Your body

None of this needs explaining to work. A child who cannot say what happened can still be helped by breath, movement and sound.

That makes body based work useful right across the ages, and for anyone who finds talking hard, including people whose language is not the one the…

Sound based work is aimed at a particular set of troubles: noise that feels too loud, voices that turn to mush, jumpiness, difficulty reading people. If that is you, it is worth asking about.

It gets chosen by what your system does rather than by a diagnosis, which is why the same programme is used with very different people, from toddlers…

Irritability, a hot face, itchiness, a mild earache or feeling slightly off balance are common while doing this. People often say it feels like getting off a long flight.

Knowing that in advance matters, because unexplained body sensations are easy to read as harm when your alarm system is already sensitive. Say what…

Most of the research on this programme was done with autistic children. For trauma, what exists is case reports and studies still under way.

That does not make it useless. It does mean you would be trying something promising rather than something established, and you deserve to know that…

A healthy heart rate is not a metronome. The small variations between beats are a sign your body can still adjust to what is in front of it.

Heart rate variability is exactly that: how much the gaps between beats change. More of it generally goes with a system that can speed up when needed…

Rest your attention in the middle of your chest, let your breath slow as though it were moving in and out through there, and bring to mind something you feel warmly about.

A hand on your chest can help you find the place. The feeling does not have to be big: gratitude for something small, or the ordinary fondness you…

Slow breathing on its own does less than slow breathing with a warm feeling attached and something showing you how you are doing.

That is the difference between the deep breathing most people have tried and found underwhelming, and this. The feedback matters because otherwise…

If you try to call up a good feeling and nothing arrives, you are in ordinary company. That blankness is common after a long stretch of hard years, and it is workable.

It helps to do this part with someone else at first, because another person will notice the flicker you dismissed. Look for what is reliably there…

Keep the explanation short when you offer this to someone. It is a way of breathing that gets your heart to send your brain a message to settle. Would you like to try it?

Long technical framings cost more than they buy. They ask a person to take in a great deal before they have felt anything, and the offer of a choice…

Practise this when you are calm and again when you are wound up. The second one is what makes it available in the moment you need it.

Skills learned in one state can be strangely hard to find in another, which is why people say they forgot to use it. Do the first round with someone…

A useful picture: the parts of your brain are sections of an orchestra. In dysregulation they are playing different tunes at different speeds. The aim is timing, not repair.

This is a kinder frame than damage, and a more accurate one. Nothing is broken or missing. What has gone is the coordination between parts that used…

Neurofeedback has its strongest support in attention difficulties, decent support in depression and anxiety, and for trauma it is promising rather than proven.

Reported gains include better sleep and attention, less irritability and fewer trauma symptoms. The honest caveats are cost, wide variation in how…

Calm is not automatically the goal, and arousal is not automatically the enemy. What you are after is a system that can move between them.

The older idea was simple: stress bad, relaxation good. It missed that the same slowing down which feels like peace when you are safe is shutdown…

Gut trouble during a hard stretch is not imaginary and it is not a character flaw. Your gut has its own branch of the nervous system, and it answers threat like the rest of you.

It senses chemical change, runs digestion and talks to your immune system, and it is wired into the same circuits that handle fear. So the churning,…

Your stress system needs an all clear as much as it needs an alarm. What often breaks after trauma is the signal that says it is over.

Cortisol rises to get you moving, and a feedback loop is meant to notice you are safe and turn the tap off. When that loop is working badly, avoiding…

Unfinished defence tends to park somewhere specific: a jaw that will not unclench, arms that never got to push, legs that never ran.

Mobilising starts deep in the middle of you and travels out to the edges, first the eyes and jaw and voice, then the arms, then the legs. Stopped…

When the danger still feels like it is happening, that is not a mistake in your thinking. It is a sequence in your body that never got to finish.

This is why arguing with yourself does so little. You can know the date, know where you are, know it is long over, and still have a system reporting…

People carrying long term trauma often show low stress hormone levels rather than high ones. Flat and exhausted is a stress presentation too.

Researchers expected the opposite and found this repeatedly. It matches what people describe: not wired but wrung out, foggy, unable to get started.…

A day has a shape. Energy up in the morning, a real dip in the early afternoon, a second lift in the evening, then down into sleep.

That early afternoon dip is normal and not a sign that you are lazy. Knowing the ordinary pattern gives you something to compare your own against,…

Coming alive at night is a common pattern after trauma. Mornings are flat, the day is heavy, and something lifts around the time you are meant to be winding down.

It is easy to hear that as a lifestyle choice, and easier still to blame yourself for it. It is more accurately a shifted rhythm. Naming it that way…