Do you have a body and want to heal?

When you struggle with life in general or with anxiety, (menopausal) irritability, grief or anger in particular, what is your go-to?

I don't know the name of this plant, but I hope you like my photo

To me it was cognitive therapies.

Over the years I saw a psychologist, a counsellor and a CBT practitioner.

That's what I knew, that's what I thought would help me make sense of the world and myself.

To be honest, it didn't do anything for me.

When I saw the counsellor over months at a particularly grim time in my life, the only thing that I felt was helpful was that weekly date in my diary as I needed the structure at that time.

And when I saw the CBT practitioner I remember a conversation when she wanted me to change my thoughts – thoughts I didn't even have:

Imagine you are walking down the street and a friend walks by and totally ignores you – what do you think and how does it make you feel?

I said that they probably were preoccupied or face-blind or just absent minded.

She said that if I were to feel hurt that they ignored me, what would I do?

I said, I wouldn't feel hurt as I'd give them the benefit of the doubt.

She went back to her textbook structure and wanted me to fit into her scheme:

But if you felt hurt or irritated …?

I truly felt this was ridiculous.

Yes, I know, this is just one single example and maybe it was me being stroppy or rebellious (really?), but talking therapies didn't do anything for me.

And please note – and I always make that clear – I'm not dismissing talking therapies.

Not at all.

I know they work for many people – and I also know that they can work particularly well in connection with a somatic modality. Sometimes, when the thoughts dry up, bringing in movement can work wonders.

I was still hoping that talking therapies could be helpful – mostly because I didn't know any other options.

Hence, I started my own training in counselling.

I wanted to do it much better than the people I had worked with and I wanted to train as a bereavement counsellor.

The training was, well, interesting, sure, sometimes it made sense and occasionally in our triads the magic happened when we students really felt what the client (a fellow student) was experiencing and went through.

But generally I was irritated by the mirroring and repeating that felt so unnatural to me. I often felt we were going round in circles. I also struggled with the typical question: “and what did it make you feel?”

Anyway, I'll never forget when the tutor said, so, next week's topic is loss and bereavement.

Just hearing this innocent sentence, I was fighting off my tears.

I was wondering how I could possibly survive this particular session as I feared I'd be flooding the classroom.

That's when I remembered EFT (Emotional Freedom Technique), a couple of years previously I was on an intro to EFT weekend and I booked a session with my trainer (who, amazingly, trained with Gary Craig the creator of EFT himself).

After a couple of sessions I felt so much lighter and I was able to talk about loss, death and bereavement in a much more neutral way without emotions welling up, let alone tears dominating the conversation.

I guess, in retrospect, this was a small lightbulb moment when I realised:

The body is so much cleverer than we give it credit for.

The counselling lesson about loss and bereavement went smoothly and I was able to hold myself together.

Success.

At the end of the counselling foundation training I decided, though, that I'm not continuing my training.

This was in 2013 and it wasn't until 2020 that I started my TRE training.

By the way, I'm writing this blog on the fourth anniversary of my TRE certification (19th July).

Happy TREnniversary to me

and I can honestly say this training has been life changing – what's more, I've been able and privileged to make an impact on my clients' lives.

Empowering my clients to help and heal themselves is priceless and I am honoured to be in this position.

When I started my TRE training I was blown away by what I learned about the body, the mind-body connection, psychosomatic pain, how The Body Keeps the Score and so much more.

This made so much sense to me for two reasons:

Firstly, TRE is an innate and very natural practice.

Our bodies are designed to deal with stress by literally shaking it off.

All mammals do this, you can observe dogs doing it beautifully after stressful incidents and then life is good again.

We clever humans, though, who are living mainly in our heads, have been socialised out of this innate reaction and our brains override the body's urge to shake.

We only do so in extreme situations, for instance after an accident when legs start trembling, before public speaking when hands are shaking or after childbirth when post-partum shivers can occur.

Admittedly, we don't want to shake after an argument with our partners or bosses as we don't want to show vulnerability, but we can give our body the opportunity to process that huge amount of stress retrospectively and in the privacy of our own homes.

Our bodies store so much sh*t (which is, according to Dr David Hamilton, a technical term 😉) that it can feel like a huge release to let go of all that tension.

Secondly, you might have heard of Bessel van der Kolk who wrote The Body Keeps the Score

– a book that was initially published in 2014 and I heard van der Kolk sharing in a lecture that he was not writing this book for the general public.

Nevertheless, the book became popular during the pandemic – unusual for such an 'old' book – and spent over 351 weeks, that's almost seven years, on the New York Times Bestseller list for non-fiction.

Over three million copies have been sold according to amazon.

Next time I'll share with you some of the notes I took during Bessel's lecture – which I find extremely fascinating – and also two key points that I've learned about trauma and movement.

So, stay tuned.

If you'd like to find out how TRE can support you and your health and well-being, I invite you to get in touch.

Either by sending me a message or by booking a time slot for a chat.

I'd love to show you how TREmendously amazing your body is and I'm here to guide you safely.

Natural. Innate. TREmendous.