine, so you’re sitting in an upright but relaxed posture. You can close your eyes, or leave them open if you prefer.

2. Place your tongue against the back of your top teeth and keep it there.

3. Exhale completely through your mouth, making a whooshing sound (this might feel a bit silly at first, but give it a go). Try to get every molecule of air out of your lungs.

4. Close your mouth and inhale through your nose for a count of four.

5. Now hold your breath for a count of seven.

6. Exhale completely through your mouth, with added whooshing, for a count of eight. Get all that stale air out of your lungs…

7. This completes one cycle. Repeat for three more cycles.

Remember that, like any new technique, this might feel a bit weird, clunky or challenging at first. Try not to get discouraged – remember that practice makes perfect. Give it a go, for at least a few days.

If you really struggle (and some people do find this practice challenging, especially that long hold), switch to Box Breathing, Compassionate Breathing or just plain old deep breathing instead. As long as you breathe in through your nose, out through your mouth, and your belly is rising and falling with each breath, it should definitely help.

Warm wishes,

Dan

Watch Dan's Interview About Trauma Healing for AntiLoneliness

Image by Jonathan Velasquez

I was recently honoured to be invited for an interview with Vassia Sarantopoulou, Founder and Head Psychologist of AntiLoneliness (antiloneliness.com).

In the course of our highly engaging, one-hour interview we discussed many issues related to trauma, including:

• Can we heal from trauma?

• What is the difference between trauma and complex trauma?

• How has this pandemic been a traumatic experience for many?

• What's a holistic approach to healing?

• How do our everyday habits add to trauma?

• Breathing and meditation: how they help with healing

Do watch the interview below, or by visiting the AntiLoneliness YouTube channel – if you have a trauma history, I very much hope you find it helpful.

Warm wishes,

Dan

Try this Step-by-Step Practice to Manage Your Painful Feelings

Image by whoislimos

As the REM song reminds us, everybody hurts sometimes. To lead a human life – with all its sorrows, as well as its joys – is to be faced with painful feelings on a daily basis. On any given day, we might feel stress, anxiety, hurt, upset, loneliness, low confidence or self-esteem, disconnection, rejection, anger, frustration, depression and boredom. Nobody likes these feelings. No-one wants to feel them. But whether we like it or not, as members of the human species we must inevitably feel them.

As I often tell my clients, if you never feel painful emotions you’re either a robot or you’re dead. And neither option is very attractive!

Another way of thinking about this is that, to live a full, rich human life, we need to feel a rainbow of emotions. Everybody likes the light-coloured ones, like joy, love, excitement, pride, pleasure and satisfaction. And no-one likes the dark ones: fear, pain, anger, sadness or loneliness. But maintaining robust mental health and wellbeing involves experiencing the full range of emotions, from light to dark.

Do you avoid feelings altogether?

Something I often notice with my clients, especially when they have a trauma history, is that they struggle with painful feelings in a variety of ways. Some people don’t feel them at all – they experience so much internal detachment and dissociation that they feel totally numb, shutdown or empty inside. And in some ways, this works well as an emotional-management strategy, because they are able to function well enough day to day, without being buffeted by unpleasant thoughts and feelings 24/7.

But the downside is that they often feel so disconnected, from themselves and other people, that life is extremely lonely. These people feel isolated and alone, even in a roomful of people. They might also struggle to feel the pleasant emotions, like happiness and love, because this internal shutdown squashes all emotions, light and dark.

Or are you overwhelmed by them?

At the other extreme, many people I work with find their feelings completely overwhelming. In schema therapy terms, their Healthy Adult part gets swamped by the intense, overpowering emotions of their Vulnerable Child part – the young, emotional, hurt child we all carry inside.

Again, if there is trauma in your background, your nervous system might be highly sensitive and easily engulfed by threat-focused emotions like anger, fear or hurt. That is not your fault, it’s just how your brain, nervous system and body were shaped by painful experiences in your childhood.

The practice

The four Fs: Find it, feel it, let it flow, find comfort

Either way, whether you feel too much or too little, you need help in managing your painful feelings. Here’s a step-by-step practice I have developed over the years, which might help.

1. Find it. If you’re experiencing any overwhelming feeling right now, first locate it in your body. For example, if you feel anxious or panicky, you will probably feel that in your gut – perhaps butterflies, a knot in your stomach or deep, sinking feeling of dread in your lower torso. If you feel angry, you might notice your muscles tensing up – especially around your upper back, arms, fists, shoulders and jaw – and a surge of heat and energy in your chest, throat and face.

   It also helps to name the emotion (research shows that just naming an emotion helps reduce its intensity) so, ‘I feel anxious/sad/upset/angry/stressed/irritable/frustrated/lonely/hurt.’

   If you tend to detach and don’t know what you’re feeling, just focus on the physical sensations in your body, however faint they may be (butterflies in your stomach, a heavy/slumpy feeling in your shoulders and upper body, and so on).

2. Feel it. It’s counterintuitive, but one reason people get so overwhelmed with emotions is because they swing between detaching, distracting or soothing (with alcohol, cigarettes, comfort-eating, prescription/non-prescription drugs, gaming, gambling or a whole host of other substances and activities) and overwhelm.

   If you just want to understand how we’re supposed to feel emotions, look at a toddler. They have no problem feeling their emotions! If they are angry, they shout, stomp their foot, scream, have a tantrum. If they are hurt or sad, they cry. If they’re scared, they run to mum for a hug. The emotions flow through them like water.

   And once they have felt and released the emotions, it’s amazing how quickly they move into a different emotional state – happy, excited, chattering, chasing a butterfly… For toddlers, emotions don’t get stuck. They feel them intensely, release them and then are perfectly fine again. It’s miraculous to see.

   Remember that feelings can’t hurt you – they are just feelings, which all humans feel and in fact let us know we are alive – so allow yourself to feel them, bit by bit.

3. Let the emotion Flow. Many of us, especially (though not exclusively) men, have trouble in expressing our emotions. We feel incredibly sad, but we don’t cry. We boil with anger, but say nothing, clamping our jaw shut, balling our fists, but carrying on as if we’re fine.

   Emotions – especially big emotions like anger or intense sadness and hurt – are designed to be released. That’s why we cry when we’re sad, so we release a mixture of emotion and stress hormones. And when we have cried enough, we feel a sense of relief.

   If you’re angry, find some safe, non-destructive methods for releasing anger and letting it Flow out of your body (here’s a recent post I wrote about that). Learn to communicate assertively. Write angry letters you never send. Find ways that work for you of healthily releasing your anger, so it flows out and doesn’t fester inside, because that’s not good for your physical or mental health.

4. Find Comfort. Think about that toddler again. When he was scared, he ran to mum for a big hug. If his sister fell over and banged her knee, she would run to mum, or dad, or a grandparent for a big hug, soothing/reassuring words and perhaps some milk and cookies. This is the Find Comfort part of the practice. Once you have allowed yourself to Find and Feel it, then let the emotion Flow, Find Comfort either from someone else or yourself.

   Because unlike toddlers, adults can self-soothe – we can give ourselves a hug, by placing a hand over our heart and thinking kind, comforting, reassuring thoughts. This might be tough for you. But it’s a skill that needs to be learned, perhaps with the help of a mental-health professional. And you can learn it, so you then have the option of seeking comfort from a partner, family member, friend or therapist, or of giving it to yourself.

I very much hope you find that helpful – remember that, like all practices, it takes practice. That’s why it’s called a practice! Because you need to do it, repeatedly, for it to become more effective. And watch this space for more emotion-focused practices you can add to your mental-health toolkit in future.

Warm wishes,

Dan

Receiving Kindness and Compassion From Others – How to Let it in

Image by Berkay Gumustekin

Most of us know that kindness and compassion are helpful qualities to develop. And if you are trying to improve your mental health and wellbeing, you will have received that message loud and clear from all the books, blogs, podcasts and social media posts you consume. It’s good to be kind and compassionate to others. It’s good to be kind and compassionate to yourself. It’s good to spend your time with people who are kind and compassionate to you. We all know this to be true.

But – and this is a big but – for many of us, none of this stuff is easy. In my last post, I explained why self-compassion is so powerful and healing. But I have also written a great deal about why it can be a struggle to generate self-compassionate thoughts and feelings, especially if you have a trauma history. Many of my clients, colleagues, friends and family members are kind, compassionate people – but have a tough time treating themselves with a similar level of warmth and benevolence.

Something we think less about, but which is equally important, is whether we are able to receive compliments, kind words and compassionate gestures from other people. Surprisingly, this can be just as tough as generating self-compassion.

Taking in good stuff – why it’s hard

With many of my clients, I have noticed over the years that when they are given a compliment, they bat it away. ‘Oh, anyone could have done it,’ they say, or ‘It really wasn’t that great.’

The same thing happens with kind words, offers of help and support, expressions of love and affection – all are deflected, batted away, subtly rejected. When I have said something warm and complimentary, telling them how big-hearted they are, or how much I like them, some of my clients actually flinch, as if I have said something cruel and hurtful.

And this is such a shame, because I am offering them a chance to feel good about themselves, to counter the often harsh, negative and unpleasant messages they have received from family members their whole lives.

But this is precisely the problem. If, as a small child, you are on the receiving end of a barrage of hurtful attacks, whether verbal or physical, you quickly learn to create some kind of armour to protect yourself. This armour may take the form of a part that helps you detach and shut down inside (called the Detached Protector in schema therapy), so you feel numb, rather than sensitive and vulnerable to being hurt.

It may look like avoiding difficult people or situations at all costs. The armour might be behavioural, like distracting yourself with your phone, or using substances to help you feel numb or disconnected from your emotions, because they hurt too much.

And all these forms of armour make sure you never feel open, vulnerable, exposing your soft belly to the world. Because you have learned that if you do so, you will be attacked, rejected or hurt in some other way.

So no wonder you push away compliments or kind words! Because to receive them you need to be vulnerable, to trust, to be open – and these can all feel threatening, especially if you have a big trauma history.

The practice

I developed this practice, which I call the Treasure Chest, to help one of my clients struggling to take in kindness and compassion from others – you might find it helpful too.

1. First, I want you to imagine that somewhere inside – your heart, maybe – you have a treasure chest. And this chest is yours and yours alone. Nobody else gets to use it. Nobody else can access it – just you.

2. Close your eyes and take a moment to really imagine this chest – what’s it like? What shape is it? What is it made of? What colour is it? Is it light, or heavy? Does it have any decorations or patterns on the outside? The more vivid this detail, the more real it will seem to your brain when you need to use it.

3. Now, here’s the hard bit. Next time somebody offers you a kind word, or compliment, instead of reflexively shrugging it off or batting it away, I want you to imagine taking this lovely thing and storing it in your treasure chest. Remember, nobody knows it’s there. No-one can access it. It’s just for you.

4. You could visualise the kindness as a piece of treasure, like a gold coin or beautiful, light-filled jewel. And as you store it in your secret chest, see if you can allow yourself to feel it, even a tiny bit, too. So if someone says, ‘I love the way you’re always so wise and know exactly what to say when I’m feeling down,’ if you let yourself, you might feel just a bit proud. There may be a small ripple of warmth in your belly, chest and throat. You might even feel yourself walking a few inches taller, that your chest has expanded a little, or shoulders relaxed and dropped.

5. It can also be helpful to start a journal, writing these gifts down there, too. If you get a lovely email, you could store it in a special folder (mine is called Hardwiring Happiness and I keep all sorts of heartwarming messages there). Write it, draw it, keep it in some concrete form – this will help make your treasure more real and make sure you don’t lose it.

6. If you keep doing this, bit by bit, slowly your treasure chest fills up. And you learn to accept those kindnesses and compassionate gestures, rather than pushing them away. Then, over time, that starts to change the way you feel – about yourself, about other people, about the world and your future. Nothing radical or dramatic, just slow, steady, incremental change. Until one day, you feel a bit happier, a little better about yourself, a tiny bit more confident and self-valuing. And that has to be a good thing, right?

I really hope that helps. And if you would like to experience me teaching this and lots of other helpful techniques live, come along to my next webinar: The Healing Power of Self-Compassion, which takes place from 3-4.30pm on Saturday 28th May 2022.

I hope to see you there – and am sending you love and strength, whatever you might be struggling with right now.

Warm wishes,

Dan

Responding to Your Pain with Self-Compassion

Image by Julien Tromeur

Have you ever had a bad back? I’m guessing that, as you are human, have a spine and do all the things that 21st-century humans do (sitting too much, being overly stressed, being hunched over a computer screen all day) the answer is yes. And if you are a fellow bad-back sufferer, you will know that when your back pain flares up, it’s not much fun.

As I write this, I am a few days into a flare-up. Despite doing everything possible to manage it – first ice, then heat; help from a brilliant osteopath; frequent yoga, stretching and mobilisation; anti-inflammatory gel, and so on – I’m in a fair amount of pain.

And when you are suffering from pain, your natural reaction might be to get frustrated and impatient. ‘Why me?’ you ask, stooped over and clutching your lower back. ‘It’s so unfair!’ Or, ‘I hate being in pain so much!’ Or, ‘I’m sick to death of this – I just cannot stand it.’

Trust me, these thoughts – accompanied by various expletives – have passed through my mind and out of my mouth in the last few days. Chronic pain is a real struggle. It just grinds you down and makes it hard to be positive, upbeat or optimistic that the episode will ever end.

Why negative thinking makes pain worse

But I am lucky enough to work in a profession that has helped me understand a great deal about pain, both physical and emotional, and how best to deal with it. When my back was really bad, a couple of years ago, I read a life-changing book by Vidyamala Burch and Danny Penman: Mindfulness for Health: A Practical Guide to Relieving Pain, Reducing Stress and Restoring Wellbeing. The authors explain that there are two types of physical pain: primary and secondary. Primary pain comprises the signals from your nerves at the site of the injury or illness in your body – like a broken leg or gash on your knee.

This information travels up the nerves until it reaches your brain. At which point, your brain interprets the information from your nervous system, as well as the thoughts you are having about the pain, to decide whether it’s serious/threatening or not. If your brain thinks it’s serious – that broken leg, for example – it then turns up the ‘pain volume’, making the pain worse.

This is secondary pain, which is often far worse and more distressing for us than the primary version. It’s important to stress that both forms of pain are real – it’s not ‘all in your mind’. We are talking about actual, physical pain and discomfort here.

But the fascinating – and revolutionary, for me – discovery here is that we can control the level of our pain by adjusting our response to it. And the key to reducing your pain, whether it’s physical or emotional, is responding with self-compassion.

The miracle of self-compassion

Let’s circle back to those (totally understandable) responses to being in pain. In Buddhism, these are known as ‘second darts’ – the first dart is the pain itself. But the second dart is the anger, frustration, stress and upset we feel when we respond to that pain with negative, blaming, hostile thoughts and words. Instead, the Buddha taught us to respond with acceptance, kindness and compassion, however alien or difficult that might seem at moments of discomfort and distress.

What helps me respond to my pain, and tight back muscles, with compassion is that I know from experience that this will both reduce my pain and accelerate the healing process. I do my level best to say/think things like, ‘Oh man, this is hard. But I know it won’t last forever and I will get better soon.’ Or, ‘Poor back. I know you’re really suffering right now. But it’s OK, nothing is wrong, you can just relax.’ Or, ‘Dan, I know you’re in a lot of pain right now and that is hard to bear. But remember that you’re not alone. I’m here for you, I care about you, and we will get through this together.’

If I keep responding in this way, my pain is significantly less. My back gets better much more quickly, as I’m not bracing and tensing up, which keeps the muscles tight and in spasm. And I spare myself a great deal of unhappiness, because accepting that I’m going through a tough time helps reduce the frustration, irritation and upset that those negative responses cause.

Of course, everything you’re reading here applies just as much to psychological and emotional pain, as it does physical, somatic pain. And that’s why my next Heal Your Trauma webinar – The Healing Power of Self-Compassion – will teach you all about being kind and compassionate, rather than unkind or harsh with yourself.

I will teach you some simple, powerful self-compassion practices that you can use right away. And the webinar will feature a 15-minute Q&A, allowing you to ask me anything you want about how to manage your pain, mental health and wellbeing.

This 90-minute Zoom webinar takes place at 3pm on Saturday 28th May 2022 – and costs just £39, including exclusive access to a recording of the event.

I look forward to seeing you there – find out more about this event by watching the video and book your place now using the button below.

And sending you love and healing thoughts, whatever you might be struggling with right now.

Warm wishes,

Dan

Don't Miss My Next Webinar: The Healing Power of Self-Compassion

Image by Taisiia Stupak

As part of my Heal Your Trauma project, I am offering a series of Zoom webinars throughout 2022. My second webinar – The Healing Power of Self-Compassion – will be held from 3-4.30pm on Saturday 28th May 2022.

One of the core values of this project is that everything is free, or priced affordably. So this 90-minute webinar costs just £29 to attend live, as well as gaining exclusive access to a video of the event, to watch whenever you like.

The Healing Power of Self-Compassion features 90 minutes of teaching, powerful exercises that will help you feel calmer and more relaxed, and a 15-minute Q&A with me.

In this powerful, highly experiential webinar you will learn:

• The key role that self-compassion plays in healing from any psychological problem, but especially trauma

• Key experiential exercises – such as breathing, guided meditations, journaling and imagery – you will learn to help you develop your self-compassion skills

• How self-compassion is crucial to help you deal with stress, anxiety, depression, low self-esteem, being overly self-critical, eating disorders, substance abuse and most other psychological problems

• And, during a 15-minute Q&A, you will get the chance to put your questions to Dan Roberts, Founder of Heal Your Trauma and an expert on trauma healing and developing self-compassion

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 – for just £29 – using the button below.

Warm wishes,

Dan

The Difference Between Empathy and Compassion – and Why it Matters

Image by Aarón Blanco Tejedor

Are you an empathic person? As you are visiting my website and reading this post right now, I’m guessing you are. But there are some common misconceptions about what empathy actually is – and how it differs from compassion. These differences might seem a bit pedantic, or only of interest to psychology nerds like me, but it’s actually of crucial importance to you, especially if you struggle with mental-health problems.

Before we get on to empathy and compassion, let’s start with sympathy. If I feel sympathy for you, it means I feel sorry for you. So if I were walking down a street in central London and saw a homeless person begging, I might think, ‘Poor guy – he looks really miserable,’ and feel sorry for the homeless person.

Empathy is different – and actually involves a much more complex and sophisticated psychological response than sympathy. If I felt empathy for the same homeless guy, I would take time to imagine what it felt like to be him – I would try to put myself in his shoes and really work at getting what it felt like to sit there, day after day, on a cold pavement (and it’s making me sad just writing that sentence, because I think being homeless must be a terrible existence).

Empathy is a good thing, but…

So you can see that feeling empathy is harder for us than mere sympathy. It takes intentional effort, especially in a city like London where, very sadly, we can walk past hundreds of homeless people a day. It can also be uncomfortable, because I am imagining what the guy might be thinking (probably not very happy thoughts) and feeling (probably sad, crushed and hopeless, if he’s like most homeless people I have spoken to).

This is one reason many people lack empathy, because it can be painful to put yourself in the mind of another. And especially if you live in a busy, crowded metropolis like London, where you have to shut yourself down a bit not to get overwhelmed by it all.

It’s also why people make the mistake of speaking about ‘compassion fatigue’, when what they really mean is ‘empathy fatigue’. It’s easy to get overwhelmed by too much empathy – especially in our world, with heartbreaking wars raging in Ukraine, Yemen and Ethiopia, the ongoing coronavirus pandemic, famine… If you really allow yourself to feel the pain of the whole world you would just implode.

Moving into compassion

That’s why compassion is a much healthier state, but also requires another step in terms of psychological flexibility. When I feel compassion, I first have an empathic response to the homeless man, putting myself in his shoes. But I then take compassionate action – meaning I am determined to do something to relieve his suffering. And that makes all the difference, because now I am protected from burnout or fatigue.

So I might ask to buy him a sandwich or cup of tea. If he looked down or upset, as a therapist I could sit and listen to him and do what I could to help. And you don’t need to be a trained therapist to take a moment to sit next to someone and make a simple human-to-human connection. In my experience, homeless people always love this and find it deeply moving, because it means we are seeing them as a fellow human being, not just an annoying obstacle to step over or rush past as quickly as possible.

It’s clear that the world needs more compassion right now. Taking compassionate action would help us solve the many challenges facing humanity, such as those terrible wars raging, climate change, income inequality, poverty, hunger, racism and other destructive forms of discrimination, violence against women, abuse of all kinds… Every single problem we face as a global human family could be solved with a little more empathy and compassionate action.

Want to know more?

If you would like to know more about compassion and how helpful it can be – especially if you have a trauma history/are struggling with any kind of mental-health problem – do book your place on my next Zoom webinar: The Healing Power of Self-Compassion. This 90-minute webinar costs just £29, including access to a recording of the event, to watch whenever you like.

You can find out more about the event on this page, or book your place using the button below.

I hope to see you there!

Warm wishes,

Dan