We all want to feel peaceful and free. We all want to be the best version of ourselves, yet we tend to make the same mistakes time and again, follow the same patterns of behaviour, return to the same destructive habits we thought we had broken, enter the same types of relationships that leave us feeling depleted and alone, and entertain the same kinds of conflicts, even when we think we know better.
As a psychotherapist, I have the immense privilege of being a witness to much healing. Naturally, I am very interested in the question of what creates lasting positive change? What stands between us and our healing? What are the necessary ingredients to the liberating shift to wellness? I have investigated that very question using the scientific, the popular, the energetic, the spiritual, the religious, and even dabbled in the literature on the nature of soul. Many theories exist to explain our symptoms, our pain, and our "stuckness", but very few sources address the real question, the “now what?”. Understanding why we behave the way we do, or why we feel the way we do creates awareness. However, awareness alone is often insufficient for change.
So, What Does Create Change?
When we are unwell mentally, on some level, whether at the forefront of our mind, or buried deep within the confines of our subconscious mind, far from our awareness, is a belief that there is something wrong with us, that we are inadequate in some way: faulty, lacking, unworthy, undeserving, meaningless, or purposeless. Depression, for example, doesn’t happen as a result of an event, or even a series of events, but rather what we have made it mean about us as a person, and perhaps our very acceptability as a human being.
Part 1: The Beliefs We Hold As Truths
The key to gathering the fragments of ourselves and reclaiming our natural state of wholeness, all comes down to beliefs. Subconscious beliefs we hold about ourselves as a result of our experiences. Those negative self-beliefs limit us and prevent us from being truly free to be ourselves, and thus grow. Because we see our beliefs as being the truth, we don’t question them. Why would we? Why question something we “know” to be true. The problem is, they aren’t true. We just believe they are…and we may not even know we have them!
Our Beliefs Are False and Limit Us? So Why Are They Even There?
Why do we acquire those beliefs if they are false, useless, and limiting? And how do we change them? To answer this question, we need to talk about lions. From there, we will domino all the way down to inner peace, freedom, and joy…one piece at a time. Let’s go!
How My Brain Reacts to Danger
Fundamentally, we are wired for survival. Our bodies love us so much they will do anything to keep us alive. Every message, every signal we receive from the environment enters our brain through the amygdala, the back door, the oldest part of the brain, also called our reptilian brain. Whether it is a sound, a smell, a sight, a taste, a combination of sounds (like spoken words), a tone of voice, a look on someone’s face…it all goes in through the amygdala.
In turn, the amygdala assesses that signal for danger. “Is this signal from the environment safe or is it threatening?” To do that, it quickly compares the given information it has received from the environment against known threats. Why quickly? Because otherwise, you might die! Your amygdala very intelligently maintains a kind of internal database for the precise purpose of scanning for threats…fast! You can think of it as your internal blacklist. It contains a record of all the signals your amygdala knows as being threatening. Each signal your brain receives is checked against that blacklist. Naturally, one of two things can happen: it either finds a match, or it doesn’t. Let’s see what happens in either case:
a) Finds A Match:
If it finds a match, the information goes no further into the brain. Alarm bells go off and action is taken! For example, if you come face to face with a lion, your amygdala will recognize it as a threat immediately and respond accordingly. It learned from evolution that a lion encounter doesn’t typically end well if left alone. Notice how it does not analyze the situation in great detail. It does not need to have any “thought” about the lion. It just reacts.
b) Does Not Find A Match:
If the message or signal from the environment is not matched against a known threat in the database, it is free to continue its way through the brain. It is only at that point that the signal can make its way to the more evolved parts of the brain, to eventually end up in the forebrain. This fancy part of the brain is where we store information: logical, rational, and factual stuff. This is the part of the brain we see as “intelligent”, capable of making inferences, being analytical, and solving complicated problems. It is our awareness. We also call it the conscious mind. This is the information we have access to readily, and know we are accessing when we are accessing it. The material we read, the facts we discover in books, the knowledge we make inferences from. We think this part of our brain is ultra-smart and is our primary behavioural guide, when in fact, the scientific community now speculates that 95% of brain activity is unconscious. This means that the vast majority of our decisions, actions, emotions, thoughts, and behaviours are the result of brain activity that is beyond our conscious awareness! Or, viewed differently, for every decision we make, we are aware of 5% of the factors we are considering in making the decision, while 95% happens in the background, without us being aware of it!!
Let’s Go Back To The Threats…When A Match Is Found:
Let’s talk about what happens when these “threats” are in the database. What happens when an entry in the database of threats matches the signal we are receiving from our environment? In other words, the signal is on the blacklist.
For example, you encounter a lion, “lion” is in the database. Then what? FEAR. When you experience fear, which is always a result of a threat (caveat to come), a series of events take place. First, your body knows it needs to react NOW. When we encounter a threat, it’s like an alarm goes off and our body directs all its energy to preparing to save our lives. It goes from parasympathetic mode (Rest & Digest) to sympathetic mode (Fight, Flight, Freeze - FFF) through a series of super quick chemical and physiological changes. Cortisol and adrenaline (stress hormones) go flying, heart rate increases, blood is redistributed so you can be extra strong (to “Fight” the threat) or lightning fast (to “Flee” the threat)…and then you react in one of three ways, namely Fight, Flight, or Freeze, also known as the FFF response. This process is described beautifully in: What Does Fight, Flight, Freeze, Fawn Mean?. Also worth noting is that when in FFF, up to 80% of the blood that usually resides in the forebrain gets redistributed to various organs and various parts of the body to increase strength and stamina in those areas. Restricted blood flow in the forebrain = limited thinking ability. It is just about impossible to think rationally under the influence of the stress response.
Once the threat is neutralized, the body returns to a state of equilibrium. In the animal kingdom, once the threat is gone and the animal has survived, it begins to tremble, and does so until the body returns to a parasympathetic (Rest & Digest) state. The animal shakes off the trauma, and releases all the preparatory reactions. Then, the animal can go on with life like nothing ever happened. Unfortunately, over the course of civilization, humans have lost that luxury, or rather that reflex to literally shake it off. We have become socially conditioned to hold on to our trauma since the releasing of the emotional component is sadly too often seen as a weakness, and many of us have lost touch with our emotional selves.
Now we know that our body assesses all signals from the environment and checks them against an internal database to determine if they are threats to us. If they are, the body springs into action. But where does that “list” come from, and how does it get updated?
How Do Threats Get Written To The Database?
So, a message comes in through the amygdala, and is assessed for danger. But how? Aha, this is where it gets tricky. Remember this list written by your loving body, the database? The one that only wants your survival? Not only does it store the “name” of the threat, i.e. lion, but it also stores instructions on how to prepare for that threat!
Earlier, I said fear is always a response to a threat. And I still mean it. However, I will add a caveat to my definition. Your body responds to all threats, whether the threat is real or perceived. And it reacts the exact same way, with the same amount of urgency, whether the threat is real or perceived. Why? Because it doesn’t know the difference! So why would I perceive danger when there is none? That would imply that the database is wrong, wouldn’t it? There are listed threats in the database that are not actually threats! That is correct, and this is where the challenges of modern life begin.
False Threats? But Why?
That database…over time…tends to become inaccurate. There are some threats listed in our database that are not actually dangers. These “false” threats define anxiety.
Anxiety: The presence of fear in the absence of true danger.
So how do these false messages get there, and HOW do I get rid of them? Great question! That is actually the key to healing. But first, a comparison. This internal database, it works just like our immune system…again, to keep us alive! But even our immune system gets it wrong sometimes and begins to attack itself. Let’s break that down.
It’s A Bit Like Our Immune System
To keep us in a state of health and balance, our immune system is constantly on the lookout for foreign harmful organisms trying to enter our body. When such invaders are detected, it springs into action and destroys them. So, how does it know what is harmful? It has the ability to learn and update its internal database, or blacklist. And the learning of the immune system is what we call immunity. Let’s say you get the chicken pox. You get quite sick and your body needs to work pretty hard to fight off the disease and bring you back to health. Once you are healthy again, it says: “never again!” and so it adds to its blacklist a note of what this invader looks like. The next time a similar organism attempts to enter your body, it will be compared against the blacklist and identified as an attacker immediately upon entry. It will not be let in. Denied!
However, sometimes, when our immune system starts to see friendly substances as threatening, it can turn on itself. It begins to attack parts that are not actually threats. This is what we call an autoimmune disease. It’s when our body works so hard to keep us safe that it actually starts to see as threats things that are not actually threatening. And it starts to attack them, destroy them. It is essentially our body turning on itself.
Enough About the Immune System, I Still Don’t Know How This Database of Threats Gets Populated!
In short, every time we face a threatening situation, where our survival is at risk, and we somehow survive, just like our immune system, our body makes a note of how it did it so that we don’t need to risk our life again in the future. Some messages come from the evolution of the species (like our previous lion example), and some messages come from our life experiences. The ones that come from our life experiences tend to be more or less useful after a time, but since we don’t easily shake off our fear response like animals do, they tend to stick with us.
Let’s imagine you get into a car accident. You get minimally hurt and survive the incident. However, the next time you get into your vehicle, you notice you are completely unable, no matter how hard you try to convince yourself, to turn left. After a while, you begin to understand that when you had your accident, you were turning left and another vehicle ran into you on that side. Even though that danger is gone, your body remembers, and it is saying “no”. Every time you want to turn left, you have a physical reaction and are just unable to do it. You feel blocked.
Now if we look at our database, at the time of the accident, you encountered a true danger. You survived the danger and so your body wants to make sure this never happens to you again. So, what does it do? It adds an entry to the database: Turning Left = Danger.
From that moment on, every time you want to turn left, the alarm goes off and you go into stress response mode. Now arguably, this response is not terribly useful. Rather, it is quite limiting. Turning left is not a TRUE danger, yet it is programmed into your internal database, which lives in your subconscious mind. So just telling yourself it’s okay to turn left will likely have little to no impact on your debilitating symptom. Your body has developed an internal belief that turning left is dangerous.
This example, although accurate, is a bit simplistic. The true catastrophe tends to manifest when our messages get recorded during childhood. Let’s talk about that.
Childhood Experiences
When we are small and the people we depend on for survival (our parents or caregivers) teach us something (whether implicitly or explicitly), we don’t question it. It becomes our truth.
Let’s imagine you grew up with an emotionally and physically abusive father who would be very unpredictable in his moods and violent when he was in a bad mood. To avoid being the object of his violence or his harsh words, perhaps you developed a strategy that it was best to stay quiet when he was around. That sounds like a brilliant strategy! And that would definitely minimize your exposure to the outbursts. So, it is highly effective. It helps the child survive! And what happens when your body notices something has helped you survive? Precisely! It puts it in the database! It creates a program, and that program plays every time a signal from the environment resembles a signal that was encountered at the time of the actual threat. In this case, any time this person (now an adult) feels threatened, whether by a boss who raises their voice, a public speaking opportunity, a difficult conversation, the person, who now holds the belief “I have no voice.” or “I am invisible.” might go into stress response and react just like they did when they were a kid: extreme fear, tight throat, inability to express themselves…
Such beliefs can play out in a variety of ways, and sometimes might not seem related to childhood experiences, until a bit of investigating is conducted. As far as our stress response goes, we tend react with “Fight” if we have relative power over the “threat”, “Flight” if we don’t but believe we can escape it, and “Freeze” if we don’t think we can do either one of the previous.
Keeping with the same example, imagine you are all grown up, you are a conscientious mother who believes in speaking gently and respectfully with your children. One day, your child tells you to be quiet (which activates in you the “threatening belief” that “I have no voice”) and you completely lose it and begin to yell at him. Later, when you are calm, you think back and don’t know what got over you, you feel guilty, and promise yourself never to respond that way again. But the next time a similar situation happens, you react the exact same way! What’s that about? When your child said the words “be quiet”, your database was checked, and a match was found. The signal didn’t pass the test. Alarms went off, you went into FFF, lost your ability to think, and “Fought” your child. You chose “Fight” due to your relative power over your child.
Or you are in a romantic relationship and your boyfriend implicitly and falsely accuses you of being unfaithful. Instead of attempting to explain, speak up, assert your truth, and express your healthy anger around his accusations, you run away. Same belief, but you adopt the “Flight” response since you view him as more powerful and don’t believe you can “Fight” him, but do believe you can escape.
Or you are at work, your boss calls you into his office and begins to speak to you sternly about a mistake he wrongly assumes you made. You know you didn’t do it but feel completely incapable of explaining yourself. Same belief causes the activation, but this time, you see your boss as more powerful than you, and don’t see escaping as an option, so you go into “Freeze” mode. Your body goes numb and you can’t even get yourself to speak.
What Does That Leave Me With? - The Resulting Belief Bank
These types of childhood experiences leave us with false beliefs about ourselves along with an inability to be fully present and free to be ourselves. They render us unable to be truly authentic. Why is that?
Attachment Versus Authenticity
When we are little, we depend on our parents for survival. So, no matter how bad things get, no matter how neglectful the situation, we look for their approval, their love. Why? Because we need them. We need to depend on our caregivers to survive. When we have reason to believe our parents don’t love us, or love us conditionally based upon our actions, we give up parts of our true selves to obtain their approval. We bend and twist and shape ourselves into what they need us to be or want us to be so that they love us and thus take care of us. Their implicit disapproval leads us to believe we are inadequate as we are, there is something wrong with us, and as such, we morph into an altered version of ourselves, one that is more likely to be approved of and taken care of by our caregivers. From the child’s perspective, that is the safest option, because beyond the neglect, the child understands his dependence and knows he needs these adults to survive at all. This is what Gabor Maté calls choosing attachment over authenticity.
As in our previous example, let’s say when you were little, Dad would get really mad at you sometimes, and a lot of those times you didn’t even know why. You couldn’t avoid it, because you didn’t know what set him off. When that happened, the best thing you could do to keep yourself safe was to not talk back, to be quiet, to get out of the way, to be invisible. Now, many, many years later, long after the danger is gone, if anything/anyone makes you feel invisible, you are brought back, the signal to your amygdala doesn’t pass the test, alarms go off!! You “know” (in your database) invisibility is associated with a threat, so what do you do? React like it’s a threat! As an adult, you are an altered, limited version of yourself because you once had to choose attachment over authenticity. Your body remembers, and thus continues to act as though that was useful. Growth happens from a place of authenticity, so until we can reclaim that authentic self, we will likely seek approval at all cost, make decisions based on what others will likely think, and work tirelessly to be liked by absolutely everyone.
Common False Beliefs
Unfortunately, many of us are stuck with such beliefs, “I am unlovable”, “I am worthless”, “I am shameful”, “I don’t deserve love”, “I’m not good enough”, “I’m defective”, “I can’t trust myself”, “I’m powerless”, etc. And these beliefs limit us. They prevent us from being fully, truly, freely, and authentically ourselves. They are precisely what limits us and stunts our growth. They keep us trapped in a state of anxiety and willing to trade in our authenticity for a sense of perceived acceptability and thus relative safety. Here is a list of common beliefs.
But What To Do About It? Why Do The Beliefs Linger When I No Longer Need Them?
Why is the belief still there and why do I act the same even long after the danger is gone? Every time you are triggered, you are aroused, you are in a heightened state, one that thinks you are in danger and therefore you react as such. And every time this happens, you survive. So, the link between holding the belief as truth, and your very survival, gets strengthened. Your body sees every single one of those panicked, awful experiences as a success, so it keeps doing what it knows how to do.
It has no idea the very same strategies that once saved you are the exact same ones that limit you now, stunt your growth, and get right in the way of your authenticity, your true nature. It sees what it is doing as a continuous string of successes! Threat Detected –> Threat Neutralized With Known Strategy -> Survival -> Success!
Part 2: What Can I Do About It?
“If you are saying I have false beliefs about myself, stuck in my subconscious mind, that do nothing but limit me, but that I can’t access them because they are a “program” in my subconscious mind, then all that does is make me feel doomed and hopeless.”
You and me both! And I have struggled with that question for so long, hence the digging into the philosophy on this from so many areas.
I absolutely refuse to believe that your life experiences, the ones that have made you suffer the most, set you up for a life of more suffering with no possible way out! The same way that I refuse to believe you can be traumatized in an instant but need mountains of time, effort, and willpower to heal, if you are to even be successful at all. It just doesn’t make sense to me. And I’m here to tell you, it doesn’t need to! Stay with me!
If these limiting beliefs are truly the culprit, the piece holding you back, causing you anxiety, stress, depression, self-sabotage, etc., it would make sense that identifying those beliefs would be a good start.
I couldn’t agree more! It’s what comes after the identification of beliefs I have had trouble with. So, let’s first talk about identifying false beliefs that run the show of our lives long after the danger is gone.
How Do We Identify Those Beliefs?
I call this part the detective work. I call it detective work because the link between our thoughts/feelings/(behaviours/actions) and our negative self-beliefs isn’t always obvious. For example, if you tend to lose your patience and fly off the handle every time you call your kid for supper and are met with “in a minute” or “I just need to do/finish…”. Clearly, this is not a life-threatening situation but your body sure is reacting like it is. Anytime you “lose it”, you are in FFF, and have “chosen” the first option, (F)ight, as a response. But why? “Why is that so upsetting to me? What does it mean to me?” Through questioning and exploration, we may come to discover that when your child responds in that way, you take it as them being dismissive. Dismissive of your efforts to feed them nutritious food, and thus showing them love. Perhaps you also see it as them being unappreciative of your time, effort, and care.
If these are your realizations, you can then ask yourself a difficult question: “What am I making this mean about me?”
“What does that mean about me?”
“What message am I receiving through those actions?”
“What is my child telling me?”
Of course, rationally, we are tempted to say “nothing”. “This doesn’t mean anything about me, my child is simply being dismissive, unappreciative, and ungrateful.” But if we listen carefully to what we are REALLY saying, the story might be different.
Small Apple Problem, Small Apple Reaction…So Why The Big Apple Reaction To The Small Apple Problem?
Behind any reaction that is disproportional to the level of threat, there is a belief. One we likely acquired in childhood. We are likely reacting to the past, and not the situation at hand. Let me repeat that. When my reaction to an event is not proportional to the level of threat, I am reacting to the past, not the present.
Continuing with our example, perhaps you are responding from the part of you that believes the love you are showing is not being returned, your authority is being questioned, and you are not appreciated. “My child is dismissing me.” Subconsciously, all of this takes you back to a time when your parents neglected to meet your needs…to be seen, heard, appreciated, validated, to simply have feelings and own them.
That’s the detective work. Knowing what false truths we believe about ourselves is a beautiful thing. It creates awareness and it helps us understand our behaviours. Unfortunately, awareness and understanding alone are often not enough to create meaningful change. Why not? And if it’s not enough, then what? What does that even mean? If we follow our example, does it imply that every time you are faced with a situation that activates in you the belief that you are invisible, you will freak out? The short answer is “yes”.
This is where it gets tricky, and very interesting. THIS is where I refuse to believe we are stuck with old programming and can’t ever move beyond it!!
Triggers
If we endorse the idea that the beliefs we have acquired to keep ourselves safe in childhood are stuck in our subconscious mind, that they cannot be accessed, and that they cannot be modified, then all we can really do is work with controlling the activation of those signals/messages from the environment that are perceived as threatening. These signals that fail the test yet are perceived danger (not real threats) are called triggers. We’ve all heard of triggers. “His behaviour triggers me.”, “Dishonesty is a trigger for me.”, “I felt triggered.”, “Small spaces trigger me.”…
Again, IF we believe the “programs” can’t change, then all we can really do is either avoid “triggers” (i.e. make sure I avoid all situations that might activate in me a belief I acquired in childhood) or prepare for them (i.e. train myself to react calmly to “triggers” that make me feel like I’m dying). Both of those options feel very discouraging to me. Here’s why.
Landmines
Let’s imagine our triggers and associated beliefs are like landmines. If you step on a mine, it explodes. The same way running into your triggers in the world makes you figuratively explode. Every run in with a trigger causes a stress response and ensuing FFF life-saving reaction. With so many landmines, it becomes difficult to navigate. You step on figurative mines all the time, and feel completely out of control. Hence the state of chronic anxiety.
Now, let’s say you become very self-aware or go to therapy and together, you and your therapist identify your erroneous beliefs, the ones that trigger you. You think: “Great! Instead of blindly walking through this explosive field, I have an awareness of what types of situations trigger me.”
As mentioned a moment ago, the next logical steps are to either avoid those types of situations or prepare for them. So, in continuing with our analogy, the awareness of our beliefs is like being on the field but being given a map of where the landmines are. If I am allowed to walk very slowly, watch every step while following this precious map, then all is golden, I can avoid the mines and thus will survive the journey. But what if I’m on that field and I’m distracted? Engaged in an activity? Someone starts chasing me? I can no longer carefully scan my environment. In such a state, even if I know where the mines are, it would be very difficult to dodge them all. We can think of those distractions as the unpredictability of everyday life. Things happen all the time, every moment, whether it be getting cut off in traffic, losing keys, a tantruming child, a dropped birthday cake, a personal betrayal, …they all happen!
Keeping the analogy in mind, let’s look at the two options we have outlined when it comes to our real-life triggers:
Avoiding
By its very nature, avoiding anything requires vigilance. You need to be aware of what is coming at you at all times. So, if your chief complaint is anxiety, and your strategy is avoiding triggers that set off your anxiety, and the way to achieve that is through vigilance, well, you are taking your already, by definition, hypervigilant self and asking it to be constantly vigilant about possible threats. That’s exhausting.
There is actually another danger associated with the elaboration of strategies to avoid triggers. To successfully achieve avoidance, you need to be in control. You need to control your environment and your mental state. You might develop routines that help you do that, like picking a very particular bedtime, a pre-bedtime routine (avoid your phone an hour before, have a calming cup of tea), or make all your own food from scratch with organic ingredients only. That doesn’t sound so dangerous, what is the big deal? The problem is, if we are already anxious, we likely associate control with safety. And that is a slippery slope. The more we control, the more we may want to control, and eventually, anything we can’t control will likely throw us off. Control can become obsessive when used as a coping tool. Or if some things we are trying to control are incompatible, we may be thrown into a state of panic. For example, let’s imagine my coveted routine indicates that I need to make all my food from scratch, but I also need to go to bed at 9PM. It is 8PM, I haven’t made food for tomorrow’s lunch, and I don’t have time to do it before my coveted bedtime. The idea of having to choose between two elements I’m attempting to control, namely making my own food and respecting my bedtime, will likely throw me into a panic. My safety plans are incompatible with each other!
Preparing
We have looked at the implications of avoiding triggers and the vigilance and energy required to do so. What about preparing? Can we prepare for those triggers and thus not get hijacked by them?
Preparing for possible triggers that initiate the stress response involves being highly aware of your thought patterns, understanding the intricate relationship between them and your feelings, and your behaviours. To prepare for those possibilities, you need to practice. So essentially, you need to imagine what you would do, how you would think, and how you would respond in the event of a known trigger. You practice this in a safe space, when you are feeling relatively calm. In this safe space, you become intimate with these interrelationships so you can catch yourself in your escalation if you start going off the rails. And that is the tricky part. Because when you go “live”, out of “practice mode”, your triggers are the messages you receive from the environment and that are subsequently matched with an entry in your database…thus alarms go off and the message doesn’t make its way into the evolved parts of the brain where you store strategies, knowledge, learnings! Therefore, the stress response may be activated before you even have the chance to reflect and access what you have practiced. Even if you know better, and there is a part of you that knows you aren’t in mortal danger, the part of you that is in charge in that moment, the amygdala, doesn’t know that. And so it does what it knows how to do to keep you alive.
In a moment of panic, the practice exercises that were done and rehearsed in the safety of a calm moment, are completely inaccessible. It gets even worse. Let’s say your practice was repeated 20 times, with all sorts of different variables, and you worked really hard at mastering your reaction. Then, when the real situation comes up, you are hijacked by your stress response and react the way you always have. What are you left with? Feelings of failure, discouragement, and doom. “I did it again, I knew better, yet I still snapped”. Or if you know you get triggered when interacting with your children, you read an amazing parenting book, understand and endorse all of the strategies it suggests, feel ready and unstoppable, excited for the next moment your child does the thing he does that drives you crazy…only to be met with your usual reaction. What are you left with there? “Even when I know exactly what to do, and why it’s important for my child’s well-being, my relationship with my child, and my own mental health, I still fail, I am hopeless.” In both cases, your reaction came as a result of what was going on in the amygdala. It all took place before the environmental signal (trigger) even made it to the part of the brain where your strategies are stored.
Needless to say, both options, avoiding and preparing, require lots of work and have questionable success rates, along with the possibility of additional feelings of failure and worthlessness, to add to the pile of negative beliefs you may already hold true about yourself.
Part 3: What Else Can I Do About It?
I just described how I think the strategies of avoiding and preparing can feel discouraging. So, now what? What do we do if these solutions fail to help us feel better and thus do better?
First, here is why I think your body is very resistant to changing its mind despite the nudging and the practice. In short, every time we are triggered, we reinforce what our body thinks is working.
We have seen that every time we are triggered, or in other words, every time a negative belief we hold true about ourselves is activated, we experience a stress response. The stress response is your body’s response to a threat, real or perceived, and thus a lack of safety. So, by extension, keeping in mind your body doesn’t know the difference between true danger and a perceived threat, your body thinks it saves your life every time this combination of activated belief –> stress response is initiated. Your body’s reasonable conclusion is IT WORKS!!!! Every time it happens, YOU SURVIVE!!!! It hasn’t NOT worked a single time. In your body’s opinion, it has never failed you. Going into FFF every time you feel invisible has never killed you. So, your body sees this activation of the stress response and ensuing reactions as a HUGE SUCCESS, a VICTORY!!!!
So why, oh why would it want to stop doing that? It has no idea your personal growth is stumped and your life is overwhelmingly burdened and limited by the existence of these reactions! It is only interested in your survival, and it is succeeding. From your body’s point of view, there is absolutely no problem! And here is where it all comes together. Our very last NOW WHAT??????
Solution: The Body
Remember our analogy about the landmines? How you aren’t free to walk down the beautiful field? There are hidden land mines everywhere and they will explode if you step on them? And how knowing what your beliefs/triggers are and thus trying to avoid them is analogous to being given a map of the location of the landmines? And how difficult a job that can be, especially if there are other things going on around you? What if we could clear that field of the landmines instead of simply trying to follow a map and constantly tread with caution?
Here's the good news. Your body is a perfect map of your subconscious mind. Some go as far as saying your body IS your subconscious mind. The reason we convince ourselves we can’t change anything in our subconscious mind because it is “programmed” and all we can do is “run the programs” is simply because we are ill equipped to communicate with that part of ourselves. We don’t know how to interact with our subconscious mind. Or more precisely, we have forgotten. It is my belief that in a long ago that is not that long ago as far as evolution goes, people communicated easily with their subconscious mind. And the main vehicle for that communication was the body.
So What Does This Tell Me About Changing My Beliefs So I Can Be Free?
Short Answer: Everything
We know that the sheer activation of a negative self-belief we hold as true elicits a stress response. We now also know that we can send signals to our body about the state of our environment. What if we could activate the belief, invite the stress response (it will actually invite itself because it is our current programmed reaction), but THEN, send signals to the body telling it everything is okay, and that we are safe?!
How Would That Change Anything?
It creates an anomaly. A glitch in the matrix. A set of conditions that is impossible to obtain in a situation of actual mortal danger! How?
Once again, what happens every time a negative self-belief is activated? Alarms go off and you are met with the stress response. But also, every time that happens, you survive!! What does your body learn as a result? It learns that the response works. Old news, we’ve talked about that already.
Now. What if you could access the belief (the belief that sets off the alarm and ensuing stress response), and create conditions where the body can come down from its stress response while the belief is still active? Then it would, for the first time ever, create a mismatch. You could be in the presence of the belief, and in the presence of the parasympathetic response (Rest & Digest) at the exact same time! These physiological conditions are actually impossible in the face of true danger. So what would the body learn? “Wait a minute, I found a match to this environmental signal in the database, set off the alarms, prepared appropriately, then the system got dismantled, the defense collapsed, and yet we are still alive and operational … hmmm … something’s not adding up. Maybe this trigger should not be in the database after all. From now on, when faced with this particular trigger (activated negative self-belief), we don’t need to go into lockdown mode. We can let this, now benign, signal from the environment continue its way through the brain.” And that is when the database removes an entry from its list of known triggers. The previous program dealing with the trigger is useless. So, no more avoiding, no more preparing, it’s just gone, released, healed.
What does that look like in real life? The next time your child ignores you when you invite him to the supper table, you won’t need to verbally pounce on him like your life depends on it because you feel invisible. Invisibility is no longer a trigger with an associated survival strategy. You do not feel agitated and can calmly talk to your child about the implications of his action, and the message he might be sending by acting as such, just like the fabulous parenting book taught you.
AMAZING! Now How Do I Create Those Conditions?
Part 4: Creating The Conditions For Healing
Now that we have all the ingredients, it is incredibly simple to put it all together.
First, a tiny bit of terminology:
1) Cognitive approaches to therapy are rooted in the concept that the way we think affects how we feel. Therefore, these approaches rely on the possibility that if we can think differently, we can feel differently. Inevitably, we will also act differently.
2) Somatic approaches to therapy use the body as an entry point for communication, or as a vehicle for change and thus healing. And, as discussed earlier, the body is a map for the subconscious mind.
As previously established, identifying our negative beliefs is a great first step to healing. Cognitive approaches can elegantly lend themselves to the identification of such beliefs by questioning our thoughts and associated feelings and behaviours. The problem we tend to run into is that when the beliefs are activated, the stress response and corresponding hijack aren’t too far behind. And because of that, avoiding and preparing offer their own sets of challenges.
However, once the beliefs are identified, we have learned that the body can send some calming signals indicating that although the belief was once (likely in childhood) associated with a threat (i.e. being invisible = surviving), it no longer serves that purpose, and every time our stress response is activated as a result of accessing this belief, nothing dangerous happens…but we suffer the debilitating consequence of chronic anxiety, stumped growth, a limited life in the body of a limitless creature, and a detachment from our authentic self, which is the true expression of our existence. And this is where somatic approaches are a game changer.
How Does This Play Out In A Therapeutic Environment?
Once a trusting relationship is established between therapist and client, one where the client feels safe, we do some detective work with the help of cognitive approaches. Once we can identify belief(s) with associated thoughts, feelings, related experiences, and physical manifestations, we welcome the inevitable stress response, which will elicit in the client a mild to moderate level of distress. The therapist skillfully titrates the input to avoid retraumatization. The goal is healing and liberation, not suffering…the client has likely done enough of that to get where they are at.
Then, with the help of somatic approaches, focused on the body’s response, we create conditions that interrupt the stress response and return the body to its parasympathetic state (Rest & Digest). This sends the signal that it is possible for the belief to be activated and for the body to remain calm simultaneously, which in turn indicates that the presence of said belief is NOT an actual threat, and therefore can safely be deleted from the database, and I can act calmly and rationally in situations that would have previously triggered its activation. Being in the presence of a yelling boss no longer sends the signal that “I could die!!” and thus must shut down or run away. In fact, I can be empowered, speak my truth, request respect, and have a lovely conversation!
What do somatic approaches all have in common? In short, they bring in signals of safety under conditions where danger has been perceived since the birth of the particular activating belief.
What we can do with somatic approaches is access that program (the belief and/or associated strategy), and the associated danger response (and all of its familiar discomfort), and simultaneously, send calming signals to your body with a variety of body based techniques, from breathing deeply to tapping points on your body, to moving your eyes in certain ways, to holding points taking advantage of the electromagnetic properties of your body. What this does is that it puts your body in a state of relative calm that would be physiologically impossible to achieve under actual threat, in a true life-threatening situation. And then big shifts tend to happen. The key to the healing is not so much in the exact somatic technique being used but rather to the simultaneous activation of the belief (through the vehicle of thought, memory, experience, behaviour, emotion, physical sensation, etc.), stress response, AND the parasympathetic state achieved with the timely application of somatic techniques.
A marriage of cognitive approaches for belief identification and somatic approaches for the modification of the identified beliefs allow for the processing and releasing of negative self-beliefs, obsolete survival strategies, and associated thoughts, feelings, and behaviours. In turn, these liberating shifts create healing resulting in states of peace, freedom, increased calm, joy, and an authentic expression of the self.
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