Gentle Changes
Gentle Trauma Therapy & Mental Health Support
Beyond Mindfulness
Gentle Changes Blog
Un-shaming and Un-blaming – The Disconnect Between ‘Resilience’ and Wellbeing
I’ve been reflecting on the distressing after-effects people experience when they stretch beyond their sustainable capacity to meet demands. This is particularly evident in traumatised, neurodivergent, and burned-out individuals, but it applies to many of us. The aftermath—heightened anxiety, low mood, sleep disturbances, lack of focus and motivation, and an impaired ability to return to normal routines—is something so many people experience at one time or another. Yet, it often feels incomprehensible, as though something must be ‘wrong’ with us. Are we faulty? Are we simply not trying hard enough?
Why Beyond Mindfulness?
What I have noticed is that whilst embodied approaches can offer the opportunity to be in a gentler, less conflicted, more integrated relationship with ourselves, the way these approaches are delivered, the particular emphasis given, often does not explicitly emphasize the inner-relational dimension. I came to understand that clients who have trauma, particularly complex and developmental trauma, and clients who are neurodivergent, are often least able to engage with a psychotherapeutic or self-help modality without also dissociating parts of themselves, and are often less likely to feel the benefit, even when engaging with the ‘bottom-up’, somatic and embodied approaches which have the potential to offer so much benefit.
A Simple Way of Building Safety in Therapy Sessions
During moments of feeling stuck or blocked, an invitation to select a stone can help identify and connect with the inner resource which will bring a welcome shift into the felt sense of the problem. The simple act of choosing and holding a particular word stone, brings a new quality of energy into the inner sense of frustration, confusion, hurt, anger or powerlessness. At other times, at the point of shift in the felt sense, choosing a stone can feel affirming and strengthening of the emerging resourceful state.
When Healing From Trauma Feels Like Getting Worse
Healing from complex and developmental trauma and in many cases, a lifetime of varying states of structural dissociation, involves a process of embodiment. This sounds great – who wouldn’t want to be more embodied, present and aware? For trauma survivors, one of the effects of becoming embodied means they begin to FEEL more, and that, unfortunately, can mean at times there is increased emotional discomfort, particularly anxiety, which can be distressing, disheartening and hard to bear, but there is hope…
Is it possible to feel better after only one therapy session?
Learn why therapy might not be as hard as you think.
Is Your Trauma Therapy Trauma-Safe?
There are things that I would like you to be aware of before you take up coaching or therapy from someone who claims they can completely heal or cure your trauma or past abuse.