Fears, depression, trauma:

Handling Stressful Emotions Better

In our quest to heal our souls, we tirelessly search for the causes behind it all. We tell ourselves a story about why we are afraid or why we are depressed.

At best, we uncover our behavioral patterns and how they were formed in our childhood.

We have more understanding for ourselves, more self-compassion when we have feelings that may have been triggered by the current situation but cannot really be derived from it.

At worst, we become increasingly intertwined with painful stories, feeling like victims of an unhappy childhood, powerless against the past, which continually materializes in our memories. We dig ourselves deeper into depression.

But how do we get out of this predicament?

Finding early triggers is interesting but only helps us to a limited extent.

"The solution has nothing to do with the problem and lies in the future" (Steve De Shazer and Insoo Kim Berg).

This understanding of how therapy works is relatively new, at least so new that most of us still associate psychotherapy with Sigmund Freud's credo: "What happened in the past, with which the problem can be explained?"

In my work, I try to develop new, more helpful "stories" with you that allow us to feel better.

Sometimes it is even helpful to completely detach from a "story" and only focus on the feeling it evokes, consciously observing to learn how to process it without being overwhelmed and entering into a state of exceptionality, liquefying it, supporting it with gentle body movements, getting to know and learning to act on the stress activation scale in the body.

Both anxiety and depression can be reactions to overwhelm; they are opposite points on a continuum of activation of our autonomic nervous system. Anxiety is related to the flight mode, the "flight response," and indicates overactivation of the sympathetic nervous system, accompanied by tension, higher blood pressure, and everything that is useful for flight at the bodily level. In depression, the sympathetic nervous system is underactive, and depression represents collapse, helplessness. Oscillating between these extremes is not uncommon when the autonomic nervous system is thrown out of balance by excessive stress.

Aligning the nervous system to a healthy activation within our window of tolerance is a way out of the anxiety and depression spiral. Involving the body in this process is helpful. Gentle movements are part of the therapeutic program with me.