I got my first job as a clinical psychologist in 2011 at a PTSD clinic in Sweden. There I realized that it seems to be in the extreme worlds that we can get the clearest understanding of human behavior. It is in worlds where people are forced to feel or act based on extreme emotions that we can understand how emotions affect the body and how our way of dealing with them affects us.
For those of you who have ever owned a dog, it is clear what an impact the first time in a dog's life has on the dog's behavior later in life. Just like dogs, people are conditioned during their first time in life to a certain type of behavior and adapt to a certain type of environment.
If you are exposed to emotional neglect, unpredictability or even violence early on, your nervous system will associate such environments with safety, even if they are actually anything but safe. You will also form an opinion about life and your role in it based on your first encounter with life.
Your external reality is a reflection of your internal reality. If your life is chaotic, it is a clue to the chaos that is going on inside you. But you will not hear your internal chaos screaming as long as the external chaos drowns it out.
It is only when the external environment calms down that the anxious movement inside is felt, which most people with trauma have difficulty coping with. They therefore immediately engage in various distractions so that the movement outside the body is noticed more than the internal one again. In this way, you ensure that you continue to live in the environment you grew up in and are used to, and prevent the body from getting used to peace and quiet.
This requires that you first let your anxious feelings get used to the fact that your body is a safe place to live in. It is only when you put up with your feelings that your body can gradually calm down. You can then stop running through life and start mastering the ability to stay.
Many people I meet are unaware of how they unconsciously choose to return to environments, situations, feelings, and behaviors that perpetuate the bad feelings for which they seek my help. As Carl Jung said
"Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life, and you will call it fate"
I would like to say that it doesn't matter how many emotional breakdowns from difficult events in your childhood you have or how many psychedelic trips you take to influence the body's standardized thought pathways, if you still go back to the life that perpetuates the previous programming. It is not enough to have moments of calm through meditation or moving to the country.
To change from the ground up, you need to clear your life of what drains you or takes attention away from yourself, which can be about people as well as environments. Then you have a greater opportunity to face what has not previously been faced in yourself and slowly but systematically get used to being a safe home for your emotions to live in.
Such a process is not for everyone as it can mean that you potentially lose everything you previously saw as your security and that you know, without knowing what you will get instead.
But as I see it, it is precisely this uncertainty that is the very factor that makes you about to change. It is precisely in the jump into an uncertain future that you can gain a relationship with the present when you need to adapt to the current circumstances and make decisions in each given moment.
I would like to compare it to the feeling you can get in different types of sports or hobbies. I myself have started skating as part of my awakening to middle age. I experience several moments of pushing my body into uncomfortable positions where it can either fall and hurt itself or manage to adapt to a new life-affirming movement.
It is in the uncertain situation between the old way of moving and the potentially new that I experience fear, joy and courage at the same time. And I mean that it is in this state that the actual reprogramming of your nervous system begins.
For those of you who want to change fundamentally, I have developed an online course called Stop before Start. Many people desire change but without first stopping all the distractions that prevent sustainable change. Instead, they focus directly on the new person they want to become.
But true change that lasts a lifetime requires more than starting with new healthy habits. My experience as a therapist and from my personal life is that you first need to face the difficult feelings that appear when you stop your distractions.
You need to learn to sit with them without acting on them. You need to teach your feelings that the body is a safe home for them. Only then can you start with your new life.
You can buy the course as it is or in combination with supportive coaching sessions.