Archives for 2021

Your body is a portal to essential knowledge.

March 13, 2021 by Nicole Urdang

Your body is your ever present home on earth and houses a wealth of information you can tap into anytime. Yet no one teaches you how to use this innate somatic knowledge.

The field of psychotherapy, especially trauma therapy, is In the midst of a mini revolution as somatic awareness is now recognized as a crucial part of healing and well-being.

Just like your emotions, even the ones you don’t enjoy, bodily sensations are messengers to help you navigate life, understand yourself and make joy-enhancing decisions. The trick is to tune in.

Since most people have not been trained in how to do this, it’s helpful to have a map.

It takes skill to understand and utilize the body’s messages. One of the best ways to do that is with something called Felt Sense. This technique helps you figure out what the body is telling you, as well as allowing you to anchor in awareness, and re-ground in the present moment.

Simply put, your felt sense refers to the physical characteristics, qualities, and properties of an emotion.

Once upon a time, some wonderful person, or people, taught you how to read. Without that skill the world would be a very different place. Of course, you experience physical feelings without needing a roadmap, but finding the right words to describe them can be daunting. Here is a primer of words and concepts to assist you in navigating somatic sensations for greater self-awareness.

At first, cultivating felt sense awareness will feel awkward and forced. That’s natural. In time, it will become second nature to use this new vocabulary as a way of exploring what’s true for you in any given moment.

Often, you’ll notice the emotion before you’re aware of its physical manifestations, even though the physical sensations typically precede your emotional awareness. It’s simply that you have not been taught to focus on your body, let alone develop a lexicon to describe what you feel. Furthermore, when the body reacts strongly to something with pain or discomfort, it’s natural to think an ibuprofen will solve the problem and dismiss that inner cache of information.

The following is a list of words to help you think about your body’s sensations in new ways.

Achy	Frozen	Raw
Airy	Full	Releasing Rolling
Alive	Fuzzy	Shaky
Bloated	Goose Bumpy	Sharp
Blocked	Gurgling	Shimmering
Breathless	Hard	Shivery
Brittle	Heavy	Shudder
Bubbly	Hollow Hot	Silky
Burning	Icy	Smooth
Buzzing Bruised	Intense	Soft Sore
Chilled	Icy Itchy	Spacious
Clammy	Jagged	Spacious Breathing
Closed Clenched	Jittery	Spasming Spinning
Cold	Jumbly	Sticky
Congested	Jumpy	Stationary Still
Constricted	Knotted	Stretchy
Constricted Breathing	Light	Stringy
Contracted	Limp	Strong
Cool	Loose	Suffocating
Cozy	Moving Nauseous	Sweaty
Cramped	Numb	Tender
Damp Dense	Open	Tense
Dizzy Dry	Paralyzed	Thick
Dull	Pounding	Throbbing
Elastic	Pressure	Tickly
Electric	Prickly	Tight
Empty	Puffy	Tightness of skin
Energized	Pulled	Tingling
Expanding	Pulsing	Trembling
Faint	Quaking	Twitchy
Flaccid Fluid	Quiet	Vibrating
Flushed	Quivering	Warm
Fluttery	Radiating	Weak
Free Frantic	Ragged	Wobbly

By familiarizing yourself with this list you create a wider somatic vocabulary.

The next time you notice an emotion, try this experiment:

Notice any tightness, tension, or heaviness in your body and home in on the physical sensations that accompany it. Scan the above list to see if any other feeling words could describe your experience. This helps you anchor into your felt sense and feel more grounded in your body. As emotions can be quite squirrelly, somatic awareness is a useful tool to help you feel safer in the midst of strong, even disturbing, feelings.

You might ask yourself: How does this feeling sit in my body right now?

Can you let the breath touch that soreness, tightness, tension, etc.?

See if you can allow the feeling be there without trying to change or fix it.

Try softening around it.

Does the feeling spread?

Does it evoke any images or memories?

Does it stay the same or change as you investigate it?

With curiosity, enter the physical feeling, meander within it and notice any changes from simply exploring sensation.

With this new sense of connection, compassion, and acceptance, how do you feel towards this emotion now?

Let yourself experience whatever comes up in your body as energy, while actively resisting the urge to tell yourself a story about it, demonizing yourself or anyone else.

Then, give that feeling plenty of breathing room. Let it expand and radiate and see what happens.

A focused, slow body scan meditation, like those offered on the free Insight Timer app, is another helpful way to get into your body and away from repetitive thoughts or overwhelming feelings.

Here’s a link to a wonderful somatic exploration of a feeling: https://insig.ht/qgcQ9fEpupb

Copyright Nicole S. Urdang

The Struggle of Perfectionism

March 3, 2021 by Nicole Urdang

Doing things well is satisfying, but perfectionism can turn almost anything into a struggle. Every time you strive to be perfect, the best, or better than you were before, you put pressure on yourself. Not only does that pressure accrue, it robs you of joy. In addition, it’s almost impossible to be mindful and live in the moment when the sword of Damocles is hanging over your head exhorting you to do everything as well as possible or face dire consequences.

And what would those horrific consequences be? That you would be average? That you might go unnoticed? Unappreciated? Unloved? Unremembered?

Whatever your deepest fears might be, they’re rarely conscious. They roil under the surface egging you on until, ultimately, you collapse from overwhelment.

That can take many forms. It might be ill health, the sundering of a relationship, an accident, abruptly leaving a job, selling a house, going on a long retreat, or anything else that radically shakes things up.

For most people, there’s a limit to how many times you can whip yourself into shape before you realize how battered you are.

Recovering from perfectionism is a long and arduous task. If there hadn’t been wonderful benefits from it you wouldn’t have continued to do it. Doing things consistently well rewards you with respect, appreciation, even love, and your ego laps it up.

The combination of ego gratification and deeply entrenched habits makes perfectionism very difficult to overcome; yet, it can be done.

While not an addiction, per se, it has many similar hallmarks. And like an addiction, recovery is an ongoing process.

Start by asking yourself what would be so terrible about being average? As David Burns said in his book, Feeling Good, “Dare to be average!” It actually takes far more courage for a perfectionist to dare to be average than to keep putting their best foot forward.

Next, deliberately do things less perfectly. Stop dotting every “i” and crossing every “t.” Purposely choose to neglect something. Don’t forget to pick up your children at school, but fold the laundry less precisely, or make your kids a PB &J instead of a complicated lunch. Ask yourself: What would I do differently if I just cared a little less and I could leave my ego outside the door? Choose things that won’t have negative consequences. Relinquishing a little control can have symbolic ramifications that free you up both energetically and emotionally.

Working to overcome some of your perfectionism is incredibly difficult as it fed your ego for a long time. Ego gratification is just as addictive as any drug. Be gentle and patient with yourself and go as slowly as necessary, taking baby steps while you assess how you feel along the way.

Using an “ I can care less” mantra can be a useful strategy in combatting perfectionism’s insistent lure. You can also ask yourself: What’s the worst thing that can happen if I do this later or do it to less stringent standards?

An often overlooked aspect of perfectionism, is a perennial people pleasing part of you that has trouble setting boundaries.

Sometimes, it’s easier to start with setting small boundaries as they are easier to see and tackle than deeper patterns of perfectionism. Sarri Gilman has an assortment of YouTube videos, books, and workshops on her website that can help you recognize your patterns and change.

Perfectionism and trouble setting boundaries are often legacies of childhood trauma, as they go hand in glove with co-dependent relationships. Both typically occur when you have grown up with an addicted parent or sibling. They can also arise from situations where you were called to be a little adult as a child. Last but not least, if you grew up in a critical household where you were blamed or punished when you didn’t succeed or forgot something, you could have easily developed a tendency to micromanage everything. It’s natural under the circumstances and often fueled by fear of making a mistake and feeling that shame again.

I love to talk about how crucial it is to be self compassionate. Here, I would extend it to forgiving yourself and even having mercy on your sweet younger self as you were always doing the best you could.

For starters:

Steep yourself in self compassion meditations (I highly recommend the free app: Insight Timer; especially Kristen Neff’s offerings).

Set a timer on your phone and pause for 30 seconds to appreciate something in yourself.

At the end of the day, notice everything you can feel good about; especially the things you allowed yourself to do less perfectly.

Actively dispute thoughts that exhort you to do more or better.

Celebrate everything you might have viewed as a mistake in the past as an opportunity to learn and grow. (Read the piece on this site titled: No mistakes, only lessons.)

Patience is your ally as you slowly and lovingly work to free yourself from the shackles of perfectionism.

Covid and The Great Pause.

February 3, 2021 by Nicole Urdang

If you’re lucky, and you know where your next meal is coming from, you have a safe place to sleep and your family is well, you can view this pandemic as an opportunity to practice what I’m calling The Great Pause.

In many ways, the whole world is on pause. It feels radically different, yet aspects of life are still blissfully familiar.

If you live in the northern hemisphere, the short, darker days of winter can be especially isolating; and the great pause can feel overwhelming. The thing about feeling overwhelmed is, as awful as it feels in the moment, it doesn’t last. Winter turns to spring, and, even in the midst of a pandemic, new life bursts forth. This may be a great pause, even an end to life as we knew it, but it contains an incredible potential for growth and positive change.

On an individual level, this great pause can have wonderful ramifications if you allow things to be different from how you think they should be.

Over the years, I have learned the value of even a nanosecond’s pause. The tiny sliver of time it takes to think before speaking. To wait for another driver to pass. To resist pressing send on a potentially inflammatory email. In other words, to think before acting or reacting.

If that is a gift, and it definitely has been for me, imagine the potential of the pandemic and its great pause. At the very least, it teaches us we have the resilience, fortitude and grit to keep going. But there is more. It’s a chance to explore solitude and peace. Sages have said: The cure for loneliness is solitude. Rather than rail again what is and all the things you miss, you can choose to embrace this new experience. Of course, if you’re living in a small space with others, solitude may be hard to come by.

As a seasoned holistic psychotherapist, I know there were plenty of challenges before Covid, these are just different. Dealing with them has the potential to teach many interesting lessons. That said, it’s still quite challenging.

If you want to explore some of the positive aspects of this pandemic experience and what the great pause has meant for you, you might want to try the following journaling, or audio journaling, prompts.

I suggest reading the question, closing your eyes, and leisurely thinking about it. If a question elicits a strong emotional or physical reaction, be curious about it.

What can I learn from this?

What has been most challenging for me during Covid?

Who has been there for me?

How can I be there for myself?

Am I more or less grateful as a result of this experience?

What do I really need versus what I think I want?

Has Covid changed my ideas of how I want to be in the future?

What do I value more, or less, as a result of the pandemic?

What is important to me right now?

Has the way I treat my body changed?

Has my relationship with my emotions changed?

Has Covid forced me to make decisions I never would have made without the pandemic?

Has my way of looking at life changed?

Please feel free to share any other journal prompts you discover as you explore your own inner terrain.

Copyright Nicole S. Urdang

Cultivate Curiosity for Clarity, Calm & Perspective.

January 11, 2021 by Nicole Urdang

One inescapable truth is things will not always go your way. Your landlord suddenly raises the rent, you lose your job, your body acts out with a strange new symptom, your child’s teacher asks for a meeting, the roof leaks, the car dies, you get the idea. No one singled you out for extra hardship, it’s just part of the human condition.

As much as you plan and prepare, the law of unintended consequences reigns. Luckily, in the midst of a new challenge (read stressful event), you can find your inner gyroscope by cultivating curiosity.

This kind of curiosity involves an acute awareness and inquiry into whatever is happening now. With time and practice, you can add curiosity to that first reaction and shift your knee-jerk emotional response from stressed out to calm.

Shifting your perspective through re-framing thoughts is a classic cognitive behavior therapy technique. If looking through the lens of internal family systems therapy (IFS), it would be called being in self energy. According to IFS, self energy is apparent whenever we feel one of the 8 C words: calm, connected, creative, compassionate, curious, courageous, clear or confident.

While you can consciously choose to be intellectually curious about any situation you find yourself in, there are other ways to capture your heightened energy and re-route it to calmer territory. Even if you have a trauma history and have been strongly triggered by life’s curveballs, you can still build emotional muscle with curiosity. That then gets translated into a larger repertoire of responses.

The first alternate approach is to be curious about physical sensations.

What is happening in my body now? It’s not enough to ask the general question as details are your friends here. Do a body scan, notice if any particular physical feeling wants your attention. As best as you can, name what you’re sensing. Does it have a color, shape, movement, size, energy, density, temperature, pressure, tightness, numbness, weight, etc.?

You can also be curious about your own history by asking yourself:

Have I felt this way before?

Did it pass?

How did I handle it?

How would I like to handle it now?

What would a new way of reacting look and feel like?

Remember: However you dealt with difficulties in the past you lived through them all. That’s irrefutable. Give yourself the respect you deserve for soldiering on through thick and thin, and watch your confidence soar.

If you’re seeking connection, you might ask:

Is there anyone who could help me through this? Practically speaking, do I need to call a roofer, car mechanic, doctor, therapist, etc.? Do I want emotional comfort? Whom can I call? Even if no one comes to mind, you can always call crisis services. Someone will be there 24 hours a day to listen and support you.

Ask yourself if you can separate this challenge into smaller parts. Thinking of handling a big issue, like finding a new job, can feel overwhelming. One way to lessen that is dividing the task into smaller, more manageable bits. Perhaps you’re qualified for a number of different jobs. Rather than look them all up at once, pick one and explore those options. If that feels daunting, call someone you know who works in that field and ask them what opportunities might be available. If that feels like too much, write a list of all your talents and abilities to brainstorm what you might really like to do. And, if that feels like too much, take a walk, do a yoga nidra practice, or make some tea. Anything you do gives you a sense of control and agency, both of which help build your confidence.

The most important thing in any difficult situation is to practice self compassion. As powerful as it can be, it’s unlikely to help if you suddenly decide to be kind to yourself in the midst of a crisis. Far better to practice self compassion every day in little ways so it will be there when something big comes along. There are tons of wonderful self compassion meditations on the free Insight Timer app. You can also explore YouTube videos by Kristen Neff or Chris Germer. If you’re feeling especially ambitious, Kristen Neff wrote a comprehensive and elucidating workbook on self compassion.

No matter how you do it, curiosity shifts everything: your thoughts, physical feelings and emotions. It allows you to look at a stressful situation with fresh eyes as it soothes your nervous system. Next time something daunting lands in your lap remember to be curious. It’s one of the most powerful things you can do to find equanimity, no matter what’s harshing your mellow.

Why Do People Lie To Their Therapist?

January 2, 2021 by Nicole Urdang

Strange as it may sound, people are not always in touch with things that might seem very obvious to an impartial observer. I’m not talking about denial, a willful refutation of observable facts, but of obliviousness. Everyone has different levels of awareness, internally, externally and psychologically. It’s all too easy to assume someone is consciously lying or denying when in fact it might truly be a lack of awareness.

On the other hand, there are times when people consciously choose to not tell their therapist the truth, or the whole truth. There are good reasons why people lie to their therapist and different kinds of lies. Lies of omission that don’t tell the full story, and lies that purposely distract from the truth. Both have short-term healthy unconscious motivations of self-protection from feeling too vulnerable, embarrassed about something, or having to deal with an issue they’re simply not ready to approach.

Of course, there are times when one lies to a therapist because they don’t yet trust them or they don’t trust anybody. Usually, this makes a lot of sense. Their experience is that people are unreliable, unpredictable, disloyal and will betray their confidence or use it against them.

As they spin a story, another part of them is aware this is unhelpful, but the deeper goal of protecting vulnerable child parts inside is paramount. The good news is, in time, therapy with a trustworthy person in a safe space allows the gradual unfolding of one’s truth.

With greater safety it’s possible to look at someone’s lying as an amazing opportunity to discover how it actually protected them by keeping boundaries until they felt safe to speak more freely.

Here’s an example:

Someone whose drinking is problematic tells their therapist they are drinking less, or not at all. On the face of it, it looks as if this is incredibly unhelpful to them; yet, what would feel far worse would be vulnerability to possible criticism or feeling shame.

At first glance it defies logic. Somebody pays for therapy, takes the time to go, and sabotages it. But are they sabotaging it? No, they are simply going at a pace that feels comfortable to them.

Many years ago, therapists and researchers spent a lot of time looking into what they called resistance. Now, most counselors understand there is no active resistance, just self protection and fear.

We all have a multiplicity of parts and sometimes they get polarized. One part may want to get sober and another part wants to protect that vulnerable child inside from getting hurt. The good news is, these parts can learn to talk to each other and recognize that they want the same thing: peace in the valley. Peace from craving and aversion. Peace from knowing that the person they are now is truly capable of taking good care of themself in ways that are different from how they did it in the past. These new ways ultimately feel much safer and compassionate. In the meantime, until someone is ready, it may be safer to only tell part of the story.

Clearly, it’s crucial to have a therapist who understands your lying has nothing to do with them and is necessary as long as it’s necessary. When you feel safe enough you will be more forthcoming. Until then, it’s really crucial to be kind to yourself when you notice you lied to your therapist. This never makes you a bad person, just someone doing the very best they can to feel safe.