Seeking self, dropping anchor

The third factor impacting our capacity to regulate is our environment. I find this one really interesting because we can’t always change our environment & we can’t control what happens throughout the day! And nor should we… unfamiliar environments (e.g. a new school, new job etc) & unpredictability (e.g. changes to routine, cancellations etc) can reduce our capacity to regulate (stay calm) but this is not to say they should be avoided! It’s healthy to place ourselves in new spaces with new people & learn how to tolerate the discomfort. It’s also important for us to be equipped to cope with unpredictable changes without falling apart. I think there are two helpful ways to look at this one:  If there are new & unfamiliar places/people occurring throughout our week (inevitable!) then how can we increase familiarity & predictability in other areas of our (or our child’s) day/week to provide some space for grounding ourselves and/or recovering/resting. Becoming more...

The second factor I mentioned impacting our capacity to regulate are emotions. Each person has their own unique relationship with emotions & it can be really helpful to give yourself the space to become more aware of yours. Self-awareness is calming! Most of us develop a baseline understanding of emotions during childhood, often by observing significant adults around us & their reactions to our different expressions of emotions. For example, a lot of clients tell me that for them growing up any expression of anger was responded to with automatic punishment leaving them to this day confused about how best to express anger in relationships & also leaving them highly anxious when faced with another’s anger (eg. Their partner or child). A helpful way to identify which emotions raise anxiety for you is to observe yourself in relational interactions & see what triggers those anxious body responses.  Question for you: Are there any emotions you avoid experiencing? Are you ...

In my last post I talked about how our bodies play a big part in our ability to regulate. A really helpful way to increase our ability to regulate is to become more in tune with what our body is feeling & then being able to use strategies to help counteract that.  For example, when some people begin to feel anxious their bodies are aware of this even before they are! It can start causing us to feel hot & sweaty, or need frequent trips to the toilet, or get an awful headache, or pins & needles in our hands, or tight sore neck muscles… these are all really helpful alerts to tell us that we need to pause before it spirals out of control & we find ourselves in deep panic. I am a big fan of practising very simple mindfulness to help with this - especially body scans, deep breathing exercises & progressive muscle relaxation. If that’s not your thing then something as simple as pausing to take a sip of water, changing your body position, taking a shower, laying on...

I talk a lot about being able to stay calm in the face of distress. That’s good and all… but how do we practically do this? A good place to start is to understand ‘regulation’ - this simply refers to the ability to remain in a calm & alert state without flipping into hyperarousal (e.g. fight/flight) or hypoarousal (e.g. freeze). I’m going to offer some more info on this & ways we can more effectively regulate ourselves over the next few weeks. When we are well regulated we feel ‘within our window of tolerance’ - in other words we can cope with whatever stressful situation pops up in that moment, without throwing us off balance or in a state of disarray. There are many factors that contribute towards our window becoming smaller & therefore more likely for us to respond to stress with overwhelm, including something as simple as the time of day the stress occurs! Some core areas impacting our ability to regulate are: how our body feels, our emotions, our environment & of c...

A colleague I supervise this morning asked me how to understand the discrepancy they observe time & time again between a parent who is describing their child as highly symptomatic & in need of diagnosis - but the clinical team and school have not observed the severity of these symptoms & instead see a relatively well functioning child in other environments.  Murray Bowen’s concept of the family projection process can be very helpful in understanding this presentation. It describes the primary way parents can transmit their emotional problems to a child. This in turn can impair the functioning of the child & increase their vulnerability to clinical symptoms. It follows 3 steps: Parent focuses on a child out of fear that something is wrong with the child.  Parent interprets the child’s behaviour as confirming the fear.  Parent treats the child as if something is really wrong with the child. The parent can then focus on ‘fixing’ the child & clinical servi...