Tag: <span>anger</span>

EFT Therapy • • • • • • • • • • • • By Puja 0 Comments

EFT as an assistive approach for MHPs

How can EFT help you in your practise if you are a mental health professional?EFT can be used as an individual as well as an assistive tool to help your clients with emotional and psychosomatic issues.

Here are just a few ways in which EFT can help your clients. I’m highlighting the most common benefits of using EFT with your clients and introducing it into your therapy practise.

1. Clients often get dysregulated while talking about their issues or processing their issues in the sessions. EFT helps in regulating your client’s nervous system during a therapy session. Tapping helps by sending deactivating signals to the limbic brain and that in turn calms the mind and body. Imagine how much more your clients will be able to process, if they were able to get back into a regulated state easily and gently during a session! It also helps them self-regulate in between sessions.

2. Handling difficult persistent negative feelings is easier with EFT. You can creatively combine any modality that you use with EFT to help your clients cope with and manage their difficult feelings, in the session as well as on their own in between sessions.

3. EFT can help in unearthing and transforming limiting beliefs. Limiting beliefs keep clients stuck in negative patterns and EFT utulizes a unique method to change these unhelpful beliefs – the unhelpful conclusions the clients have arrived at about themselves, the world and others.

4. Anxiety and stress are two of the most common presenting issues that clients bring to the table in our profession. EFT helps in easing the symptoms of GAD ( Generalized Anxiety Disorder). Clients can also learn the basics of EFT and apply it on themselves while they’re experiencing symptoms of anxiety such as heaviness in chest, increased heart rate, sweating etc. EFT is very effective for social anxiety as well.

5. Most clients have had some form of trauma in their lives. A specific technique in EFT is used for disarming troubling, stressful and traumatic memories and reducing the emotional charge associated with them. This is turn helps in improving their quality of life. There are many emotional and physical consequences of trauma, and working on adverse childhood experiences with EFT has proven to be very beneficial.

6. Goal setting & improving performance is another area where EFT can help either by itself or along with CBT and REBT.

7. Stress management is another area where EFT is very effective. I’ve conducted a lot of stress management classes, and tapping helps in reducing stress rather quickly. Research in EFT shows that tapping can reduce cortisol by approx 43% in a one hour tapping session.

8. EFT can complement the top-down approaches that most mental health professionals practise. EFT is a bottom-up approach which also incorporates cognitive shift and exposure. Since the body component is involved, EFT can help in decreasing body based anxiety and processing stored trauma responses in the body.

9. Talk therapies can sometimes be very overwhelming. I remember being very overwhelmed after a few of my talk therapy sessions. It felt like opening a tap and not closing it before the session ended. EFT can help in closing the tap by the end of each session. It has containment techniques than can effectively lessen the client’s overwhelm by the end of the session.

10. EFT can also help in positively resourcing a client at the start of the session.

EFT is a trauma informed approach and with increasing research backing its effectiveness, it’s time more MHPs considered learning and applying EFT. Since MHPs already have a solid background in psychology, in my opinion, they can master EFT skills easily.

Intense Emotions • • By Puja 0 Comments

‘Willing Hands’ to Diffuse Anger

I came across this simple and practical technique to diffuse anger on NICABM.

This technique can be used in two situations

  1. To diffuse anger
  2. To stay calm when you are discussing something with your spouse. You can ask your spouse to use this technique as well.

All you need to do is to open your palms and keep them (also known as willing hands) on your knees or at the side of your body.

 

 

You can also watch a video on this.

Krav maga Self-improvement • • • • • • • • • By Puja 0 Comments

Anger, freeze response & Krav maga

I recently restarted my Krav Maga classes. Over the past few years, I have been in and out of Krav Maga many a times for various reasons, but have always been drawn back to it. After my class yesterday, despite the soreness and pain, I felt good and decided to pen down my thoughts about what I have felt and observed in the last couple of years. I see this practical self defense as a kind of somatic therapy which helps you get in touch with your healthy anger, and also allows you to step out of your freeze response, amongst many other things.

Getting in touch with your healthy anger

I help my clients cope with and heal their anxiety, trauma, pain and other emotional and physical issue on a daily basis. And what usually comes to the forefront is that most of us don’t really understand anger. Anger has been demonized for a long time. It’s only recently that people are discovering that anger is a very vital emotion and when not suppressed or disproportionately expressed, it can help us in many ways. And this is where Krav Maga comes in.

Karla Mclaren calls anger “the honourable sentry”. Healthy anger helps you take a stand for yourself without violating the boundary of others. It teaches you to respect your boundaries as well as that of others. “Anger arises to address challenges to your standpoint, your position, your interpersonal boundaries, or your self-image”. It helps “restore your sense of self and your interpersonal boundaries”

In a typical KM class when you are asked to practice with a sparring partner, by taking turns to be the defender and the attacker, you actually get a chance to get in touch with your healthy anger.

By defending yourself against the attacker, you get to protect your interpersonal boundaries and not let the attacker violate your boundaries. With specific set of natural reflexive techniques, you protect your personal space. When it’s your turn to be the attacker, your sparring partner defends himself/herself. This helps you develop a healthy respect for others’ interpersonal boundaries as well. So essentially you learn that you need to protect and restore your own boundaries and also make sure that you don’t transgress others’ boundaries.

The sparring sessions, power drills, aggression training etc allow your anger to flow freely through your body – while getting discharged in the specific reflexive action that is needed to protect yourself. The more you practice it in a safe simulated environment, the better you are able to channel your healthy anger to keep you safe when needed.

Freeze response

When there is any danger – real or imaginary – the body goes into the fight, flight or freeze mode. Freeze response is the feeling of being ‘scared stiff’.

Freeze response is also known as tonic immobility (Levine, 2010). This is the third reaction to threat called immobilization, or Tonic Immobility (TI). When you cannot escape threat, the freeze response or tonic immobility takes place wherein you do not feel the pain of the injury or in the case of the animals, the predator feels that the prey is dead. It is a coping mechanism to fool predators.

Now if we look at it in the Krav Maga realm, the defense postures help you complete the fight – flight response that the body automatically goes into when it is hyper aroused. You either run from the situation or you stay and fight. Either way you have tackled the threat successfully. fight-flightHowever, a freeze state can occur prior to the sympathetic hyperarousal, if you have concluded in that split second that you cannot overcome the threat. You go into the freeze state; the immobility stops you from running or fighting. Tonic immobility is a somatic dissociative response that protects against overwhelming threat that could result in death. If not discharged, this usually temporary response can also become persistent and chronic leading to trauma.

Animals shake off the freeze response by literally shaking their bodies. We as humans do not engage in this behavior and hence the freeze response gets stuck in our bodies. “The storage of those false responses or procedural memories is basically the structure of trauma.” (Dr. Scaer) [ Adding a clarification here: Humans ‘can’ shake off the trauma if they want to. For more information on shaking off freeze response, go to http://traumaprevention.com/ ]

When you keep practicing these techniques in mock scenarios, your body will gradually learn to come out of this paralyzing state of freeze, and you will be responding with fight or flight depending on what is needed in that situation. This will also help in responding to emotional threats without becoming numb or dissociating. If you’ve had trauma in the past, and have frozen in threatening situations, then those locked traumas will also get released in the form of minor tremors or shaking of the body. Certain stretching techniques that we do in the classes- when done for a longer period of time – can automatically result in shaking and trembling, which is simply the body releasing the stored autonomic and physical somatic energy.

Conclusion: Krav Maga lets you find the ‘gifts of anger’ and helps you come out of the frozen paralyzing response to emotional or physical threat.

Observe how you feel after the classes. Do you think they are helping you get in touch with your healthy anger or come out of the freeze state? Leave your comments below.

 

References

Karla Mclaren http://karlamclaren.com/understanding-and-befriending-anger/

Peter Levine, http://www.amazon.in/Unspoken-Voice-Releases-Restores-Goodness/dp/1556439431

Dr Scaer http://www.traumasoma.com/

Healthy boundaries • • • • • By Puja 0 Comments

Boundary Setting

Boundary setting is a skill and is needed in all relationships. I often come across people who are very compassionate, good at heart but fail miserably at setting a healthy boundary in relationships. They constantly help others, give away their personal time, let others encroach on their private space, aren’t able to say no, and most of the times end up resenting others in the long run.

Setting boundaries doesn’t mean not helping people or becoming selfish; it simply means that self-care is very important and if we don’t say no when needed, if we don’t stand up for ourselves when needed, we will let others violate our boundaries in small and big ways.

As much as you need to rebuild, reset and strengthen your boundaries and safeguard it from others, you also need to safeguard it from yourself! Interesting isn’t it? We can break our boundaries internally as well.  An extreme example would be suicide. Others would be self harm, lack of self-care, being excessively critical of ourselves, anger and self blame, addictive and mind numbing activities etc.
You can set boundaries with grace and compassion because when you do so, you show respect for yourself and others; you don’t transgress on others boundaries and neither do you let them transgress on your own.