The Therapy Edit - Ask Anna - will I ever find a way to overcome my trauma?

Episode Date: November 25, 2024

In this Monday episode of the brand new Ask Anna series, Anna is joined by Nahid de Belgeonne, Nervous System Whisperer, Author and Burnout, Anxiety and Trauma coach.Together Anna and Nahid tackle the following question: "About trauma . . . Does it affect your brain/ change how you think forever? I’ve had significant trauma, I’ve been to talking therapy and had EMDR. I can see massive improvements, but I wonder has it changed the core of me/ who I am/ how I think. Do you truly ever find a way to ‘get over it’?"Do you have an Ask Anna question you'd like to submit for future episodes? Or an anonymous confession? Visit the website to learn how Learn more with Nahid at the following links:website: https://www.thehumanmethod.co.uk/thesootheprogrammeselfpacednewsletter:https://nahiddebelgeonne.substack.cominstagram: @thehumanmethodukBook: SoothePlease note - the names and voices of some of the Ask Anna/Confessions contributors may have been changed at their request.

Welcome to The Therapy Edit. I'm your host, Psychotherapist and author Anna Martha. I will be bringing you bite-sized episodes twice a week full of tips, wise words from expert guests and insights to support your mental well-being. Hi everyone. Welcome to today's episode of The Therapy Edit. And today we have another Ask Anna question. Now this one is it's going to feel really relevant for anyone that has just been through a therapy edit. a really tough time. Maybe you've tried things and you've been to therapy. Perhaps you've read loads of books and consumed loads of podcasts, but you just feel stuck. Maybe you're asking, is this just how I'm going to be now? Is this as far as I can go in addressing this? So this question will feel really relevant for you. And I'm really excited because I have a guest expert with me. And sometimes when I get guests experts on, I get to explore a whole other person

I haven't yet found on social media. So I'm really excited to have with me, Nahid de Beljean. She's a nervous system whisperer. She is the author of Sooth, which very quickly went on my reading list. And it's called The Book Your Nervous System has been waiting for. And I think as I even looked at the book and read the description, I felt my shoulders drop. And the nervous system is something that over the last few years, I have had an immense interest in and have really woven throughout my work. So I can't wait to hear from her. And her passion is really supporting you and restoring your nervous system from stress, anxiety, burnout and trauma. And she is on Instagram as the human method. So it's great to have you here, Nahed. I think I could have chatted to you for ages before

I even hit hit record today. So tell us a little bit about what makes your heart, you know, what makes you feel really passionate, what sets your heart on fire? What do you love? I think it's the ability to be able to shape shift no matter where you are in life. I think that just gives me such hope and joy because, you know, like most people I got into this world, because I was looking to resolve things for myself.

You know, I come from a family that was quite dysregulated. And so I was a real seeker, seeking out all of those practices. And I think the things in our culture that we do is we work too much at it. We're always doing more and more and more and more. And I think that's very confusing for your system because it just feels like punishment and the never-ending to-do list. But actually, this work is all about, it's very revelatory, it's very compassionate, and it's all about unlearning, not doing and sensing more. Yeah, you're so right.

I mean, I have a whole bookshelf out of shot that I'm looking at that is literally, I mean, I've got so many books on all of the things that I have wanted to address. It might be parenting. It might be kind of anxiety. And I think sometimes it's in the reading and the layering on of more and more information that we're kind of pressuring ourselves to remember in these moments. moments where we're actually feeling quite stressed and it's quite hard to recall things. So you're saying actually you're passionate about helping people kind of strip back some of

those layers and just, yeah, unlearn and maybe tap into. Yeah, and feel more so that you are really sensing where you are at a given moment. And of course, knowledge is great. You know, I'm an avid reader and I've also got a burgeoning bookshelf that I can see at the corner of my eye. But we're very good in our culture. at collecting content but we're not very good at embodying it and so that's where my work steps

and it's the bridge between knowing what you walk to do and actually feeling into it. Oh, because do you think sometimes we read loads of stuff and we want to find loads of tools so actually we don't have to feel because I do feel like there's so much in our culture

that says, oh no, you don't have to feel like this, do this, numb that, you know, drink this scroll and then forget, have a Netflix binge and switch off, but you're saying actually this is about feeling. Yeah, I think we're overstimulated. We have too much stuff coming at us all the time and your brain needs some rest and it needs time to process. So again, I am an avid reader and I love knowledge, but you need to give yourself the space to be able to process that knowledge because you can't actually learn and do at the same time your brain needs to kind of make sense of what you've just kind of taken in

and I think that's quite powerful because if you understand that maybe you wouldn't feel so guilty in daydreaming or not doing or pondering or being curious and actually I think curiosity is our superpower and kind of really thinking about Well, how am I responding in this moment? You know, self-reflection.

And again, something that we very rarely have a lot of time for, is such an important part of being human. Yeah, that self-reflection, that's stillness, and reframing those restful moments as actually being really nourishing and they are productive because we're percolating and we're wondering and so much creativity happens as well, doesn't it? when we slow down?

Yeah, absolutely. Darwin used to have a little thinking path. So he'd work for maybe three hours in the day and then he'd go off and look at this little thinking path in his garden to think about what he had done. And I just thought that was so beautiful. Wouldn't it be lovely to have councils building us little thinking paths outside houses and offices?

Yeah, the movement is something so meditative. I always go for a walk and I'm stuck with something or I'm trying to think of a book title or I've got to a place in a bit of writing where I just don't really know where to go from and I think we seem to have gotten to this rut or we just think, right, I need to try harder, I need to consume more then.

I haven't got quite the right bit when actually when we just take that space, we often find that it just emerges from inside of us where it already is. Yeah, absolutely. You've got the space and the time to get creative and to ponder what you've already done. Yeah, absolutely.

Brilliant. Well, thank you so much for joining me. And I can't wait to kind of, yeah, just, I think your book's just going to feel like such a gift. And I can't wait to read it. But the question that we have today in the form of a voice note is all about trauma. And I'm going to play that now. Anna, I'd love to ask you about trauma. Does it affect your brain, change how you think forever? I've had significant trauma. I've been. been to talking therapy and had EMDR, I can see massive improvements, but I wonder, has it changed the core of me, who I am, how I think? Do you truly ever find a way to get over it? So here's someone, Heed, who's just done so much, tried so much, done EMDR, which is quite, is quite a really proactive therapy, and seen lots of improvement, but it's just wondering, will I ever find a way to get over it? Will I ever find? Will I ever feel like me again? What would you want to say to this listener? Well, first of all, the thing to

remember is that the idea of you shifts and changes over time. So it's quite important to not compare ourselves to something that we once were. You're going to be changing all the time anyway. But here's something really interesting. When you think about the thing that you've been through and you identify with that, you are unwittingly training your nervous system to stay like that. You don't mean it, I understand that, but that's what's happening. So really what you want to do is you want to start introducing new experiences to your nervous system. And what that does is you can't really unlearn things, but you can just have layer and layer and layer upon it new experiences. And I'll give you an example of that. So I had a client who had quite a traumatic

childhood, and she was also held by her therapist as well, and her therapist referred her to me. And it was really interesting because the client didn't really have, she had deep shame, she didn't really have the words to explain to her therapist, what were the dark corners and you know how something had happened to her and she wasn't quite aware of what it was and she didn't have to talk about it because she just wasn't aware of her and we work together how I work is I will watch you I'm guiding you verbally and then I might say to you do you notice that your fingers are really held very tightly and so you might have heard of the book the body keeps a score yeah I love that's been updated to your brain keeps the score but your body is the

score card. So while it isn't true that you hold emotions in your body, because muscles are dumb, you know, they have no intelligence, they only know to contract or let go. What is true, I believe, is that you hold the patterns of that emotion. So if you're feeling very anxious and you grip your fist or something happened to you and that was your pattern there, you might not have let that go. So I'm looking at that. So I might say to you, do you notice your fingers, you know, do you notice what's happening? And as soon as you shift, your brain to something else. It has to, or it's slowly over time, let's go of any effort that you don't need, because that's going to take your energy. So your brain is really

interested and will shift its focus if you give it something new and you move. So I'm working with those two things to kind of take your focus away from your patterns of that traumatic incidence. So yeah, you absolutely can move on and you can move on. And you can move on in more, you know, very revelatory and interesting ways so that you become more attentive to how you respond. And when you do that, you absolutely own that space so that you're not reliant in lots of different people kind of telling you what to do or a process or a system, all of which are very, very useful. But sometimes we forget, don't we, we were in the moment and we get gripped by that old, you know, behaviour. But if you notice it and then you,

you introduce something to disrupt it, you can totally dissipate it. And I think that's a more interesting way to look at it, but it has no longer has the grip over you and your behaviours. So it's observing some of the more kind of physical patterns that we might have kind of, yeah, that we might have implemented over time and just giving ourselves that opportunity to, to change them. Yeah, exactly. And I'll tell you why it works, because your whole system, it might be helpful if I explain the nervous system. I was going to say, yeah, because for me, it's second nature to be talking about the nervous system, but there was a point where I was like, but isn't it just some nerves?

You know, and actually there will be many people listening and tell me more about the nervous system. Okay, so a really easy way to think about your nervous system is it's your brain, it's your spinal call that travels through your spine. So nerves that go out from that into your organs and the rest of your body and back from your organs and body to your spinal cord and your brain. So what it is, in fact, is this continuous looping of information that goes in and out, and it's just doing that all of the time. Generally, if you have a pain pattern or a trauma pattern, what's really highlighted in

your nervous system is that pattern. So what my work does is it shifts you from that thought, that focus. And so it's recognising your patterns. Your patterns also could be holding your breath? Yeah. It could be even that. And as soon as you soothe the system and let it release from that grip, you then have the space to go, okay, am I really in danger here? So if you think of your whole system, actually like a fishing net, if you've got to pull on one part of it, it's going to influence the whole. So any little thing that I might do with myself to hold myself in a certain position is going to affect my ability to be at peace and to be calm and not to be anxious or exhausted or whatever my patterns are. And it's really interesting during

COVID as well. Obviously, lots of people were coming to me. Everyone was really worried. And lots of people were coming to me with this sort of pattern where they were just feeling very, very anxious, their head was forwards. It's almost like you're trying to close in on yourself because you're feeling so anxious. And also that, you know, the idea we weren't allowed to look at anyone or move, you know, going towards anyone. So it just made us really retreat. When you move into a pattern like that, you're having quite a huge effect on your physiology.

So first of all, your muscles contract across the chest. And your head is forwards of your spine. So there's a lot of weight coming down on your internal organs. That's going to obviously send lots of signals to the internal body. Your breaths might become shorter because you're not breathing all the way fully into your lungs. So all of these things are going to kind of intensify your feelings of, you know, anxiety, stress, trauma, whatever is that you're going through. Because we used to think we were a brain with a body, but actually we now know we're more a body with a brain. So there's more messages coming from your body to your brain than the other way around.

And then your brain just reinforces that. So if you're in this position, you're thinking, I'm anxious. Your brain goes, yeah, you're anxious. Let's grip and hold even more. tightly to keep you safe. And so it's disrupting those patterns. It's, it's recognizing them, noticing them, becoming aware of them, and then having a whole toolkit to kind of disrupt that. And right is really powerful for that. This is so helpful. So it's almost as if the listener who's asked this question has said, you know, I've had this trauma. I've been to talking

therapy. I've had EMDR. I see lots of improvements. But you know, I feel kind of stuck still. And it's, so you kind of saying that it's as if in that trauma, she was in a kind of maybe quite a physical brace position. Because as you were talking, you were holding that position that I think we all know is really familiar, these kind of like hunched shoulders, the kind of folding in on ourselves a little bit, almost like we're trying to hold ourselves.

But it's a bit like that brace position, isn't it? We're kind of waiting for the next attack. We're waiting for the next thing to come. at us and we can kind of live from that place so are you saying that maybe this amazing listener has had this therapy has come to maybe a whole load of insights and understanding but actually there's something physically for her that is still just braced as if things aren't safe like she knows the trauma's past but actually it still feels like she's waiting exactly that cognitively you know the trauma has passed.

You know, she sounds like she's like lots of great therapies that have moved her on and got her to hear. But she's still holding on to something. And the reason being is when you were a baby, you would have responded to things with your whole self. You wouldn't have made a distinction between your mind and your body because there is no distinction. So what that means is you would have moved towards your caregiver's voice and you would have moved

away from loud noises. So it's pre-language, isn't it? How you look after yourself is pre-language. And your nervous system hasn't, you know, the structure of it is exactly the same. It's working exactly the same way. So there's, I would be very interested to look at this person and kind of look at where they're holding patterns are and just to slowly see if we can help her to unpick them. And it just gives you a lot of, because we're very good at externalising,

aren't we, you know, our care, you know, we feel bad about something so we buy things. You know, it might be a yoga mat. Generally, I don't know about you, Anna, but as soon as you start something new, what's the first thing you do, you buy? And say, you mean, it's like I have all these things to make myself into this person that I want to be. But actually, this is much softer and gentler than that, because it's just asking you to listen in so that you can then have agency over your own care. and decide what it is that you need.

So I'll give you a really good example. A client had non-epaleptic seizures because she had lots of trauma in her background. I didn't really know what that was. I didn't need to know. I'm looking at you off purely from a physical, you know, movement perspective. Which actually is all, you know,

that's exactly how we interact with our environment. So it's so much bigger than, you know, movement. It's so much bigger than we give it credit to. And this particular client would go into a seizure every time she was alarmed. She was very addicted to kind of high excitement things like, you know, spinning. She'd go after spin and she'd go mountain biking with her partner. But it also meant that because of these seizures, she wasn't ever on her own. She would have, somebody would always have to go out with her,

which is, you know, she was in her 50s by the time she came to see me. And she was very just run down by it and just felt very despondent about, is this going to be the rest of her life? And after six sessions, I was able to get her to interrupt the first signs of the seizure. So to actually listen in for the first signs of the seizure, because generally for most of us, we don't go from naught to add, or actually we do because we're not listening to all of those little signals that we get before that happens.

And those signals could be sweaty palms. You might get a bit tenser. Your breath might get shorter. So whatever little signals that you personally have is kind of really listening out for them. And that way we kind of really make you a lot more resilient. We sort of build out, you'll expand your window of tolerance so that you are able to sense and enjoy much kind of bigger things without them sending you into this learned behavior, this response that you've learned once upon the time ago, which was really useful then.

It saved you then, but you no longer need it. So that's what we're looking at. It's how can I interrupt the things that happen to me when I'm clearly not in danger? So it's the, you know, it's the questioning, am I in danger? Is there a reason for my shoulders to be up here? Is there a reason for me to be holding my breath? If not, let's let that go. So maybe this listener and anyone else listening, and I think even me sitting here,

you know, I'm recognising where I'm kind of like hunched in and I'm kind of leaning towards the mic a little bit, but there's, it makes me feel different when I just sit a little bit taller. It makes me feel different when I just breathe a little bit deeper. And I think sometimes we don't even realize how these little habits that we have physically are impacting how we feel emotionally. So if anyone's feeling a little bit stuck and they, they've been doing the therapy and they've kind of done a lot of soul searching, a lot of reading, a lot of, you know, you're just encouraging them to look at what are the patterns in your body, what, where might it look like or feel actually you're holding yourself in a slight kind of brace position or

you're not breathing deeply and fully because we breathe kind of shallowly, don't we? We breathe kind of high up in our chest and we're feeling threatened when we're moving to that fight or flight. And it's with noticing that we are presented with a choice. choice, aren't we? Yes. To just disrupt it and do something differently. So anything else that people listening might, that you feel are quite common ways that we just kind of move through life

in that protective brace position when actually it could benefit us to disrupt that and present ourselves or move in a way that is displaying more of a sense, that sense of safety that actually cognitively we know we're, safe in this moment. So how can we embody that a bit more? Well, first of all, our culture puts us in a position that mimics the freeze response. And I suggest that most of us are in the freeze response because, you know, we don't really fight, do we? If you're stuck at your desk in the office and you've got loads and loads of stresses coming at you, which are more psychological, you can't really run. So actually, we're generally in the freeze response, I feel. And sitting down for long

periods. It's not the sitting down per se, it's for being stuck for a long period in the same position, is sending signals to your nervous system that you are in an alarmed state. Your body doesn't care. Is it anxiety? Is it stress? Is it a trauma issue? It doesn't really care what it is. It just knows it's either alarmed or it's not alarmed. Now, the most appropriate thing to do with the spike of chemical that you get when you're in a alarm state, which is cortisol, is to move without. You really don't want to be sitting with lots of cortisol in your body. It's very inflammatory for the internal body. So the best thing to do is move. So if you get an email coming in and it just makes you kind of cuss and your shoulders come up here, the best thing to

do is get up and just shake it all out. And if you do that repeatedly throughout your day, you will find that by the end of the day, you haven't attached yourself to those patterns. You've let go of those muscular tension so that you can have a good night's sleep because how many of us kind of have this build up and build up and build up of alarm throughout the day. And by the time you go to bed, you're really tight and anxious and you just, you know, it's impossible, you know, exactly all the disaster recipe to have a good night's sleep. So they're constantly moving and getting out of you is really powerful and just kind of thinking, oh, that thing that I've just scene has actually really shocked me. So I'm going to go for a little bit of a walk around the

garden or around the block or just shake it out. Or I've just noticed that this piece of news that I heard or this deadline that I've just received has made me hold my breath. So I'm just going to soothe myself and start to breathe again. Things like touch, you know, even touching yourself, incredibly soothing. This slow touch is really soothing for the system. So just finding things for you to do with movement, really, that will just help to disrupt that response, I think is incredibly important. Oh, this is, yeah, it's so helpful. And it's making me think of my kids, because I think they do that instinctively. You know, they're in their feelings stressed. They want a hug. Or I'll see my, you know, my son will kind of be playing with his hands or, you know,

when they've got feelings, they'll move, they don't sit down. And I think, yeah, we kind of suppress that over the years, don't we? So it's kind of re-engaging, as you say, kind of un-learning though. We've got to sit down. We've got a stiff upper lip. It's this kind of suppression really of we've got cortisol in our body. It's the hormone. It's a chemical. And we need to kind of diffuse it and move it around so that we can kind of metabolize it. Otherwise, it's going to be sitting there and we're going to lie down. It's going to be fizzing away. So this is so helpful. So, yeah, lots of really practical tips there. So it's been wonderful chatting to you. And I really encourage everyone to go like me and grab a copy of Soothe, which is Nehid's book. And the book your nervous system

has been waiting for. And I imagine that it's got so much of this in there, just learning and understanding how emotions are sitting in our bodies and how when we're feeling stuck, the answer may not be about reading another book or listening to yet another podcast it may well just be about tuning in and thinking where am I how am I holding myself what how am I responding in these moments of stress how how am I comforting myself when I'm when these feelings rise up um yeah just so so helpful and I hope that was really encouraging for the listener that that has been through that trauma and yeah just my get her thinking about some of those ways that she might be bracing herself,

that perhaps it's that reminder, you know, I'm safe now. I'm safe now. I wasn't, but I'm safe now. How can I embody that a little bit more? How can I disrupt some of that, that physical holding and bracing? So, yeah, thank you so much. Thank you for coming on for your soothing words and your soothing book. And I'm, yeah, go and find an heed over on Instagram at the Human

method but she's also got a substack which I've just been exploring and really really loving so I'm going to go and find the heed on there which I'm sure there's more of your beautiful words and kind of gentle education there too thank you so much lovely to speak thank you for listening to the therapy edit today if you enjoyed it please do take a sec to like and subscribe so we can share the words further and wider if you have an ask and a question or an anonymous confession for the Confessions from the Therapy Room episodes, head to anamatha.com and click on the podcast tab to submit. Want more? Grab a copy of my most recent book, The Uncomfortable Truth. Change your life by taming 10 of your mind's greatest fears or enjoy some of the video and downloadable

resources on my website, tackling everything from burnout to driving anxiety. So until the next episode, goodbye.