Trauma is not the event(s) that happened to you, it’s how you are affected by those events.
Continue reading “How Trauma Gets in the Way of Your Goals and What You Can Do About It”Every noise, every touch, the stones beneath my feet, the splash of fountains from a window, crept evilly upon my senses. The air had a stinging weight like ocean waves. I felt myself a stranger to the world.
Circe by Madeline Miller
How we talk to ourselves has a direct relationship to how we feel and what we do. This has been documented in psychological research (see references below) and there is a correlation between self criticism and feeling crap. You can see for yourself how true this is by paying attention to your inner voice. If your inner voice is hard to notice at first in daily life, you could pick an activity that you’d like to be able to do well, but haven’t clocked up the hours yet to be able to do well in it. It could be drawing or painting or parkour, for example.
Continue reading “Kind Communication With Yourself”
Given that an estimated 20% of women and 4% of men in England and Wales* have experienced sexual violence since the age of sixteen (and those are just the reported cases; therefore, these figures could be just the tip of the iceberg, not to mention the child sexual abuse figures; see Rape Crisis for more statistics), there is a high probability some of them will be your clients or customers or colleagues or students or apprentices or family members. There are also many people who have experienced emotional and/or physical abuse and/or neglect. You might not know this about them because they may never tell you. Since some of the people you spend time with at work and home are likely to have experienced trauma, it follows that being trauma informed in the ways you communicate with them will be helpful to both you and them.
Continue reading “Could being ‘trauma informed’ help you in your work and personal relationships?”In January 2018 I was experiencing deep frustration at the fear that was paralysing me when I went to climb. Climbing was one of my passions and had been for about a year, yet when I went near the wall I felt crippling fear. I wondered whether my fear was related to the effects of trauma that pop up in my life, so I decided to research trauma and recovery, and set myself experiments to overcome fear. I recorded my journey in a series of blog posts, in case anyone else was going through the same thing as me. I thought I’d share links to those posts here because the sports psychology I used in my experiments might be useful to you. Here they are:
Continue reading “Overcoming irrational fear in climbing”
Legal High (2011)
50 x 40 x 1 cm
Acrylic, emulsion, dish scourers, and anti depressants on canvas
