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Synchronicities

I returned to journaling in 2005 as part of my intention to explore and process trauma. At the time I also read articles and chapters in various books on the power of journaling as both a therapeutic tool, but also a means of self knowing. I engaged in a variety of exercises, used free-association, wrote with the less dominant hand and also sketched. I wrote from a child and adult point of view. One exercise I sometimes did was to first write from a certain younger age perspective and then write a letter to that younger state from the adult perspective as a form of reparenting, soothing and integrating experience. Currently there are many more books on the benefits of writing and more research to support the benefits and effectiveness of this process. There are hundreds of guided writing exercises and activities available. Also, journaling or writing complement yoga, meditation / mindfulness practices, and so on. It is really good to see that more and more people not only engage and consider writing and journaling important, but also see its value as a therapeutic tool, because not that long ago in a Master’s Programme in Clinical Psychology I was doing, these processes and ideas were seriously frowned upon, but this story could be the theme of another post.

 

These last few weeks I have been looking at some old journals from a somewhat different perspective. Stories and adaptations, the whole curriculum of conditioning, injunctions and psychological defenses, the layered nature of experience and understanding, emotions and intentions, the gaps in the stories or the lack of data, all populate these pages. Yesterday, I listened to Elena Brower talk about Practice You, a workbook she has created based on her own experience. She includes a letter writing exercise in each chapter and talks about how this process was illuminatibng for her. Specifically, she invites readers to write a letter to themselves at a certain age. For instance, in one of her book chapters she asks readers to:

 

“Consider a moment when you felt challenged, afraid, or sad at the age of nine. See yourself hugging that child you were. Now, from your perspective today, write a song, a poem, a letter, or a story that gives that child insight into the ways in which you will soon learn to know yourself, believe in yourself, and to bestow dignity upon yourself by trusting yourself.” (Sounds True: Insights at the Edge)

So, in some sense through this process we acknowledge and validate the pain or confusion or fear, but we also reassure that young part that things will turn out fine. To say this differently, we can potentially, unfreeze and defuse landmines of fear, injunctions and unhealthy learning, reframe experience, increase continuity and integration, release outdated beliefs, broaden perspective and understanding of traumas or events, modulate emotions and practise self-compassion. It’s like going back in time and shedding light on events and emotional experiences, and also, paying our respects to the young parts that have held this difficult material. Elena Brower says ‘you can handle that person, you can heal that person, and you can help that person bring forth into right this moment more solace and more confidence’ and that it’s like going back and holding that person’s hand.

 

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What we can feel, we can heal…

You may like to listen to Chris Germer, clinical psychologist and lecturer on psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and founding faculty member at the Institute for Meditation and Psychotherapy, talking to Tami Simon about the power of self compassion at Soundstrue.com. Many voices, one journey

The discussion is about how to practice mindful self-compassion, which requires three things—to be aware, to know that we’re not alone, and to act with self-kindness. Chris Germer also talked about how people with chronic back pain can use the practice of mindful self-compassion, and how working with key principles such as “what we resist persists” and “what we can feel, we can heal” is leading to impressive results in the new research that’s being done in this area. He further talked about how he and Krisitn Neff found that mindfulness, which is a kind of balanced spacious awareness, adds a quality of equanimity to compassion training. Chris Germer referred how he worked with the underlying early shame to overcome anxiety with public speaking anxiety instead of targeting the anxiety. Finally, he discussed working with men and research findings done on self-compassion and veterans, which show that self-compassion is a very powerful factor on whether or not people develop post-traumatic stress disorder when they return home.

Extracts

‘When we practice mindfulness, it’s like holding a camera but you have to hold it steady. Sometimes the camera is just shaking. What does it take to stabilize a camera? What does it take to stabilize our hearts? That’s where compassion comes in. Compassion is more relational; it’s about sentient beings’.

‘…. there’s a cultural element to this. I’ve been teaching self-compassion all over the world and it seems to me that in countries, or parts of the country, where there’s a lot of competition where the sense of self is highly contingent on where you stand in the social hierarchy, in the pecking order. Then a person’s sense of self becomes unstable. It depends on how we’re doing. Self-compassion is more about having a quality of a secure base inside oneself and I believe that in cultures that are more collectivist and also stable, that people have a more stable sense of self’.

‘I think our sense about personal secure base is eroding and as a result, I think we just need more self-compassion. Mindfulness appears to be a perfect response to the fast pace of society and the fragmented attention spans that we have with electronic media. Compassion, in my view, is a healthy response to the ways our sense of self is eroding in this environment and also in increasingly competitive circumstances’.

‘One pathway is through physical touch. Another pathway is through language like I described but some people just don’t have that kind of language. Another pathway is behavioral… Self-compassion activates the mammalian care giving system. We all know what this is like. For example, if you have pain and somebody puts their arm around you and really loves you then inside you have a feeling like, “Ah.” They didn’t just do surgery on your lower back but your whole relationship to yourself and to your back changes. In other words, there’s a relaxing, there’s a letting go. This is what’s called regulating emotion through affiliation, through a sense of connection, through a sense of care’.

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Decluttering……

 

I have always believed in the benefits of recycling and I am also the type of person who likes a clean, and relatively tidy living environment. I also think that to some extent, too much clutter and too much mess burden and distract us from dealing with deeper stressors and issues. On the other hand, obsessive cleanliness and tidiness can also distract us from pressing and urgent issues of the heart. Moreover, some people are highly creative in messy environments and others are weighed down by the disorder, and cleanliness and tidiness are also learnt ways of being and influenced by familial and cultural values. Some cultures may value these qualities more than others; for instance in Japan, tidiness, decluttering and cleanliness are valued more than in other cultures across the world perhaps.  Read more ..