You Are a Living, Breathing Miracle

Image by Gerd Altmann

If you are struggling with mental or physical health problems, it’s easy to think you are somehow ‘broken’, or that healing is not possible for you. My clients tell me things like that all the time, for very understandable reasons. Let’s say you have been struggling with depression, on and off, for 30 years now. It’s entirely reasonable – logical, even – to think that you will have depression for the rest of your life.

You might also feel this way if you struggle with chronic pain, musculoskeletal issues, addiction, low self-esteem or any of the myriad mind-body problems that humans are vulnerable to developing. Again, I see this as eminently reasonable, because to believe otherwise requires a great deal of optimism and hope – both of which are in short supply if we have been in mental or physical pain for a long time.

But, as I often say to my clients struggling with depression, let me hold the hope. Because I am full of hope, confidence and optimism that you can heal, whatever you are dealing with right now. Why? Because I have spent many years working with people who are suffering and have seen them change, grow and heal in ways which surprised us both.

I have also studied many different therapy models and – in my previous life as a health journalist – interviewed some of the world’s leading scientists, researchers and medical professionals about all aspects of health, including illnesses like diabetes, cancer and heart disease, as well as cutting-edge treatments and strategies to optimise human health. All of this has left me brimming with hope, for the following reasons.

The miracle of being you

It is truly a miracle that you are even alive as you read this. For you to be you required four billion years of evolutionary twists and turns, any one of which could have gone slightly differently to mean there would be no you existing on this planet. (We could take that back even further, for the 13.8 billion years of deep time since the Big Bang, but I don’t want to make your head hurt too much!).

And for you to be exactly you meant that just one out of millions of your father’s sperm had to meet exactly the right egg in your mother’s womb. And you had to grow, from that miraculous moment on, cells multiplying as you went from the simplest possible organism to the person who can read blog posts, and drive cars, and walk in the park, and see the achingly beautiful world in which we all live.

And how can you read this post or drive that car? Because, in your skull, is the most complex object in the known universe. A brain. And your brain is made up of around 86 billion neurons (nerve cells), with each neuron connected to up to 10,000 other neurons, meaning there are 1,000 trillion synapses (connections between cells) in your brain.

And for you to think, or see, or just be alive, day to day, information must flow between those billions of neurons in the form of electrical impulses, which get fired from one neuron to another via neurotransmitters like serotonin or dopamine. All of this happens, completely outside your control or conscious awareness, every second of every minute of every day of your life.

Tell me that isn’t a miracle.

How the brain and body heal

Enough science, already, I hear you clamour (I love this stuff but it drives my wife nuts when I go on about it over breakfast, so I know I’m a bit of a health/science nerd! Apologies). OK, what does all of this mean for you. Well, all that remarkable neural architecture is not only what makes you, you – it’s also why we can heal from trauma, or neglect, or 30 years of depression.

Because the way those cells are wired up is in no way fixed or set. Your brain is not like a lump of marble, sculpted and fixed forever in the same shape and configuration. It’s more like wet clay, which can be moulded and shaped by experience – which it is, every second of your life. This rewireable ability is called ‘neuroplasticity’, which I have often written and taught about, because it’s such a wonderful thing.

It means your brain can change and heal, whatever painful experiences you have had and painful memories it therefore holds. You can think, feel and behave differently – this is not just hopeful or wishful thinking, it is a science fact backed up by decades of neuroscientific research.

So whenever you are feeling down, or stuck, or hopeless, try to hold these ideas in your mind. Because there is always hope. And I will do everything in my power – with posts like these, my webinars, workshops and guided meditations – to help you on your healing journey.

Sending you love and warm thoughts,

Dan

Why Do We Find Romantic Relationships so Triggering?

Image by Steve Watts

It is my tenth wedding anniversary this year. And I am lucky enough to have found someone who is warm, kind, caring and supportive. I genuinely don’t know how I would manage without her, because she has been there for me through so many hard times over that decade – illness, struggles with my mental health, tough times in my career. She is a gem.

But, trust me, my relationship history before this remarkable woman did not run nearly so smoothly. I have had my heart broken, more times than I care to remember. And, as a younger, more selfish man, I did not treat other people’s hearts with the care they deserved. I very much regret that now, but at least learned from those mistakes and now am (I hope) a kind, loyal, trustworthy and loving partner. I’m her rock and she is mine, which is truly a blessing.

I am sharing this with you to illustrate two key points:

1. A good romantic relationship is one of the most healing things that could ever happen to us (equating to many, many years of the best therapy you could find, I reckon).

2. A bad romantic relationship is one of the most triggering, hurtful and destructive experiences you could ever have (requiring many, many years of therapy to get over).

Relationships Fire up Your attachment system

Why are relationships so powerful, so emotionally activating for us? Well, partly because of the impact they have on your attachment system – one of the most powerful systems in your brain. A brief guide: your attachment system comes online the moment you are born, as does (hopefully) that of your mother, father, siblings, uncles, aunts, grandparents, and so on. But for most of us, our mother is our primary attachment figure, as we are literally part of her body for nine months (how much more attached could you be than that?), usually breastfeeds us and does most of the early caregiving.

So, you are born, your attachment system comes online and so does your mum’s. This is what helps you bond, as you both experience ‘attachment bliss’, that feeling of being completely loved, safe, cosy, warm and connected as she holds you in her arms and you gaze into each others’ eyes. And if this all goes as Nature intended, you feel securely attached to her and so develop a secure attachment style, which stays with you for the rest of your life.

Sadly, many of us did not experience this secure early attachment, for all sorts of reasons. Maybe mum was depressed, so was sometimes withdrawn and emotionally unavailable when you were a baby. Maybe she was drinking or taking drugs. Perhaps the family environment was highly stressful, involving poverty, domestic violence or some other kind of volatility and conflict. If she was stressed, so were you, so poor little you could not feel safe and secure, no matter how hard she tried.

None of this is about ‘mother-bashing’ – most mums are kind, loving and determined to be the best parent they can be. It’s just that sometimes, despite their best intentions, things don’t go as they should – and so exquisitely sensitive, utterly helpless, entirely dependent little you could not bond with her as you needed to.

If this was the case, you would have been insecurely attached and developed either an anxious or avoidant attachment style (or a mixture of the two). Again, this will have stayed consistent throughout your life, making relationships tricky – especially romantic ones.

How does this work in practice? Let’s say you meet a guy on a dating app. And he seems nice, at first. But soon he starts ignoring your messages, or giving vague, noncommittal answers – he might have an avoidant attachment style, so shuts down and withdraws if he feels like you’re getting too close. If you are anxiously attached, you might start panicking, wondering what is wrong and when he will leave you. Perhaps you start bombarding him with messages. You might even show up at his house, asking what you did wrong and how you can fix it. He gets more and more distant, you get more and more anxious, and so the whole painful cycle goes until, inevitably, it ends.

Good news: Your attachment style can be healed

So far, so depressing. But there is good news – we know from all the research (and there is a vast amount of research on attachment, dating back to the 1950s and the ‘father’ of attachment theory, Dr John Bowlby) that although attachment styles do stay constant throughout our lives, they are not fixed or set in any way. Your attachment style can change, so if you are anxiously attached but instead of meeting Mr Wrong on the dating app, you lucked out and found a kind, decent and securely attached guy, being with him would help you become more securely attached.

I would say that’s what has happened to me – after 10 years of love and stability, I feel much more securely attached to my wife than I did during all the crazy, rollercoaster years that came before her. So if romantic relationships are a struggle for you, please don’t give up.

As I am always saying in these posts and my teaching, it is never too much and never too late to heal. If you have a history of unhappy relationships, before embarking on a new one get some good therapy first, so you can heal yourself and stop playing out the same, painful patterns with every new person you meet. And then focus on the kind of person you choose – prioritise kindness above all else. Imagine this person as your best friend, not just an exciting lover. Would you be compatible? Would you be happy living with them, picking up each other’s dirty socks and all the other decidedly unromantic stuff that long-term cohabitation involves? Could you imagine them taking you to hospital if you were sick?

That’s what real, long-term, lasting love is all about, not the fireworks and can’t-keep-your-hands-off-each-other stage, which never lasts. See this person, primarily, as your friend and you will be much more likely to choose a keeper.

I hope that helps – and if relationships are a struggle for you, don’t despair. There is always hope – take it from someone who found lasting love, finally, in his middle age. And if I can do it, so can you.

Sending you love and warm thoughts,

Dan

Winter Getting You Down? Here's How to Lift Your Mood

Image by Andy Holmes

I am writing this on a mid-January morning at my office in north London. Today, like yesterday and tomorrow, the sun rose at around 8am and will set at about 4pm. That’s eight hours of daylight and 16 hours of darkness. And this absence of daylight is one of the many reasons we find winter tough – especially the dregs-of-winter months of January and February, when it can be hard to believe it will ever be light and warm again.

No wonder many of us (estimated to be 10% of the US population, for example) experience Seasonal Affective Disorder, which has the appropriate acronym of SAD. Unusually for depression, which has so many possible causes, SAD has a clear triggering factor: not getting enough daylight, which begins in late autumn and remains an issue until those glorious first days of spring.

Even if you don’t experience depression in winter, it is natural for your mood to dip a little at this time of year. It’s easy to forget – as I type away at my computer, in a warm, dry office, on a suburban street in a city of nine million people – that we are seasonal animals, as much as hibernating bears or migratory swifts and swallows. We feel the changing seasons in our bones, powering down into a mental hibernation in winter and waking up when spring offers up its delicious colour and vibrancy in April.

Fighting against evolution

Although most of us live in urban environments, surrounded by buildings, roads, cars and the hubbub of tightly-packed humanity, we did not evolve to live this way. For millions of years of human evolution our ancestors lived in the wilderness, with daily lives and body clocks governed by the day and night, dawn and dusk, as well as seasonal changes throughout the year.

No amount of artificial light and heat can change this deeply entrenched knowing of light, dark, day, night that is in our DNA. So winter comes and our bodies know it’s time to change our behaviour, slowing down, conserving energy, sleeping more, spending time inside where it’s warm, light and safe (from all those hungry animals that would have been marauding outside the stockade at night).

As well as all the many other complex and subtle reasons to experience low mood in winter, this is a major and often unrecognised one – it’s just natural for your mood to dip with the darkening days, so try not to worry if you are feeling a bit lower than usual right now.

If that low mood tips into depression, especially if it lasts for more than a few days, please do seek help from your doctor or a mental-health professional. Medication and talking therapy can both be helpful, but there are a number of things you can also do to help yourself. Here are a few that I find helpful for my own mental health and my clients tell me have lifted their mood on a gloomy day…

1. Move your body. This is a no-brainer for most of us, as we are constantly told that exercise is good for our health, both mental and physical. The tough bit, of course, is actually doing it, especially if you’re feeling low in mood and energy, demotivated and glued to the sofa.

   It might help to know that, in a number of high-quality studies, regular cardiovascular exercise (jogging, swimming, dancing, cycling, brisk walking) was found to be just as effective as antidepressants for mild-to-moderate depression. Let that sink in. Something that is free, easily accessible, with no nasty side effects and good for you in so many ways, is just as effective at boosting your mood as the most powerful psychiatric drugs Western medicine has developed.

   If it still seems daunting, start small. Get up and go for a walk (there’s robust evidence that walking helps with many aspects of mind-body health too). Kick a ball about in the park with your kids. Get off the bus a stop early on your morning commute and walk a bit further before work. Just try it – I promise you will thank me later.

2. Go easy on the booze. You might be mid-way through Dry January, in which case I salute you. Not long to go now… But if you’re still drinking, cut back as much as you can, reducing both the amount you drink each day and building at least a couple of sober days (more if possible) into your week. Why? Well, alcohol is a depressant, so although that glass or two of wine takes the edge off after a rough day, it will lower your mood the next morning.

   Also, you need to know about dopamine and the ‘reward system’ in your brain. I have been reading an excellent book about this recently – Dopamine Nation: Finding Balance in the Age of Indulgence, by Dr Anna Lembke – which explains how the neurotransmitter dopamine both affects mood and drives the astronomical rates of addiction we now see in wealthy, industrialised nations like the US and UK.

   Dr Lembke teaches us that a wide range of substances (alcohol, cocaine, MDMA, nicotine, sugar, cannabis) and activities (social-media consumption, TV-watching, gambling, sex, pornography, shopping) induce the release of dopamine in your brain, which makes you feel good. But what goes up must come down, so if we drink too much and get lots of lovely dopamine as a reward, the brain automatically resets your ‘dopamine base level’, which lowers your mood, energy and motivation levels.

3. Take compassionate action. More research, sorry – a large and ever-growing number of studies show that compassion is good for your mental and physical health. As I often say when I’m teaching, it doesn’t matter how that compassion is generated, it’s all good. So you could generate it yourself (self-compassion), receive it from someone else (taking in compassion) or give it to other people (taking compassionate action). Any of these activities will light up the same brain regions and will be an excellent antidote to low mood and depression.

   We also know from positive psychology that being altruistic, by helping others, is extremely good for your mental health. So this winter, as so many people in my country and around the world struggle with the cost of living, why not take compassionate action to help someone in your community?

   You could volunteer at a food bank, or a charity that’s close to your heart. If you are an animal-lover, why not foster some kittens or a guide dog? You could mentor a troubled teenager, even litter-pick at your beloved local park or woods. The options are endless, but know that this is a win-win – it will benefit others and also boost your mood.

I will teach much more about depression and how to recover from it in my next workshop: Overcoming Depression – How to Lift Your Mood & Feel Calmer, Happier & More Hopeful, which takes place on Saturday 1st April 2023, from 10.30am-4.30pm. This event will be held at Terapia, a specialist therapy centre in the grounds of Stephens House, a listed house and gardens offering an oasis of peace and calm in the busy heart of North London. Terapia is a 10-minute walk from Finchley Central Northern Line station, with free parking outside – book your place now using the button below.

And if you are struggling right now, I would like to send you love, hope and strength – remember that spring will be here soon, so hope, light and rebirth are just around the corner…

Warm wishes,

Dan

What Are Trailheads in Internal Family Systems Therapy?

Image by Ethan Unzicker

Jargon can be a real turn-off, don’t you think? And the world of psychotherapy is full of it. You can’t move for initials like CBT, DBT, ACT or MBCT and daunting-sounding words like countertransference, metacognitive or subcortical. It’s a pain, I know.

So I start this post with an apology – I have one more piece of jargon for you, but it’s a useful one, so bear with me... In Internal Family Systems (IFS) therapy, there is a useful concept known as a trailhead. What the heck is that? Well, a trailhead is a thought, feeling, body sensation, memory, image or any other experience that we think is a communication from one of your parts. I won’t explain parts here because I have written about them extensively in recent posts, but here’s a useful guide to them and the IFS model in general.

So the trailhead is a starting point, a clue, an indication that something’s up and we need to investigate further. Let me give you an example. If you struggle with worry and anxiety, you will experience a number of somatic (more jargon, sorry! Just means you experience it in your body) sensations like tense muscles, racing heart rate, feeling hot or sweaty, butterflies or a knot in your stomach, tension in your neck and shoulders… Any or all of these could be a trailhead, because in IFS we think the anxiety comes from a scared, young part.

Following the trail

Understanding your mind, brain, nervous system and body in this way is, I think, incredibly helpful. Because if you just think ‘I’m so anxious’, or ‘I’m really panicky right now,’ it’s as if all of you is anxious, vulnerable and feeling powerless to calm yourself down. As soon as we say, ‘A part of me is so anxious,’ or ‘A part of me is really panicky right now,’ everything changes. Because you now have a scared young part who needs calming and comforting – and a you who isn’t that part, who has the resources to be calming and comforting.

This is a crucial step. I see this in my consulting room (and in myself) every single day – this simple shift can be so freeing and powerful, because many of my clients have felt paralysed and gripped by their anxiety, depression, substance abuse or whatever they were struggling with for years, as if they had no power, agency or control over these painful symptoms or behaviours.

But you are not powerless, not a victim, not helpless. There is a resource in you we call your Self, which is calm, compassionate, loving, wise and healing. And this resource can help you overcome any obstacle, however daunting. How do I know this? Because you are a walking miracle, with a billion miscroscopic processes happening inside you every single day.

Healing inner resources

You have flu, you recover. You break your leg, the bone knits together and heals. You drink the socially acceptable poison known as alcohol and your poor liver processes the toxins and helps flush them out of your body. Cells die, cells are born. Food and drink are digested and excreted. All of this happening, all the time, without any conscious input from you.

And so it is with your wounded little parts, who desperately need help – and the other parts who protect those little ones, with whatever means they have available. All of these parts need healing. And your Self can do just that, if we help you access these wonderful, rich, healing resources inside.

Not easy, but doable – for me and you, however impossible that might seem right now. Whatever you have experienced in your life. However long you have been trying, struggling, falling down. It could happen today, with the right help and support.

If you would like to experience IFS, try my Insight Timer practice, How to Comfort Your Inner Child: IFS Meditation. You can listen now by clicking on the button below.

Love,

Dan ❤️

Don’t Miss My Next Webinar: Trauma Healing With Internal Family Systems

If you missed this webinar, you can purchase the recording for just £10 – you can then download or stream the recording whenever you like.

Just click the button below to enjoy this powerful, highly experiential webinar now:

Trauma Healing With Internal Family Systems Therapy

Image by Igor Kasalovic

First, let me wish you all a very Happy New Year! May 2023 be a year full of health, happiness and healing. Heal Your Trauma has an exciting year ahead, with webinars and workshops throughout the year – a combination of your favourite events so far with some brand-new content we are confident you will love just as much.

We kick the year off with our first webinar, Trauma Healing with Internal Family Systems, in February. Internal Family Systems is one of the most exciting therapy models currently available. IFS has become hugely popular in recent years – and for good reason. As an Internal Family Systems-Trained Therapist, I use this warm, compassionate, highly effective approach with all my clients. And that’s because it is so effective for a wide range of problems, from complex trauma to problems with anxiety, depression, relationships, chronic stress, eating disorders and addiction.

If this sounds helpful for you, watch the recording of this 90-minute Zoom webinar presented by Dan Roberts. Trauma Healing With Internal Family Systems took place on Saturday 11th February 2023, from 3pm-4.30pm and was the latest in a series of regular Heal Your Trauma workshops and webinars presented by Dan Roberts throughout 2023.

Trauma Healing With Internal Family Systems features 90 minutes of teaching, powerful exercises that will help you feel calmer and more relaxed, and a 15-minute Q&A with Dan Roberts, an Internal Family Systems-Trained Therapist and an expert on trauma, mental health and wellbeing.

In this powerful, highly experiential webinar you will learn:

• What we mean by trauma and how common it is, especially if we had a difficult childhood

• Why IFS is such a revolutionary model, offering brand-new ways of understanding psychological problems and how to heal them

• Why we all have an internal system of ‘parts’ – both young, wounded parts and protective parts which work hard to make sure those young parts never get hurt again

• How to calm, soothe and heal your young parts, so you also feel calmer, soothed and can heal from painful past experiences, especially in childhood

• Why we all have a ‘Self’ – an internal resource that is calm, compassionate, courageous and healing

• You will also learn some simple, powerful techniques to help yourself feel calmer when you are triggered – especially important if you have a trauma history

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

Don’t miss this chance to learn from a leading trauma therapist and an expert on Internal Family Systems and mental health – purchase access to this recording for just £10, to download or stream whenever you like, using the button below.

Warm wishes,

Dan

Christmas Survival Guide – How to De-Stress the Holidays

Take a close look at this picture. The perfect family Christmas – even the dog looks full of festive cheer. And how closely does this resemble your family Christmas? I thought so. This holiday season does bring lovely moments, if we’re lucky – but can also be stressful, lonely, upsetting, conflict-filled and generally tough for many of us.

So, in the spirit of seasonal giving, here are my three top tips to survive the holidays, relatively intact:

1. Stop believing that silly pictures like this one represent actual Christmas. Sorry, I know I put it there. But still, at this time of year we are bombarded with ads, photos in the media – both mainstream and social – of perfect Christmas scenes, with happy families unwrapping presents under the tree, cavorting in the snow outside their huge house, and toasting each other over groaning tables of immaculately presented food.

   For most of us, even if we’re lucky enough to have a family – and luckier still to have a family we actually get on with – this is just a fantasy. If we’re doing the prep we shop and wrap and chop and cook and clean and tidy and frantically try to make sure everyone has a nice time.

   It’s so damn stressful… and for what? One or two days of our lives. So start by accepting that this is not how Christmas is, or even should be. It’s about love, and rest, and gratitude that we even have enough food to eat, or a warm house to celebrate in, which many people in the UK and around the world will not this year.

2. Take the pressure off, wherever possible. Does everyone really need all those presents? How many of them are destined for landfill, or at best charity shops, by the end of January? And what’s it doing to the planet, all that tinsel and plastic and electronic stuff that none of us really need. Sorry if this sounds Scrooge-ish (my family do tell me I’m a bit of a Grinch at this time of year!) but it’s also about looking after yourself, your mental health – and your bank balance. Many of us are struggling financially right now, so the last thing we can afford is buying vast numbers of presents for everyone we know.

   Why not get everyone just one present. Something thoughtful (and ideally plastic-free) that they will actually love and use and keep for years to come. A life-changing book you read this year. A beautiful, well-made piece of clothing you know they will love. How about making something, if you are artistically inclined? Or writing them a letter, telling them how much they mean to you and all the reasons you love and appreciate them. Better than socks, no?

3. Make this a compassionate Christmas. One of our friends, who is of Indian heritage and whose family doesn’t do Christmas, spends a week volunteering at Crisis every year. She helps homeless people have a break from the cold streets – they get somewhere warm to sleep, clean clothes, hot showers, healthcare, a haircut, gifts and lots of lovely food. It can be life-changing, if you live on the streets and are treated as an irritation to be avoided and ignored most of the year.

   And of course it’s a great gift for her, because giving of herself in this kind, altruistic way helps her mental health. We know from extensive research that compassionate acts like this are just as good for us as they are for the beneficiaries of our compassion. You don’t have to volunteer for a week, but perhaps a day at your local homeless shelter or food bank? How about inviting that lonely elderly person on your street for Christmas lunch?

   Or buying all your gifts from the Choose Love shop, say, which helps refugees around the world get through the winter. They need all the love and help they can get right now, in my country and yours, wherever you are in the world. And giving like this – freely, without expecting anything in return – just feels good, doesn’t it? Humans are wired to be altruistic and pro-social in this way, so you get a lovely little dopamine hit in your brain whenever you perform a benevolent act. The very definition of a win-win.

This will be my last blog post/newsletter of the year, so I would like to say thank you to you all, from the bottom of my heart, for supporting my Heal Your Trauma project throughout 2022. This non-profit project is also a compassionate act, from the whole HYT team, trying to help everyone, everywhere with their mental health. And we couldn’t do this without your support, so a profound thank you for that.

I hope you have a restful, mindful and restorative holiday season. And look forward to reconnecting with you in the new year.

Sending you love and warm wishes,

Dan

Why Do We Worry? And is it Always a Problem?

Would you call yourself a worrier? And if so, what kinds of things do you habitually worry about? Let me take a guess… My hunch is that your worries take the form of ‘what if…’ thoughts, like ‘What if I lost my job? How would I cope? Would we lose our home? Would my wife leave me?’

Or, ‘What if I make a fool of myself giving that speech at my daughter’s wedding? What if my mind just goes blank and I can’t remember what to say? Everyone would think I’m a pathetic loser. That would be horrendous – I would never live it down.’

Our worries commonly show up as these ‘what if…’ thoughts for a few reasons:

1. Worries are always future-focused. We never worry about things that have already happened. And that’s why worry (a cognitive process) is linked with anxiety (a feeling), which is also future/threat-focused. So we worry about bad stuff that could happen, imminently or further down the line.

2. Worries are often catastrophic. Not always, of course – worries range from mild to severe. But they often involve ‘catastrophising’, because that’s what worry is for – imagining worst-case scenarios and how we could cope with them. So in the above example, losing his job led to losing the house and potentially divorce, rather than simply having to downsize or rent for a while.

3. Worry involves ‘bridge-crossing’. This links to the future-focused idea, because when we worry we are crossing every potential bridge on the road ahead, seeing where they all lead and how best to cross them. Some of those bridges we may well have to cross, but probably 99% of them we won’t, which is one reason that worry can be stressful, exhausting and potentially very unhelpful. We live through a vast number of horrible imagined situations, most of which never actually happen.

Worry is not a bad thing, per se

I have had many clients who worry in an obsessional, relentless and exhausting way – so for them, worry is definitely unhelpful. But I tell even these people that worry is not a bad thing, per se – it’s the way we worry that’s tricky.

Let’s do a thought experiment. Imagine that a team of scientists could miraculously stop your brain from worrying, ever again. Pow! No more worry. Would that be helpful? Not so much.

Imagine you now have to plan your daughter’s wedding (and write that damned speech). But you can’t do any future-focused problem solving because you have lost the ability to worry. And remember that this is what worry is for – imagining challenges in your future so your brain can think and think (and think!) about them until it has come up with a solution.

Which part of you does the worrying?

Looking at this through an internal family systems lens, as I increasingly do, it’s helpful to understand that there’s a part of you who feels anxious (a young part, probably) and another, protector part, who starts worrying to try and help the little one feel calmer, safer and less stressed. This is what protectors do, inside your head – try to make sure that hurt parts of you never get hurt again.

We usually call this part, unsurprisingly, the Worrier. And Worrier parts are busy little bees. They are super-hard working, hypervigilant, relentless (when you ask them they will tell you they never switch off, 24/7, every day of your life). They work so hard to protect you – and especially those young, anxious parts of you – from being criticised, attacked, shamed, rejected, or hurt in any other way. They’re kind of heroic, in my opinion.

But of course all this worry is exhausting. It often leads to insomnia, as you lie there at 3am going over and over that tricky morning meeting. Excessive worry can lead to chronic stress, burnout, being constantly on edge and never able to switch off. It’s not much fun.

So if you worry in this unhelpful way, we clearly need to help you worry less, altogether, and worry in a less catastrophic, more helpful/problem-solving way. Luckily, internal family systems gives us a clear, concrete road map of how to make these internal changes – one of the many things I love about this incredibly creative, highly compassionate model.

If you would like to find out more, do come along to my next workshop – Overcoming Anxiety: How to Worry Less, Feel Calmer and More at Peace, on Saturday 10th December 2022. This is an online workshop, so you can join from anywhere in the world. As with all our Heal Your Trauma events, it offers a limited number of free places, as well as a Low-Income Ticket and Supporter Ticket, if you are able to support the project.

So money should be no barrier, if you need help, even if you are struggling financially right now.

I hope to see you there!

Warm wishes,

Dan

Book Your Place Now – Dan Roberts' Webinars and Workshops for 2023

Image by Tobias Reich

If you are interested in coming to one of my Heal Your Trauma webinars and workshops, I have just released a full calendar of events for 2023. Bookings for all events are open now, so do visit the calendar page on my Heal Your Trauma website to reserve your place now. Many of these events sell out quickly, so do book your place early to avoid missing out.

We have webinars and workshops running almost every month, on a wide range of subjects to help you with your mental health and wellbeing. My workshops are all in-person next year, as I very much enjoy being with you ‘in real life’ – these will be held either at the Gestalt Centre, in central London, or Terapia, in north London. Highlights include:

• Brand-new workshop – Overcoming Depression: How to Lift Your Mood & Feel Calmer, Happier & More Hopeful, 1st April 2023 at Terapia

• Our highly popular Overcoming Addiction: Heal Your Pain and Escape the Addictive Cycle, 29th April 2023 at the Gestalt Centre, co-presented with the brilliant Claire van den Bosch

• First time in-person – Overcoming Anxiety: How to Worry Less, Feel Calmer & More at Peace, 8th July 2023 at Terapia

• Also brand-new as a workshop – The Healing Power of Self-Compassion, 23rd September 2023 at Terapia

If you are unable to travel to the workshops, we have a wide range of webinars planned for you, which are hosted via Zoom. Online highlights include:

• Brand-new webinar – Trauma Healing With Internal Family Systems, 11th February 2023

• Also brand-new – How to Manage Your Inner Critic, 25th March 2023

• Our highly popular The Healing Power of Self-Compassion, 27th May 2023

• Brand-new webinar – Buddhist Wisdom for Your Mental Health, 28th October 2023

All Heal Your Trauma events offer a number of free places, for those struggling financially for any reason, as well as Low-Income Ticket and Supporter Ticket options, if you are able to support the project. Heal Your Trauma is a non-profit project, so every penny we receive, after covering expenses, goes into making sure that everyone, everywhere can access all of our content.

I am excited about our upcoming programme for 2023 – and very much look forward to meeting you at a Heal Your Trauma event soon!

Sending you love and warm wishes,

Dan

Don't Miss My Overcoming Anxiety Workshop on 10th December

There Is No Such Thing as a Difficult Person

Image by Tumisu

Think of the person in your life that you find the most rude, annoying, insensitive or otherwise difficult. Can you see them in your mind’s eye? How do you feel as you picture them? I’m guessing some combination of irritated, frustrated, upset, hostile, vulnerable, anxious or exasperated.

Now I’m going to tell you a secret. This man or woman whom you think is so difficult, isn’t actually a difficult person. Why? Because none of us are entirely difficult, just as no-one is entirely lovable, kind, generous or compassionate.

That’s because we are all complex, multifaceted individuals, made up of an internal ‘family’ of parts. Some of these parts can indeed be difficult, but that’s not the sum total of who you are, or who that ‘difficult’ person is.

How parts work

There are many different ‘parts-based’ models of therapy, but my favourite is Internal Family Systems, developed by Dr Richard Schwartz (Dick to his friends). In this model, we are all made up of a complex, interrelated system of parts. This includes young parts who hold painful thoughts, memories, feelings and body sensations from your past (so a five-year-old part holds difficult stuff from when you were five, and so on).

You also have various protector parts, whose job it is to protect those young parts and make sure they never get hurt again. These protectors also try to keep the young ones hidden away inside, because they can hold such an intense emotional charge, which the protectors fear will overwhelm you if they come bursting out.

In IFS, it’s also thought that you have a Self, which is not a part but a rich array of inner resources like calm, compassion, clarity, confidence and more (some of the 8 Cs – Dick likes alliteration!).

So think about that ‘difficult’ person again. Got them? Right, now I want you to zoom in on the most troublesome behaviour they exhibit, whether that’s being rude, critical, dismissive, or whatever. Now label that as a part – so the Critical Part, or Angry Protector, and so on.

And now (here’s the bit that will help you manage this person better) try to understand that this protector, however rude, obnoxious or hurtful, developed at a time when that person was young, vulnerable and being hurt in some way. This protector’s job is to make sure that never happens again. Some protectors are proactive, like an Angry Protector, busily doing a job to keep them safe (being snippy or harsh, lashing out to keep potential threats at bay). Others are reactive, like a Soother part that makes them drink to numb out painful feelings as quickly as possible.

Look behind the curtain

And so, I guarantee that if you were look behind the ‘curtain’ (ie behind that protector part on the surface) you would find a young one who was hurt, scared, lonely, unloved, or some other painful thing. It’s like a dog who has been mistreated. They become very barky and aggressive, but they’re actually scared – being aggressive is the best way they know to protect themselves and make sure you can’t hurt them like they were hurt before.

This idea helps me virtually every day, as I deal with the various people in my life I find hard to manage. When they are doing whatever I find annoying, I try to see them as a scared little boy or girl. And suddenly they don’t seem so powerful. I can manage and set limits with the spiky protector part without demonising the person, thinking they are ‘horrible’ or ‘nasty’. They are just hurt and doing what they have always done to keep people at bay.

I hope you find that helpful – and if you’re interested in IFS, do come along to one of my webinars and workshops, as I and my co-presenters blend concepts and practices from IFS with other highly effective models in our teaching. We have two more planned for 2022 and one a month throughout 2023 – visit healyourtrauma.com to find out more.

Sending you love and warm wishes,

Dan

Don’t Miss Our Overcoming Addiction Workshop in London – 26th November 2022

If you struggle with addiction or compulsive behaviours, book your place on a one-day, in-person workshop co-presented by Dan Roberts, Advanced Accredited Schema Therapist, Trainer & Supervisor and Founder of Heal Your Trauma and Claire van den Bosch, UKCP-accredited Psychotherapist and an expert on treating addiction. Overcoming Addiction: Heal Your Pain and Escape the Addictive Cycle is the latest in a series of regular Heal Your Trauma webinars and workshops throughout 2022. 

This event, which will be both highly informative and experiential, will take place from 10.30am-4.30pm on Saturday 26th November 2022. It will be held at The Gestalt Centre, near King’s Cross in Central London. The Gestalt Centre is easily reached by bus, Tube or mainline rail, being a 10-minute walk from King’s Cross Station.

This event is booking up fast, so don’t miss this chance to learn from two leading trauma therapists and experts on mental health, wellbeing and addiction – watch the video for more information and book your place now using the button below.

Warm wishes,

Dan

Why Mindfulness Practices Can Be Triggering for Trauma Survivors

Image by Tobias Reich

As a long-term meditator, I am a passionate proponent of mindfulness. Building mindfulness practices into my life – as well as other forms of meditation – has had a profound impact on my mental and physical wellbeing. There is now a huge body of research to back this up – regular mindfulness practice is clearly beneficial for common psychological problems like stress, anxiety and depression, as well as a whole host of physical health benefits like lowering blood pressure and relieving gastrointestinal issues.

I have recorded a number of mindfulness practices for my Insight Timer collection and send these to clients as homework, to help them build a daily practice. Most of my clients like them, some absolutely love them and some find it hard to incorporate a daily practice into their busy lives, which is of course fine.

But what happens if you find standard practices like mindfulness of breath, or the body scan, not just hard to embrace but actually harmful? For a small minority of people who try mindfulness practices, with a therapist or meditation teacher, on retreat, or using an app like Calm or Insight Timer, the standard form of practice is highly triggering.

Why trauma makes mindfulness challenging

Why is this? Well, most of these people will probably have a trauma history. If you experienced trauma, either complex trauma in your childhood, or a single traumatic event like a car crash or assault, your nervous system may be ‘dysregulated’, meaning you are either prone to hyperarousal (high-energy states like stress, anxiety, panic, agitation or anger) or hypoarousal (low-energy states like dissociation/detachment, sadness, shame or depression).

In more simple terms, this may mean that when you sit and focus on your breath, say, you feel uncomfortably short of breath and panicky. That’s because your body is sitting calmly on your cushion, as instructed, but the threat system in your brain is yelling Run! So now you’re stuck there, trying to be all calm and serene, as you think you should be (especially if you have mainlined all those Instagram posts of beautiful women sitting in perfect Lotus positions, with peaceful, radiant expressions), when your whole body is fizzing with nervous energy and you want to get the hell out of there asap.

Trauma-sensitive mindfulness

This is why Trauma-Sensitive Mindfulness was developed. And this approach, which either adapts standard practices to make them more helpful and accessible for folks with a trauma history, or offers brand-new practices, is incredibly helpful. Because mindfulness is a key skill for everyone to learn, especially if you have a trauma history. So please don’t abandon or avoid mindfulness and meditation just because you had a bad experience.

In my next Heal Your Trauma webinar, on Saturday 12th November, I will explain why Trauma-Sensitive Mindfulness is such a helpful approach for trauma survivors – and guide you through a number of practices. Do come along if you’re interested – as with all my Heal Your Trauma events, this will be donation-based, making it affordable and available for everyone, everywhere.

You can book your place now using the button below – I hope to see you there, or at another of my webinars and workshops, very soon.

Sending you love and warm wishes,

Dan

Come to My Overcoming Addiction Workshop in London on 26th November 2022

What is Internal Family Systems Therapy?

Image by Aaron Burden

If you live in Therapy World, like me, you will definitely have heard of Internal Family Systems (IFS) therapy. It’s ridiculously popular right now – every IFS training is sold out and finding an IFS therapist or supervisor with any space is borderline impossible. IFS is definitely having a moment.

But when I speak to people who live in the Real World, many of them have never heard of IFS. Which is a little baffling for those of us who live, eat and breathe therapy. I guess one reason for that is that it’s a model imported from the US (as many of our best models are). And it’s taking some time, especially in the UK, for it to hit the mainstream in the way that, say, CBT has.

If you have heard about IFS, that’s wonderful. But if you haven’t, it’s definitely time you did. Here’s why…

So what is IFS?

Internal Family Systems therapy was developed by Dr Richard Schwartz in the 1980s. Dr Schwartz (or Dick, as he likes to be called) was a family therapist, who was frustrated with his model and started listening closely to what his clients were telling him. They would talk about ‘parts’ of themselves who often had clear voices, wanted different things for the client, had conflicting ideas about what they should do, and so on.

Dick started working with one of these parts, which was making one of his clients self-harm. Unable to stop the self-harming, Dick started working collaboratively with this part, listened to and understood its concerns and function for the client – and IFS therapy was born.

He came to understand that we all have parts of us, whether we experienced a ‘normal’, happy childhood or severe trauma. It’s just the way that your brain constructs ‘you’. But if you did experience childhood trauma, you will have young parts inside holding those traumatic memories, feelings and experiences. You will also have other parts, who are protectors, using various means to protect the young ones from being hurt again.

And the Self?

But although all of these parts live in your mind, brain and body, there is another you – what Dick says is ‘who you really are, deep down’. And this is your Self, which is not a part, but a deep, rich array of resources that live within us all, whether we can access them or not. Some of these qualities are embodied in the 8 Cs:

• Calm

• Compassion

• Clarity

• Connectedness

• Courage

• Creativity

• Confidence

• Curiosity

Again, all of these wonderful qualities are inside you, right now. You don’t have to learn them, or grow them, or find them somewhere out there in the world. Instead, you just need to access them. Of course, that can be hard, especially when your young parts are triggered and you’re riding big waves of emotions like stress, anxiety, sadness or fear; or your protector parts are up and you’re being avoidant, or compulsively drinking/shopping/thinking about stuff. (This happens to me on a daily basis, it’s just what minds do/how parts get triggered by our experiences in the world. Nothing to be ashamed of our feel bad about, it’s just how all humans work).

Self like the sun

But I want you to hold on to this idea. However bad things have been for you, however much you are struggling right now, there is something in you that can respond to your suffering with love and compassion. Which can help you heal. Which is like the sun, bursting out from even the darkest clouds. The sun never vanishes, right? Even if we can’t see it, we know it’s still there behind the clouds, with all of its life-giving energy and power. So it is with the Self.

I will be teaching a great deal more about the IFS model on my upcoming Heal Your Trauma webinars and workshops this year and next – but especially my Overcoming Addiction workshop, which I am co-presenting with my dear friend and colleague Claire van den Bosch. Like me, Claire is trained in and passionate about IFS, so we will be weaving IFS concepts in with those from schema therapy, EMDR and other rich, wise therapy models.

I hope to see you there – or on another Heal Your Trauma event soon.

Sending you love and warm thoughts,

Dan

How Can Trauma-Focused CBT Help You Overcome Trauma Symptoms?

PTSD is estimated to affect one in three people after a traumatic event. If you are struggling with trauma symptoms it can be useful to begin considering your support options. There are many different therapies available to support trauma and one of those is Trauma-Focused Cognitive Behavioural Therapy, or TF-CBT for short, but what is this type of therapy, and what does it involve? 

Psychologists Ehlers and Clark (2000), in their Cognitive Model of PTSD, propose that there are certain factors that keep the vicious cycle of trauma going, and these factors essentially prevent the trauma memory/memories from being processed. These factors include:

1. Poorly elaborated memory of the trauma and that the memory has not been contextualised (the memory does not equal the situation within which it existed or happened).

2. Excessive negative beliefs and meanings attached to the trauma memory.

3. Behavioural and cognitive strategies. Cognitive strategies include pushing thoughts away (suppression) and dwelling on events (rumination). Behavioural strategies may include withdrawing socially, avoiding internal and external reminders of the event/s, little or no engagement in previous hobbies or interests, use of drugs and alcohol. There can be many more strategies people may use, we recognise every individual has different coping strategies to try to minimise or eliminate their suffering.

Goals in Trauma-Focused CBT

Therefore together our goals in TF-CBT are to:

1. Reduce flashbacks and nightmares by opening up the memory and being able to discriminate with reminders of the trauma what is then (at the time of the trauma) and what is now (in the present moment). We may recall the memory spoken out loud or by use of writing in session using the present tense. Some people may revisit the site of trauma in this part of the work to aid adding context to the trauma memory.

2. Modify excessive negative beliefs of the trauma, changing perspectives to create new more helpful beliefs. For example ‘it was my fault X happened’ becomes ‘it was not my fault X happened’ we may develop a more compassionate response towards the self. In therapy we may do this through careful and gentle questioning to explore different perspectives. We then incorporate the more helpful belief into the trauma memory.

3. Remove unhelpful behavioural and cognitive strategies that maintain intrusions and the current sense of threat and danger. We may do this in therapy by exploring the advantages and disadvantages of each strategy both in the short and long term.

As we come towards the end of treatment we often hear people we support reporting a reduction or ceasing of intrusions, a decreased sense of danger in the present moment and an improvement in mood as the person begins regaining and rebuilding their life after after the traumatic event/s.

Please see the video below if you would like to learn more about the different stages of the therapeutic journey when we work with trauma using TF-CBT. 

Emma McDonald, CBT & EMDR Therapist

•If you are looking for a Trauma Focused-CBT specialist we have a team of therapists who can offer this support face to face or online – further information can be found on our website www.thepsychotherapyclinic.co.uk

A Compassionate Approach to Overcoming Addiction

When Dan and I decided to run a workshop together on Overcoming Addiction I felt extremely excited! Dan has become one of my most respected colleagues and a dear friend – and I'd collaborate with him on a workshop about tractors if he asked me to.

But this topic is also one I'm passionate about – and understanding addictive processes and supporting other so-called addicts like me on their healing journey is probably my life's deepest purpose, at least when I'm not on my motorbike.

I've been professionally upfront about my status as a recovering addict for around 10 years, because I was ‘raised’ in 12-Step recovery where we support one another through sharing our own experience, strength and hope so others can identify and begin to be freed from isolation and shame, which are often such painful aspects of living with addictive struggles.   

The times have changed so much when it comes to common perceptions of addiction, but not as much as I would wish. I still meet people who see addicts as lacking willpower and being weak including, very often, the person with the addictive struggle themselves. Being able to understand some of the basic brain science of powerlessness and behavioural conditioning that puts so many behaviours out of the reach of conscious control is essential if we're going to have a chance of changing our patterns. 

Childhood distress and addiction

So is being able to understand the role of childhood distress. The distress can be dramatic, obvious experiences that are the easiest for us to label as ‘trauma’ – and also the quiet, understated and lonely experiences of lack. We lack the kinds of good-enough caretaking that is required by the human organism (and many other mammals) for the development of a well-regulated nervous system and the acquisition of adaptive behavioural strategies for navigating the minefield of life. 

Understanding the role of trauma in the development of addiction isn't a blame-focused witch-hunt. Nine times out of 10 our caregivers were doing the best they could with their own struggling nervous systems, their own lack of resources and their inherited beliefs about parenting. Cultivating a victim-mindset is no more productive in our desire to heal than maintaining a stance of misguided self-shaming. 

But understanding the damage sustained by our still-tender nervous systems and psyches can facilitate the opening of our hearts to ourselves, including all the ways we’ve learned to cope, and from there can arise the feelings of empowerment to take responsibility for our recovery in ways that really work. 

And we are learning more and more about the ways that really work. The power of psychological approaches like Schema Therapy, Internal Family Systems work, Compassion-Focused Mindfulness, and theoretical frameworks like the framework of Core Developmental Needs, is becoming available to more and more struggling humans than ever before, as we strive to find ways of living in our amazing and challenging world with integrity, respect, joy, purpose and a growing sense of peace. 

Healing for everyone, everywhere

One of the reasons I love Dan and his work so much is that he believes in doing what he can to make healing available to as many people as possible, regardless of their financial means and especially when one-to-one, trauma-informed therapy may be inaccessible. I believe in this vision. I also believe, and I know Dan does too, in the power of connection and community.

Being able to create a day-long workshop for a group of humans all struggling in similar ways, where they can experience the power of a group, as well as the benefits of well-trained and experienced professionals – that really, really lights me up. 

If you struggle with addiction or compulsive behaviours, we'd both love to welcome you to our one-day workshop which we're designing to be both highly informative and experiential. It will take place from 10.30am-4.30pm on Saturday 26th November 2022 at the Gestalt Centre, near King’s Cross in Central London. In keeping with the Heal Your Trauma vision, the workshop will have a limited number of places available for free, if you are struggling financially for any reason.

Otherwise, you can choose the Donation Ticket option to support the Heal Your Trauma project. All donations we receive, after covering expenses, go to support the project and make sure that all of our content is available to everyone, everywhere. You can find the booking page here.

May you be well, and may you be free of suffering and the causes of that suffering.

Love,

Claire

•Claire van den Bosch is a UKCP-accredited psychotherapist and an expert on healing trauma and addiction. Find out more about Claire at atimetoheal.london

How Does Mindfulness Help You Heal From Trauma?

Image by Stefan Widua

If you are interested in personal growth (which, as you’re reading this, I’m guessing you are), you will know that mindfulness is a helpful skill to learn. In fact, it can feel a little overwhelming at times, as mindfulness is touted as a sort of miracle cure by the media for problems including ADHD, depression, anxiety, chronic stress, eating disorders, substance abuse, chronic pain, insomnia and many more. Of course, it’s not a miracle cure but, happily, many of these claims are backed up by extensive research (psychologists have been researching mindfulness as a health-promoting practice for around 50 years).

So, mindfulness practice is clearly helpful for many of the common mental-health and some of the physical-health problems we all struggle with. And, as I often say in these posts, this is not new information for billions of people around the world – Buddhists have been practising mindfulness for 2,500 years; and devotees of yoga have been using similar techniques for even longer, so they probably greet the Mindfulness is Today’s Hot New Health Hack-type headlines with a wry smile.

Mindfulness is key for trauma recovery

One area of particular interest to me is the importance of mindfulness in healing from trauma. I specialise in treating complex trauma, so I am always looking for knowledge and skills that will help me help my clients. If you have a trauma history (and many of us do, whether we know it or not), here are three ways that mindfulness will help you heal:

1. The power of ‘noticing’. Until you know what the problem is, you can’t possibly solve it. So we need to learn how to notice all sorts of things in real time. For example, if you want to work with your inner critic, you have to notice that you’re being self-critical and say, ‘Oh, there’s my Critic again!’ Otherwise it’s just a constant flow of harsh, negative and self-demeaning comments passing through your mind (and triggering challenging emotional states like anxiety, stress, depression, low confidence or self-esteem).

   How do we notice? With mindfulness, which allows us to take a step back and adopt an ‘observer’ position, so we see our thoughts arising, rather than being swept away by them/believing them to be The Truth.

2. Mindfulness is vital for emotional regulation. One of the biggest difficulties for trauma survivors is the overwhelming power of their emotions. There are many reasons for this, but simply put most of my clients struggle with intense waves of emotions like anger, fear, sadness or shame. This makes day-to-day life a real struggle – and can lead to using substances like comfort foods, alcohol or prescription/recreational drugs to numb out emotions that feel too big to handle.

   Mindfulness helps with this problem in a number of ways. First, research shows that just noticing (see above) and naming emotions helps reduce their intensity. So thinking, ‘Oh, I’m feeling really anxious right now’ can help you feel less anxious. This is especially helpful when some emotions, like panic, seem to come out of the blue. (They never do – there is always a trigger, which again requires noticing to start learning which things trigger you and why.)

   Second, using simple mindfulness practices like breathing into the part of your body where you feel tight or tense (because that’s how the emotion is showing up, somatically) can help soften and relax that part of your body, which in turn calms the uncomfortable emotion.

   Third, mindfulness practice helps strengthen synaptic connections in the prefrontal cortex (PFC), the part of the brain (just behind your forehead) you need to regulate the more emotional, reactive parts of the brain, like the limbic system. Which leads to…

3. Mindfulness practice helps us find peace, calm and equanimity. Like all skills, mindfulness takes effort, practice and dedication to learn. That’s why it’s called a yoga practice or meditation practice. Doing it once won’t make much difference. But meditating every day, for long stretches of time, will help in many ways. As a long-time meditator, I can confirm that I am so much calmer, more peaceful and balanced than I used to be. It has helped me develop what Buddhists call ‘equanimity’, which essentially means balance. So if something triggers or knocks me, it’s easier to come back to a calm, centered presence.

   This is partly because I have strengthened the neural architecture of my PFC, so have more access to resources that help me feel calm, as well as soothing and reassuring anxious/stressed/upset parts of my brain. In less jargon-y terms, regular meditation helps you feel a little happier, a little stronger, a little more able to cope with life’s many challenges. And that has to be a good thing, whether you have a trauma history or not, right?
   

–If you would like to know more about how mindfulness could help you heal your trauma, come along to my next webinar: Not Just Mindfulness, But Trauma-Sensitive Mindfulness. It takes place on Saturday 12th November 2022 from 3-4.30pm. Places are either free, if you are struggling financially, or payable by donation if you can support my Heal Your Trauma project (after covering expenses, all donations go towards running the project and making trauma-informed help available to everyone, everywhere).

Book your place now using the button below.

Warm wishes,

Dan

Webinar: Not Just Mindfulness, But Trauma-Sensitive Mindfulness

What is Enlightenment? And Could You Ever Achieve it?

Image by Brennan Martinez

I just finished a brilliant book – Waking Up: Searching for Spirituality Without Religion, by Sam Harris. If you’re interested in spiritual growth, personal development, mindfulness, Buddhism, or just want to expand your mind and improve your mental health, I strongly recommend it. And it’s got me thinking a lot about enlightenment. Is it even a thing? And if so, is it accessible to the likes of you and me, or just to shaven-headed folk who sit for 18 hours a day in some lofty monastery in the Himalayas?

To answer the first question: yes, I am convinced that enlightenment is real. Here are a couple of definitions from Matthieu Ricard – a Buddhist monk and all-round wonderful (and enlightened) human being: ‘Enlightenment is a state of perfect knowledge or wisdom, combined with infinite compassion,’ which sounds a bit daunting, right? I’m not sure I will ever achieve that level of perfection, however hard I try!

But his second explanation sounds much more achievable: ‘Enlightenment is an understanding of both the relative mode of existence (the way in which things appear to us) and the ultimate mode of existence (the true nature of these same appearances). This includes our own minds as well as the external world.’

Put more simply, in Buddhism enlightenment is often defined as waking up. Over 2,500 years ago, the Buddha taught that we are all walking around in a dream, with at best a fuzzy sense of reality. For example, I often write in these posts about feeling defective or not good enough. Why do so many of us feel that way? Because we are trapped in a (bad) dream, in which we are somehow less than other people, incompetent, dislikable, or whatever negative, self-critical story we have been telling ourselves since we were children.

So, as Matthieu Ricard explains, becoming enlightened means waking up and understanding how things really are – both in the world and our own minds.

The path to enlightenment

Still sound daunting? OK, try thinking about it like this. I once heard another Buddhist teacher explain it beautifully. He said that we may never reach that state of ‘perfect knowledge or wisdom’, but we can all step on to the path leading in that direction. And the path is right there beside you. All you have to do is step on to it (try it now, if you like – it’s right there!).

How do we step on to this path? Well, reading books like the one above, or anything explaining Buddhism, meditation, mindfulness or how to generate positive mental states such as metta, equanimity or compassion. Jon Kabat-Zinn’s books are all wonderful, as are those by Sharon Salzberg, Kristin Neff and Rick Hanson.

Developing a yoga or meditation practice (or preferably both) are also fairly simple and doable ways to step on to that path. Working with a skilled therapist, who can help you tell yourself a kinder, more compassionate story about your life, will also get you moving in a helpful direction.

And attending webinars and workshops, like my Heal Your Trauma events, or those of any other teacher who makes your brain light up and heart feel warm – Dr Gabor Maté is one of the most brilliant teachers we have, so do check out his books and events.

If you need some help with developing a meditation practice, check out my large collection of guided meditations on Insight Timer – they are all free, with optional donation. And there are thousands of other wonderful teachers on the app, so feel free to explore them too.

Again, enlightenment sounds like a big, scary, impossible word – but it really just means waking up. Seeing things more clearly. Treating yourself and all other living beings with kindness and compassion. Understanding that everything changes, so it’s unhelpful to try and grasp on to it, or try to be rigidly in control. Knowing that this life is probably the only one we have, so it’s infinitely miraculous and precious. Don’t waste it berating yourself for things you never did, or faults you don’t possess.

Let me leave you with a little mantra for the day, to help generate some self-warmth and self-compassion. Try it often throughout the day, silently repeating each phrase on the in-breath:

May I be safe

May I be well

May I be free from suffering

Sending you love, metta and warm thoughts, wherever you are in the world,

Dan