Presentification is an integrative mental action where we connect our experiences with their specific time in our life. There is a realisation, that the past is past, that we are currently in the Now and that there is a future ahead of us. Life events can get sorted into their place on a timeline and […]
theory
Elements of Integration 3: Personification
Personification is a specific form of realization. In this mental action we connect our experiences with our first person perspective. It means we introduce the concepts of ‘I’, ‘me’, ‘mine’ and ‘myself’ to experiences of the past, present and expected future. I experienced painful things. They happened to me. My family treats me that way. […]
Elements of Integration 2: Realization
Realization is an integrative mental action that needs more and a slightly different kind of energy than synthesis. We take our traumatic and dissociated experience out of the fog of ‘not knowing’ or only ‘kind of knowing’ and enter a felt sense of its reality. It means knowing with our knower that bad things happened […]
Elements of Integration 1: Synthesis
Ideas people have about integration are often vague. Some of these ideas are romantic, others scary but usually they include imagery that doesn’t tell us how integration is supposed to work and ends up being inaccurate. That is why we will look into the basic elements of integration and explain the meaning of synthesis, realization, […]
Balancing in Therapy
In nature, balance is never static. It is achieved by constantly re-adjusting and adapting to changing influences. It never stops, there is no time when a perfect balance exists for long. Balance is really a verb, not a noun. It is natural that all our therapy work is happening with ups and down, constantly shifting, […]
DBT Skills, chronic dissociation and a polyvagal perspective
When we learn how to stop dissociation we often get in contact with DBT skill training. It teaches us how to recognize dissociation early and then use different skills that we chain to help us regulate and return to our window of tolerance. Theoretically that is a good plan that can work really well. It […]
Titration in Trauma Therapy
Titration is a chemical term that was taken out of context to explain a technique to approach psychological problems. Say we want to neutralize HCl with NaOH. Mixing the acid with the base should, with an easy calculation, give us H2O and NaCl, harmless water and salt. The problem is that an acid and a […]
Containment (in body work)
There is a crucial part of emotional regulation that has to happen somewhere between identifying a feeling and expressing it. Because it is physical in its nature, not a mental concept, it makes it difficult for me to explain it with words. So I will use pictures in the hope that you can translate them […]
Understanding thoughts ‘bottom up’
There is a feedback-loop between our thoughts, emotions and body. A picture you will often see to describe it is this It is the foundation of CBT interventions. We change the thought, that will change our emotion and physical state. It is called top-down approach and it works well with many psychological problems but its […]
The Polyvagal Ladder
When I first wrote about the polyvagal theory I didn’t expect you to be interested. But there has been an ever increasing demand for more information, so here it is. We are still leaving out most of the neuroscience behind the polyvagal theory to make it easier to work with. People used to think […]
The Rhythm of Regulation
My first encounter with the word resilience was not in psychology but in physics. In a psychological context the term is usually used to describe an inner strength that can prevail under a lot of pressure. So the goal of interventions is to make people more resistant to stress by adding positive resources. You can […]
Powerful people – powerful relationships
All people are powerful. But some don’t know it yet. Or they confuse being powerful with being controlling or intimidating. At the core of being a powerful person is self-control: the ability to make choices and follow through with them, to regulate our own emotions and needs and take responsibility for our own life. Self-control […]