Brainspotting London

https://youtu.be/8SmT8DigLCE

Ilia MALININ (USA) | Free Skating | Montréal 2024 | #WorldFigure To license ISU footage: https://bit.ly/3M7bcaFSUBSCRIBE to our channel:https://www.youtube.com/SkatingISU?sub_confirmation=1LIKE us on Facebook:https://www.f...

https://youtu.be/lgbk9tyJVyA

Beethoven - Moonlight Sonata (3rd Movement) Follow me on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/peterbukaListen on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/artist/1YQd9PfvtPTkhFBvNrq4HJ?si=DMt1Dd3nT0yJNwTiu-jt_...

Good To Know magazine asked me to give them some insights into the benefits of goal-setting as a family. You can read the full article at

Do you set family goals at New Year? Nope, me neither, but I spoke to a psychologist, and here’s why we might want to start Family goals might just be the thing to do for your family

Brainspotting in Esquire: https://www.esquire.com/sports/a44960914/the-yips-sports-performance-mental-health-explained/

We Still Don't Understand the Yips Despite all the chatter about mental health in sports lately, most athletes (and fans) still struggle to understand the difference between failure and performance anxiety. The yips are a whole other beast.

Great Forbes article on Brainspotting:

Brainspotting: How It Works And What To Expect Brainspotting: How It Works And What To Expect

https://www.purewow.com/wellness/brainspotting-therapy

What Is Brainspotting—and Why Therapists and Clients Say It Makes for Faster, More Intense Breakthroughs Brainspotting therapy is an increasingly popular technique for treating PTSD and other lingering psychological problems. Its practitioners say that it provides relief to sufferers more effectively than traditional talk therapy, and we talk to a therapist and patient for details.

Konrad Lorenz (1903-1989) was an Austrian ornithologist who spent most of his adult life studying the behaviour of geese. What particularly interested him was how goslings seem to develop an attachment to their mother from within a few minutes of their birth, following dutifully behind her and obeying her guidance in matters of sheltering and feeding.

What Lorenz discovered was that, contrary to centuries of thinking, these birds do not develop an attachment to their real mother; they develop an attachment to the first moving object that they lay eyes on within hours of hatching. Unfortunately for them, they aren’t able to discriminate in any sophisticated way about who they form an attachment to and can be fooled in cruel ways: they may fall for a maternal bird but - if their eyes are angled in a certain way - they can be made to develop a powerful attachment to a bicycle, a tractor tire, a garden hose or a mannequin.

This helps to shed incidental light on a particularly painful phenomenon of human lives: just like young birds, young humans develop powerful attachments to the type of adults who are closest to them in their early days - and will then seek out similar characters when they are grown up. Yet also rather like birds, they are unable to discriminate very well between care-givers. They latch on to who is around, not what their deeper nature would ideally call for. They can, at the most extreme, develop attachments to people who not deserve their love at all, who are - as it were - as relevant to their needs as a bicycle is to a gosling.

It appears that our biological make-up privileges attachment to anyone over attachment to someone able to fulfil our needs. This opens up an avenue of compassion for us in relationships. We are sometimes puzzled by how we find ourselves in love with people whom we know - at a rational level - are not going to be good for us. But we may also come to perceive that these people mirror the disturbing patterns of our attachment figures from early childhood. We are a great deal more sophisticated than birds, but when it comes to whom we are drawn to, we must concede that we are prey to some of the same mechanical illogical loyalty as they are.

When we trot without question behind a person who treats us coldly or plays with our mind, we should not merely hate ourselves: we should reflect on how much this lover mirrors an early attachment figure who was not what we would have hoped. It can be a lifetime’s work to correct our emotional imprinting; it starts the moment we realise we’ve had enough of falling in love with tractor tires.

Shirley Manson from Garbage describes the process of slowly rediscovering her creative Flow state. With Brainspotting, we don’t have to leave this to chance or the passing of time; we can remove creative blocks and access and maintain these states at will.

Last night I wrote on a song that the rest of the band have been working on without me. Try as I might I haven’t been able to get back on the creative pony since my surgery two months ago. The brain fog that descended upon me has been intense, rendering me utterly limp and useless.
Last night I began to feel the twitch of some long switched off, turned down, dampened nerve endings, some synapses snapping and returning to thoughts, feelings, desire, hunger, memories…
I can’t begin to tell you how relieved I was to come back into focus…….a return to life….. to reality.
Love and gratitude to my patient and long suffering band mates who couldn’t have been sweeter, or more understanding………
Patience my friends, is indeed an underrated virtue and long forgotten art.

Often what seems like “mental illness” can in fact be one part of our psyche protecting other parts.

How Mental Illness Can Heal Us - The School Of Life We publish articles around emotional education: calm, fulfilment, perspective and self-awareness. | How Mental Illness Can Heal Us — Read now

Turn a vicious cycle into a virtuous cycle.

Generational trauma is the psychological and physiological effects that the trauma experienced by people has on subsequent generations in that group.

Many things get passed down through families, like genetic conditions and physical characteristics. In some cases, trauma can be inherited, too.

Generational trauma is trauma that isn't just experienced by one person—it extends from one generation to the next. "It can be silent, covert, and undefined, surfacing through nuances and inadvertently taught or implied throughout someone's life from an early age onward," licensed clinical psychologist and parenting evaluator Melanie English, PhD, said to https://buff.ly/uFUS9t

Making the concious decision to break the chain starts with a new healing journey.

Have you been the one to start the process?

A few recent updates:

-PESI published my article about Somatic Processing with Neurodivergent Clients https://www.pesi.co.uk/blog/2022/december/somatic-processing-with-neurodivergent-clients

-I contributed to an article for Metro about couples managing their budget over the holidays, during the cost of living crisis https://metro.co.uk/2022/12/13/on-a-budget-this-christmas-how-to-tell-guests-youre-cutting-back-17910432/amp/

-I was proud to be selected by the BACP as one of six UK therapists in a ‘Couples Collective’ group to discuss relational issues in therapy https://www.bacp.co.uk/couplescollective

Relationship advice from The couples collective BACP therapists share their top tips and guidance on how to navigate relationship issues, including financial struggles, social media, s*x and intimacy and open relationships. Download our booklet or read our online guide.

Excellent article about parentification: what happens when children have to behave like adults?

https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2022/sep/20/parentified-child-behave-like-adult

Were you a ‘parentified child’? What happens when children have to behave like adults When parents cast a child into the role of mediator, friend and carer, the wounds are profound. But recovery is possible

“I do think the rational aspect of ourselves is a beautiful and necessary thing, but often its inflexible nature can render these small gestures of hope merely fanciful. It closes down the deeply healing aspect of divine possibility.”

-Nick Cave, on creativity, music, grief and spirituality

https://www.theguardian.com/music/2022/sep/11/nick-cave-on-music-grief-and-spirituality-faith-hope-carnage

‘Songs are little dangerous bombs of truth’: Nick Cave and Sean O’Hagan – an exclusive book extract The musician and writer have turned hours of lockdown phone conversations into a book. Here, Cave talks movingly about how the loss of his son affected his songwriting, and how the kindness of strangers helped

https://www.technologynetworks.com/neuroscience/news/the-eyes-connections-to-the-brainstem-revealed-for-the-first-time-365614

The Eye's Connections to the Brainstem Revealed for the First Time For the first time, neuroscientists have revealed the precise connections between sensory neurons inside the retina and the superior colliculus, a structure in the midbrain.

https://www.technologynetworks.com/neuroscience/news/rapid-eye-movement-during-sleep-is-caused-by-gaze-shifts-in-dreams-365108

Rapid Eye Movement During Sleep Is Caused by Gaze Shifts in Dreams When our eyes move during REM sleep, we’re gazing at things in the dream world our brains have created, according to a new study. The findings shed light not only into how we dream, but also into how our imaginations work.

Quite from Irvin Yalom’s book “Love’s Executioner and Other Tales of Psychotherapy”.

An important part of Brainspotting is the Uncertainty Principle; always knowing that we don’t know. We follow in the tail of the client’s comet, allowing them to safely explore their own path towards healing and Flow.

The following was written by Dr. Melissa DeBose Hankins, a psychiatrist, and she gave me permission to share it:

This is what the result of unresolved trauma looks like.

What many of us witnessed during last night’s Academy Award ceremony between Will Smith and Chris Rock was a TRAUMA RESPONSE.

While I am in no way condoning violence, I think this is a very public and very important opportunity for us to all understand what a trauma response can look like.

A trauma response can take many forms (some surprising) and look like:

Slapping someone for saying “the wrong” thing

Yelling at someone for not doing something “fast enough” or “up to your standards”

Avoiding or not responding to a boss’s emails about scheduling an upcoming performance review

“Having to” do everything “perfectly,” otherwise you feel anxious or unsettled in some way

Yelling at staff or throwing things around your office or OR when you feel frustrated or have a bad outcome at work

Not setting boundaries around your time and energy because you’re worried about confrontation and upsetting the other person

Working endless hours without taking time for yourself or the things and people you enjoy because your job is your primary source and measure of your own self-worth and value

When a person has experienced trauma (“Big T” trauma or “Little t”trauma) from their childhood (or, their adulthood), the brain and body store that traumatic memory in ways such that aspects of that memory can be re-activated by present-day interactions and situations.

When this happens, the person experiencing this re-activation is split-second processing (on a subconscious or unconscious level) the current event through the filter of that past trauma. This means that that person is, for all meaningful purposes, experiencing things as if they are right back in that previous circumstance of trauma. As a result, they are reacting (taking action)—emotionally, physically, and/or verbally—from that place of trauma.

Those past traumas can be diverse and range from:

Witnessing a parent being physically or verbally abused during your childhood

You, yourself, experiencing physical, s*xual, or verbal abuse in your childhood or adulthood

Experiencing emotional abuse or neglect as a child

Being harshly reprimanded (this could include being spoken to by someones with an angry tone and demeanor) or shamed by others as a child for not doing a task “the right way” or not doing it “well enough”

Being told (and, perhaps, punished) as a child by an adult caregiver that it’s not polite and/or not acceptable to say “No” when an adult tells you to do something (including getting hugs from relatives, being made to attend events with your parents even when it’s clear your parents really didn’t want to go)

Being called out by a teacher in front of the class for having the wrong answer and feeling embarrassment and shame

While some of the above may be horrific, and other things may seem inconsequential, depending on the age of occurrence, the emotional, mental, and physical resources that person had at that age, as well as any prior traumas could determine the extent to which that person experienced trauma. A 2 year-old accidentally wandering into a closet with a door that shuts behind them that they can’t easily open, plunging them alone in darkness for 15 minutes before someone finds them is a far different experience than that of an adult in the same predicament.

In the case of Will Smith, he detailed in his autobiographical book, “Will,” that he witnessed trauma as a child in the form of violence at home. In his book he writes:

“When I was nine years old, I watched my father punch my mother in the side of the head so hard that she collapsed,” he wrote. “I saw her spit blood. That moment in that bedroom, probably more than any other moment in my life, has defined who I am.”

“Within everything that I have done since then — the awards and accolades, the spotlights and attention, the characters and the laughs — there has been a subtle string of apologies to my mother for my inaction that day. For failing her in the moment. For failing to stand up to my father. For being a coward.”

So, while the “joke” Chris Rock said was about Will’s wife, the fact that she was being targeted in combination with the look on her face (signaling to Will her level of upset and distress about what was said), triggered a split-second accessing of (and instantly being placed inside of that) memory to an earlier time when he was 9yo and wasn’t able to protect his mom (the woman he loved).

Will’s reaction last night was that of that 9yo traumatized little boy who simply reacted in the way that 9yo boy wanted to react back then.

Does having a history of trauma (big or little) give a “free pass” for the present-day trauma reactions that involve the harming (physically, verbally, or emotionally) of another? No, of course not.

However, it does highlight the extreme importance of understanding trauma and it’s many manifestations, and addressing it with effective trauma-informed approaches that address the emotional, physical (because we hold emotions in our body), and mental aspects of trauma.

Hopefully, rather than simply vilify Will, and say he has “an anger problem,” people close to him can help him recognize that this is “A TRAUMA PROBLEM,” and help him get the trauma-informed help in the form of therapy in combination with modalities as EFT (Emotional Freedom Techniques, or “tapping”), EMDR, or other somatic modalities that can effectively and efficiently release the traumatized aspects held in his memory and body.

Once his trauma and his emotions are no longer dictating his actions, he could have a much more measured and effective response to situations such as that that occurred at last night awards ceremony.

My further hope is that if anyone reading this finds that they are stuck in patterns of extreme reaction (such as Will experienced), or even less severe reactions, but you recognize are getting in the way of you living life the way you really want, please consider getting trauma-informed support.

Even if you’ve not experienced “Big T” trauma, ALL of us have experienced various “little T” traumas that have impacted each of us in various ways personally and/or professionally—some with mild behaviors and impacts, some not so mild.

As physicians, we are masterful at suppressing so many of our emotions, and the thoughts and memories associated with them. However, trauma has a way of impacting us in great big obvious ways (as we saw with Will Smith), and not such obvious ways (perfectionism, workaholism, lack of boundaries).

I’m not suggesting any of us go unearthing swaths of past trauma (please don’t do this unless you are working with a trauma-informed individual).

Simply be aware that it may be impacting you in ways you recognize and have yet to address, or in ways you never quite thought of as being associated with trauma. And, if needed, allow yourself to get the support you need by working with a trauma-informed therapist, trauma-informed coach, or other trauma-informed practitioner/modality.

Now published by KevinMD.com here: https://www.kevinmd.com/2022/03/will-smiths-slap-is-a-trauma-response.html

Trauma untethers us from our sense of self, and recovery from trauma involves rebuilding that connection:

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/feb/27/i-dont-know-who-i-am-any-more-working-through-trauma-is-about-reconnecting

‘I don’t know who I am any more’: working through trauma is about reconnecting | Gill Straker and Jacqui Winship PTSD can untether a person from a stable sense of self. Treatment is all about gaining acceptance of the fragility and unpredictability of life