Unnecessary Bracing: What is Preparatory Suffering?
Preparatory suffering is the habit driven by the belief that if I imagine every possible thing that could go wrong—if I rehearse the loss, the rejection, the disappointment, the catastrophe in vivid detail—then I won’t be blindsided when it happens. I’ll be ready. I’ll be less hurt. It sounds logical. It even sounds adaptive. Trauma taught many of us that danger comes without warning, that safety is fragile, that homeostasis can be revoked without notice. Of course our nervous systems want a head start.
Grief or Rumination? When anxiety hijacks the grieving process
Understanding the difference between the sadness of grief and the rumination that results from anxiety and depression is essential for emotional processing and, ultimately, healing. Often conflated, these two emotions serve very different purposes in our nervous systems.
The Orienting and Resourcing Technique for Political Exhaustion: How I Find Calm Amidst Calamity Using Somatics
Most of us feel the competing impulses to both look at AND look away from news headlines and either choice leaves many of us with a sense of dread churned up by political stress. Some of us can quite literally feel the weight of dis-ease in our bodies. I am a seasoned trauma therapist with well over 20 years in the field and I use the skills I am outlining here in my own daily work with myself to reduce the impact of a bombardment of current events and new cycle headlines.