The Covid 19 Pandemic: There has been an increase in anxiety, worry and fear among so many people. However it can be an opportunity for emotional healing, esp. if you have the right tools. Being mindful, moment by moment, bringing ourselves back to "right here, right now," gives us more internal space to cope with our changing feelings. When we worry about the future, whether it's 10 minutes, 1 week or 1 month from now we can feel overwhelmed and even more helpless. Learning to pause and take a breath, then checking in with our body to see which areas are tight or constricted and which may be OK or neutral, allows us to realize that it's not all of us that feels scared or anxious. This makes it possible to acknowledge and be with difficult feelings without having to fix them.
Another helpful resource is Yoga Nidra Meditations:
Try http://yoganidra.flightofheart.com/
Susan Beal who resides in VT. discovered I Rest Yoga Nidra many years ago. Finding it a major help in getting through stressful times, she got trained in it to help others.
Try http://yoganidra.flightofheart.com/
Susan Beal who resides in VT. discovered I Rest Yoga Nidra many years ago. Finding it a major help in getting through stressful times, she got trained in it to help others.
What’s Important in Couples Counseling
Our Relationships and Attachment Repair
Excerpts from article by Diane Poole Heller,Ph.D. & Maggie Phillips,Ph.D.
There’s a lot of hopefulness about Attachment Repair – even though there can be a lot of things that go wrong in early attachment. The research that is being done recently strongly indicates that repair toward Secure Attachment is possible – especially if we can work in the body awareness pre-verbally, nonconceptually, sub-psychologically. We have to access it on that level because it happens before the mind is even in place, before we can have conscious memory.
Most of us in our adult relationships have no idea, in many ways, why we’re doing what we’re doing because it doesn’t even come up as a considered decision. It comes up as more of an instinctive “relational reflex”. This is crucial for us to understand, in our primary relationship in particular, because these “significant other” dyads pull on our original dyadic attachment history with Mom the most. We take things personally – related to how our partner responds – that have nothing to do with us, and in reality, have much more to do with our early caregiver experience. Also we give ourselves a hard time for the reactions we have – and feel we have no control over – because these responses push up from the unconscious leaving us “bewildered and betwixt” about our behavior – especially behaviors we had hoped to change.
So much of our own behavior and so much of our partner’s behavior will just shift into these automatic pre-patterned structures or projections.
The Mother tends to be the whole environment that the child internalizes and these imprints shift into the actual brain structure. In terms of what attachment or bonding styles predict for adult relationship, certainly Secure Attachment predicts – “Secure Attachment” meaning that there’s a safe enough, positive holding environment, which engenders in most of us a sort of unflappable, optimistic expectation and basic trust related to our relationships and the world at large. Basic Trust implies more of an optimistic view that “things will work out, things will eventually be okay, even if I am,
or we are, going through a hard time.”
You’re looking through a template that sees the world as mostly kind, mostly loving, mostly trust-worthy, predominantly safe. Even if things go wrong, with Basic Trust in childhood, you will expect that there’s a reasonable quick repair or recovery and that you’re able to regulate with the Mother in terms of the nervous system, and the child’s nervous system is actually learning how to co-regulate with another human being. Since our human nervous systems are highly social, building that early capacity of interactively regulating is a great advantage we can later take into our adult partner relationships. Secure Attachment allows us to relax in relationship.
Certainly in Secure Attachment there’s emphasis on safety, protection, presence, safe and affectionate touch, kind gaze-to-gaze eye contact, prosody in the voice… and playfulness. Playfulness is a really important part of what builds or restores Secure Attachment.
So the upshot is in our adult relationships, we want to make sure we’re not getting too task-oriented in our hard work-focused culture. It is essential to reserve lots of time out for play. Vacation or some form of playfulness enriches us personally, strengthens our immune system toward better health, deepens our connection to our partner and builds the bridge back to Secure Attachment if either one or both of us had Insecure Attachment as a child.
Our Relationships and Attachment Repair
Excerpts from article by Diane Poole Heller,Ph.D. & Maggie Phillips,Ph.D.
There’s a lot of hopefulness about Attachment Repair – even though there can be a lot of things that go wrong in early attachment. The research that is being done recently strongly indicates that repair toward Secure Attachment is possible – especially if we can work in the body awareness pre-verbally, nonconceptually, sub-psychologically. We have to access it on that level because it happens before the mind is even in place, before we can have conscious memory.
Most of us in our adult relationships have no idea, in many ways, why we’re doing what we’re doing because it doesn’t even come up as a considered decision. It comes up as more of an instinctive “relational reflex”. This is crucial for us to understand, in our primary relationship in particular, because these “significant other” dyads pull on our original dyadic attachment history with Mom the most. We take things personally – related to how our partner responds – that have nothing to do with us, and in reality, have much more to do with our early caregiver experience. Also we give ourselves a hard time for the reactions we have – and feel we have no control over – because these responses push up from the unconscious leaving us “bewildered and betwixt” about our behavior – especially behaviors we had hoped to change.
So much of our own behavior and so much of our partner’s behavior will just shift into these automatic pre-patterned structures or projections.
The Mother tends to be the whole environment that the child internalizes and these imprints shift into the actual brain structure. In terms of what attachment or bonding styles predict for adult relationship, certainly Secure Attachment predicts – “Secure Attachment” meaning that there’s a safe enough, positive holding environment, which engenders in most of us a sort of unflappable, optimistic expectation and basic trust related to our relationships and the world at large. Basic Trust implies more of an optimistic view that “things will work out, things will eventually be okay, even if I am,
or we are, going through a hard time.”
You’re looking through a template that sees the world as mostly kind, mostly loving, mostly trust-worthy, predominantly safe. Even if things go wrong, with Basic Trust in childhood, you will expect that there’s a reasonable quick repair or recovery and that you’re able to regulate with the Mother in terms of the nervous system, and the child’s nervous system is actually learning how to co-regulate with another human being. Since our human nervous systems are highly social, building that early capacity of interactively regulating is a great advantage we can later take into our adult partner relationships. Secure Attachment allows us to relax in relationship.
Certainly in Secure Attachment there’s emphasis on safety, protection, presence, safe and affectionate touch, kind gaze-to-gaze eye contact, prosody in the voice… and playfulness. Playfulness is a really important part of what builds or restores Secure Attachment.
So the upshot is in our adult relationships, we want to make sure we’re not getting too task-oriented in our hard work-focused culture. It is essential to reserve lots of time out for play. Vacation or some form of playfulness enriches us personally, strengthens our immune system toward better health, deepens our connection to our partner and builds the bridge back to Secure Attachment if either one or both of us had Insecure Attachment as a child.
Some Thoughts about Living Life
"Managing our emotions increases intuition and clarity. it helps us self-regulate our brain and internal hormones. it gives us natural highs, the real fountain of youth we've been looking for. it enables us to drink from elixirs locked within our cells, just waiting for us to discover it."
Doc Childe
"We habitually erect a barrier called blame that keeps us from communicating genuinely with others, and we fortify it with our concepts of who's right and who's wrong. We do that with the people who are closest to us and we do it with political systems, with all kinds of things that we don't like about our associates or our society. It is a very common, ancient, well-perfected device for trying to feel better. Blame others. Blaming is a way to protect your heart, trying to protect what is soft and open and tender in yourself. Rather than own pain, we scramble to find some comfortable ground"
"Compassionate action starts with seeing yourself when you start to make yourself right and when you start to make yourself wrong. at that point you could just contemplate the fact that there is a larger alternative to either of those, a more tender, shaky kind of place where you could live."
Pema Chodron
"Managing our emotions increases intuition and clarity. it helps us self-regulate our brain and internal hormones. it gives us natural highs, the real fountain of youth we've been looking for. it enables us to drink from elixirs locked within our cells, just waiting for us to discover it."
Doc Childe
"We habitually erect a barrier called blame that keeps us from communicating genuinely with others, and we fortify it with our concepts of who's right and who's wrong. We do that with the people who are closest to us and we do it with political systems, with all kinds of things that we don't like about our associates or our society. It is a very common, ancient, well-perfected device for trying to feel better. Blame others. Blaming is a way to protect your heart, trying to protect what is soft and open and tender in yourself. Rather than own pain, we scramble to find some comfortable ground"
"Compassionate action starts with seeing yourself when you start to make yourself right and when you start to make yourself wrong. at that point you could just contemplate the fact that there is a larger alternative to either of those, a more tender, shaky kind of place where you could live."
Pema Chodron
