Scott Musgrave, creator of Associative Awareness Techniques, explains that understanding how our brains react to trauma is the key to understanding how trauma impacts the body and our psychology. In particular, by understanding that what defines trauma is how evolutionary responses are activated, allow us to unload the unfair weight of social...
Read MoreThe idea that you are a multitude of Selves within you is still a marginal view compared to many other concepts in psychology, but in my practice I have found accepting this view of our personalities both useful and helpful. After all, is the idea that you have a single unitary personality enough to explain your complexity? What if instead your...
Read MoreThe fight-flight-freeze and fawn responses are the most characteristic behaviours we display under threatening conditions. Normally speaking, these responses, being evolutionary advantageous, are short-lived and not part of our normal state. But for a trauma carrying person, they become normalised and invisible to both oneself and
Read MoreWhen under the onslaught of anxious thoughts, almost everyone feels small, under attack, and as if they are all alone, and out of control. Are you feeling like you have been struggling all week like Jarod above? You feel disoriented, sleeping is getting hard, and now, getting out of bed is starting to feel like climbing out of a cave? Afraid of...
Read MoreConditioned behaviours learned early in life can hold back our chances to form relationships of a healing nature. There was one principal theme I explored in the video "The books we hardly ever read", and that was the process of meeting new others. In that particular video I paused on the novel opportunities for bonding and intimacy that new...
Read MoreIt’s the environment that really does the switching, not us. And it’s mostly unconscious. It was in the 1920s that Carl Rogers, after spending five months in China as a theology student and witnessing the dreadful child labour conditions of the time, had his first major paradigm shift. Frustrated by his faith’s inability to explain and deal with...
Read MoreThis was the me I feared the most. He was the cunt. And in that moment I had a terrible realisation I was loving being the cunt. The road wound down a steep hill, past the lines of huts and the one-storey wooden structure of the old Esalen Institute Lodge. In his quest to understand the origins of our Western ideas of the Self, Will Storr, author...
Read MoreWhat the science of social pain is beginning to reveal is the dark error at the heart of individualism. In my extensive years living abroad the interplay between early social conditioning and our capacity to learn new behaviour and adapt to new environments have become somewhat more clear. Seven years in the exotically different culture of...
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