How can I help?

I am often inspired to write after reading, and recently these words from Anne Laure Le Cunff did just that: Taking the time to write slows you down just enough to notice what’s going on in your mind, clarify your thoughts, and explore your curiosity with intention. Over time, it becomes not just a record of what you’ve done, but a mirror for how you think.  It really is an attempt to understand my thoughts, and recently what I have been trying to understand is what is it about anything that is ‘helpful’? How do we actually help ourselves and others? And I think that I mean this more (or am interested/focussing more) on the psychological and how people think, rather than the physical and how they feel, as increasingly I believe the latter is a consequence of the former anyway. Despite a decision many years ago to retrain as an acupuncturist instead of as a psychotherapist, I still find myself fascinated by the realm of mental health and motivated to understand the strategies that seem to impact it, whatever the modality (meditation, counselling, psychedelics, somatic experiencing, breathwork etc), having myself been helped by many of them. But what does it really mean to ‘help’ someone, and how is that achieved, and what of that can I take forward and use in what I am doing in my own practice?

In a podcast I listened to recently about the fascinating work of family constellation therapy, a practitioner called Robert Rowland Smith said something that struck me – about the work of ‘healing’ being a fundamental question of “why is resolution harder to bear than suffering”? I found this to be incredibly perceptive and insightful. Although we might not like to entertain the idea that we are choosing to suffer, when it comes down to it, everyone in some way is attached to their story and their identification with their version of victimhood. It may be that it helps to solidify their place in the family or societal structure, that it helps them to avoid doing or being something or someone, or that it allows them to blame an external source for their problems rather than undertaking the work required to resolve them… The reasons are potentially endless, but truth is that ‘healing’ does require something from the individual which not everyone is ready or willing to accept.

An interesting aspect in all this is the idea of victimhood. As Robert also points out, our current tendency in the West (a phenomenon vastly facilitated by social media) is to pathologise the experience of being human, and use victimhood as a form of identity, when in reality, hardship is an unavoidable encounter along the path we walk as humans, and true victimhood is really the loss of identity, rather than some kind of a persona. Whereas traditional psychotherapy and talking therapies can have the effect of actually entrenching this position of the victim, family constellation work seems to provide an incredibly effective method of getting to the root of people’s difficulty or trauma, by identifying their stories and providing insight into what is feeding these. More often than not, as we are all a product of our parents and/or care-givers, and the culture that we grew up in, we are all carrying forward unresolved emotional and psychological wounding of various forms from previous generations and the collective field in which we find ourselves. And, as touched on above, sometimes the more interesting enquiry is not why people are unwell, but moreover what that state of unwellness is facilitating or serving, and whether they are really willing to give that up if it means then having to engage with the world differently as a result?

Another source of work that I have personally found helpful in understanding my behaviours and how they are serving me is that of Steven Kessler. When we are young and dependant, our vulnerable infant systems know that our care-givers are crucial to our survival, so we will prioritise acceptance and conformity over our own needs and feelings, repressing or suppressing instinctive desires in order not to lose love or connection. Kessler has synthesised this phenomena (and the associated “characterology” work of Wilhelm Reich from which he draws) into an elegant summary of five core personality patterns which embed at various and specific developmental stages in order to protect the individual and enable them to cope with difficult, threatening or upsetting environments and care-givers.

In brief, he identifies five key behavioural types (leaving, merging, enduring, rigid and aggressive) each with their own characteristic actions and reactions. These five patterns are effectively states that we defer to when we feel threatened or upset in order to cope and feel safer, but in doing so we take ourselves out of presence and into a more automated way of dealing with the world. Whilst not exhaustive, the patterns do provide a fairly comprehensive categorisation of typical human behaviours, and are a useful reference point for understanding triggers and motivations. His book the Five Personality Patterns (linked below) is excellent and goes into each category in detail.

The core physiology that underlies all of this human behaviour is intricately connected to our nervous system, a subject which has been elucidated considerably by the work of Steven Porges and his polyvagal theory. The importance of nervous system health and our human requirement for community, belonging and appropriate sources for co-regulation has become increasingly acknowledged and examined, especially in the aftermath of the lockdowns and social restrictions that were imposed on us during the Covid pandemic. Polyvagal theory provides a percipient outline of the stages of nervous system response in the absence of these, which can range from commonly referenced fight and flight to a complete freeze state of dissociative dorsal shutdown.

Typically, most humans first encounter this in childhood, when a traumatic or overwhelming event triggers a heightened nervous system state (fight, flight or freeze). In the rare event that the child has access to a fully present, empathic and emotionally available and regulated care-giver who is able to help bring them back into regulation and presence, this event will not leave much of a mark. But it is more likely that a residue of this experience will be left in the system unprocessed, either because there is no adult available to model effective regulation, or because certain emotions and behaviours are not tolerated or accepted in the family or social environment that individual finds themselves in. Kessler would say that this is the precursor to our discovering which behaviours ensure our acceptability and inclusion, and hence the embedding of our particular pattern begins.

Chinese medicine theory has its own version of how trauma embeds in and affects the body. Complex enough to merit a blog all of its own, essentially it sees these traumatic residues as being held in the blood system. Any stimulus that causes the nervous system to react and withdraw or shut down is broadly characterised as a form of cold, and will close off the very medium that allows us to feel and connect – the blood. These stimuli can be emotional and psychological but can also be physical injuries that inherently bring with them a cognitive component. As we fill up our available reservoirs this stagnant blood will eventually become visible as spider veins and varicosities – all indicative of an impeded flow in the body – and a sign that there is much in the system yet to be processed. By bleeding these areas the stuck blood is removed from the system allowing fresh, physiologically active blood to take its place, and conscious awareness is brought to the area that was previously hidden away - often bringing with it a cathartic emotional release.  They also have a way of understanding how generational trauma can pass down through families, but I will write more about this another time.

So how do we ‘help’ people? I think the more that I understand why I react the way I do, and what the triggers are that take me to a place of non-presence where I am responding from patterned behaviour and not attending to what my feelings and needs are in that moment, the more I can try to mitigate that, and process the discomfort and communicate more honestly. Constellation work has made me much more aware of what I am carrying on behalf of other people, and has provided alternate perspectives from which to view events that have been difficult to process. Being an empath has drawn me to the world of complementary medicine but it also predisposes me to being something of an emotional sponge, and recognising this tendency has really helped me establish stronger personal boundaries and something of a protective shield so that I can see where I might be taking on feelings from other people that don’t actually belong to me. As humans we are all prone to doing this to one extent or another, and it can be remarkably freeing to finally be able to see where this is affecting you, and understanding what you can let go of or “give back”.  Finally, in understanding better the workings of the nervous system I am now more aware of the tipping point whereby my system starts moving into a dis-regulated state, and have developed strategies to bring myself back to coherence and a felt sense of being grounded and present in my body.

I am constantly fascinated by the stories that my patients bring to the treatment room, and I hope that in sharing with them what I have found helpful they are guided to take what feels appropriate for them and for where they are in that moment. I try to achieve this by listening from an open space of presence - which is a daily practice of my own to cultivate - and which I hope allows the deep intuitive knowing that resides in all of us to guide them on their next steps.

www.robertrowlandsmith.com

https://the5personalitypatterns.com/

https://www.stephenporges.com/