The Mirror – learning from getting my feet wet
My friend Heidi and I share “that change and healing happen in relationship with ourselves, with others, and with the living world around us”. I have been brought up short recently by having a big tussle with my own anxiety, and when Heidi offered a Somatic Coaching session I jumped at the chance to give this a try.
Heidi guides people towards experiencing their situations and lives in new ways and works with her clients to help bring patterns and beliefs into consciousness, very much the same as the kind of therapeutic work I do, so it felt like a really good fit!
As a therapist who also gets crippling anxiety at times, I have lots of tools to work with anxiety, and I am well aware of where it comes from, why I get it, and what happens to me when I am experiencing it. Anxiety is an old friend, one that I have had for a very long time, and whose presence waxes and wanes through the years. We generally vibe well enough, but recently a few things in my life have stacked up and I’ve not managed to get to grips with it for the first time in a while.
Trees in the garden at Portmeirion.
An important flex for a therapist to have is not just ‘carrying on’ but getting support yourself when you need it so you can be there for your clients when they need you! Over the last few weeks I have felt so much physical pain from anxiety, and sometimes a huge sense of helpless dread that I got to the point where I knew I couldn’t do it on my own, so Heidi’s offer came at a great time, and it was fab to catch up too.
I explained to Heidi that I have a very embodied experience of anxiety, and I was needing a new way to work with it, with her help. It’s all very well having all these tools, but you can’t beat having someone else to hold you up to the mirror and be with you when you are exploring in this way.
Everyone experiences somatic work in their own way, just like counselling! The session was based on a technique called focusing. This is a little like mindfulness, but it is focused on the language you use to explicate how you experience something. I live right in my imagination a lot of the time, and I am also someone who works with spoken and written language, and for me it was a brilliant journey in expressing my inner experience in real time, which I don’t do very often because… nobody has that long! My clients in individual and group sessions are very clear that guided visualisations can be very helpful for grounding and self-regulation, and it’s one of the many brilliant ways counselling can help. Focusing isn’t as structured as a visualisation session as such, it was my mind that took it to that place, and I was startled by a few key things that really took my breath away (or gave me it back actually!). Great learning points too.
Firstly, Heidi suggested I look in on anxiety and invite it to come into my consciousness in whatever way it would like to. Very quickly I had a full visualisation going on with my anxiety as the main character, in my face, hot, stressed and unhappy. Because I was just gently observing at this point, I didn’t add any urges or demands for my feelings to change. By watching and waiting I could reach a much deeper understanding of what my anxiety was doing, and what it means to how I think about my life in memories, words and images. I reminded myself of counselling with someone who suddenly stops trying to make a change and starts noticing!
The second surprise was how my body then lead the way – firstly offering connection to my feelings, and then helping my anxiety find relief, almost before I was conscious of it! I work with trauma and transformation, and I use therapeutic approaches that connect with body awareness (find more information at somatic trauma therapy; and The Body Keeps the Score). The International Focusing Institute also says that the body knows more about situations than you are explicitly aware of.
In this session I learned more about the reality of that, which I think dips in and out of my consciousness - I can really trust my body to find a way through. Given the space it needs, and the right encouragement, my body will present the relevant memories and ideas to me as urges to speak and move, which can allow me to find peace. I went on, guided by useful prompts from Heidi, to follow those urges, to move when it felt right, to share what was going on in my mind, and to explore the richness of what my mind was generating.
In the final part of the visualisation, I experienced a reconnection with myself within the visualisation, extending the impact of the experience far deeper than I expected it might go. The effect was amazing – it transformed my embodied anxiety, allowing my breath work to work as intended, and left me with a sense of clarity regarding why my anxiety shows up in the way it does and what my body needs to manage it.
The final thing I would like to share is that trusting yourself to find the way is at the heart of transformation and change in therapy. Being open to new possibilities, new experiences, finding a person who is a good fit for you, lets us find new ways to connect with ourselves and what we need.
I am certain I will be back for more sessions in the future, and I think this is a really effective way for me to connect with myself and almost press the reset button on my “felt sense” of anxiety so I can show up in the best shape I can for my clients.
To find out more about somatic coaching you can find a link to Heidi’s website here, and as always reach out to me if anything in this post resonates with you.