Practices

Sound sensitivity is not a fault in your hearing. Under threat the ear opens out towards high and low sounds, the range that carries warning, and that is the range which makes ordinary life feel loud.

Screeching, growling, humming, scraping: those are the frequencies that signal alarm in the animal world, and a system on guard widens to catch them.…

Feeling worse as things get safer is confusing, and it is common. When the guard finally comes down, whatever it was holding down gets felt.

This shows up when someone starts a calming practice, or moves somewhere safer, and instead of relief they get grief, irritability or a wave of old…

If your response to being hurt was to go blank rather than fight or run, look at how old you were and how big they were. Blank may have been the only thing left.

A small child cannot fight an adult and cannot leave the house. When trying to connect has already failed and the other two doors are locked, what…

Going limp is an old survival bet, not a failure of nerve. Some animals are alive only because they stopped moving.

The wager is that whatever has hold of you will lose interest in something that seems already dead, and that when it does you will get up and go. It…

Not all stillness is the same. One kind is braced and wide awake. The other has gone soft and far away.

In the braced kind there is high alertness and a lot of held tension: jaw set, hands tight, everything ready. In the collapsed kind the tone drops…

The goal is not to have less energy. It is to have a brake you can feather rather than slam.

Your accelerator is not the problem. You need it for work, for lifting things, for standing up for somebody. What tends to be missing is the fine…

There is a difference between not being upset anymore and actually being settled. The first is a rough tuning. The second is finer.

On a stringed instrument the big pegs get you near the note and the small tuners at the other end find the exact pitch, and the difference is…

The first several attempts at any of this will feel awkward and slightly fake. That is not a sign it is not for you.

Repetition is what makes a practice smooth, in the way a piece of music or a gear change stops needing your whole attention after a few weeks. Early…

If nobody helped you learn to settle when you were small, you can still learn it now. Slower and more deliberately, but genuinely.

Reading about early development can leave people feeling sentenced, as though the window shut at three and that was that. The same capacity to adapt…

Being the baby who never cried is not the same as being secure. It can mean you learned very early that nobody was coming.

Some people regulate themselves beautifully and have never once been regulated by anybody else. From outside it reads as resilience. From inside it…

You can tell you are back when there is choice in it again: you can pick which thought to keep hold of, and how to answer what you feel.

The settled state is not the absence of things. It has a texture: clear, connected, reasonably hopeful, able to understand somebody and to feel…

Excitement and panic run on the same fuel. What turns it into play is feeling safe while it happens.

If you have learned to distrust your own energy, anything lively reads as a warning: a fast heart before a party, the buzz of an argument you are…

Thinking about a feeling tends to slow it down. Feeling it in your body tends to speed it up. Between those two you have a throttle.

When someone is flooded, moving to words, naming and a little distance brings it down. When someone is flat and describing their week from behind…

The tools that slow things down mostly use your head: naming what is happening, standing back a little, putting the distress at arm's length for now.

Explaining to yourself what your body is doing. Watching a thought rather than arguing with it. Asking whether the worst reading is the only reading.…

The tools that reach what words cannot are physical: feet on the floor, a long breath out, pushing hard against a wall, deliberately walking away from something.

Some of what happened is held below language, which is why the most articulate account of it can leave you unchanged. Movement that finishes…

Long stress does not have one look. Some people end up permanently switched on. Others end up flat, heavy and hopeless. The two need opposite things.

If you are the switched on kind, the work is coming down: a longer breath out, less caffeine, a real end to the working day. If you are the flattened…