Name: Your resonant self
ISBN: 9780393712247

What Hacker News says

LeonWFeb 2019

Thanks for the support!

Yes, I try to strike a balance with that. To me, knowing about it brings me a lot of safety, so I know what I'm getting into when I'm doing a session, crying, contorting, reliving old memories, etc. Ultimately, I agree with you, we can talk about how to ride a bike with as much detail and scientific evidence as we want, eventually we need to ride one to see what its like.

The most effective methods I've experienced were Somatic Experiencing, a body-based psychotherapy practice I've also trained in as a therapist. There's also an empathy resonance approach by a woman called Sarah Peyton that I find very effective (her book "Your resonant self" is great). Of course I believe in my own methodology of emotional resilience which is sort of a mix of the two above, I'd be glad to offer a free session to you anytime to experience it.

Ultimately there're lots of methods, like meditation, yoga, therapy modalities that try to accomplish what we're intellectually talking about when we say emotional resilience or inner healing. In my experience this is only effective whenever the practitioner has studied and experienced this on their own body and nervous system to offer it to you effectively. And that's hard to know when it's the very thing you're looking for and you only know it intellectually. A bit of a catch 22. And it's not really a requirement when you go to therapy school for example. So it can be a mixed bag. Trial and error, which can be painful when you open yourself up to these aspects inside yourself is your friend too I believe (I tried talk therapy, various meditation practices and a few others and settled on what was both most effective in my personal experience and had the most scientific backing, like the methods I described above).

Finally, I think we're all equipped as humans to offer co-regulation and empathic presence to each other to heal from whatever difficult or stressful experience we've had. Most of us just have unlearned it very young or there's not enough emphasis in our environment to practice that with each other.

Hope some of that is helpful, let me know if you have any more questions!

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jrochkind1Dec 2022

So I was just reading a book that talked about this in a way that was powerful for me, so I'm going to post an excerpt below. It's from _Your Resonant Self_ by Sarah Peyton. Warning, it's self-helpy, yup.

It's interesting to me that you think focusing on your emotions might be a way to distract ourselves, it makes me curious about distract ourselves from what? I think some people find they actually spend a lot of time distracting themselves from their emotions, so naming and describing and locating their emotions is kind of the opposite of distracting themselves. (But distracting yourself can be a fine thing and useful coping mechanism too; in fact Peyton includes "distraction" as a method of "self-regulation" in the same section on "self-regulation" I'm about to quote from. but, I think, a different thing than naming emotions).

Anyway, I'm no expert and I'm not trying to convince you, if it's not something that seems to resonate with you, then maybe it's not for you, right now anyway. But since you asked, I figured I'd post an excerpt from the thing I was just reading that touched on what you are asking about, in a way that really struck me -- although I don't know if just these few paragraphs will be as striking as the whole book so far as been on me!

> If you have doubts that talking about feelings will help you, you are in good company. Research shows that most people don't believe that putting words to emotions helps at all. People don't think that it makes things better to name what's happening, even though the effectiveness of that approach can be seen with fMRI. Perhaps this is because many people cope by paying no attention to their emotions or their bodies and the naming of feelings is unfamiliar and thus uncomfortable. But the experience of naming what is happening not only works to calm us down; when it is done with a caring other it can also create relationships of warmth and trust, no matter how old we are. Bringing these relationships inside (importing them into our own brain and carrying them there as a memory) helps people feel more secure in the world. This can have unexpected long-term benefits, including improving immune system function; the sense of meaning and purpose in life; resiliency in the face of trauma, depression or posttraumatic stress; and relationships with others and with ourselves…

> …Putting words to inner experience is helpful in another way, too. When people can't read the messages being sent by the body, they are in what scientists call alexithymia, or body blindness. Did you ever meet anyone who was stressed out and angry but didn't seem to realize it? They might not even have known that they had an increased heart rate or tension in their belly or that their eyebrows were pulling together. These people have a hard time knowing what their emotions are, let alone being able to talk about them. When people don't know what they are feeling, there's nothing they can do to remedy the situation. People who are body-blind show increased stress on their immune system and have a harder time with their relationships. There is also a link between being body-blind and being depressed. These people also suffer more from posttraumatic stress, and some research even shows that they have shorter lives.

> To sum up, developing a conscious practice of naming emotions is one of the sweeteest and most counterintuitive forms of self-regulation (in which the brain takes care of itself without accessing external behaviors or substances, as opposed to self-management, which uses work-arounds such as addictions). When naming emotions is done with warmth, it can foster the mothering relationship between the prefrontal cortex and the amygdala that securely attached children receive from their childhoods. Happily, as people start to name what is happening, they can learn to accompany themselves through emotional experience and support themselves and their immune systems while doing so.

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jrochkind1Dec 2022

I quoted from the self-helpy book I happen to be reading right now, _Your Resonant Self_ by Sarah Peyton, earlier in the thread, but I'm gonna do it again here too, take it or leave it!

A lot of the book is about learning to be gentle and compassionate and supporting of yourself.

> So why don't people talk about their emotions, if it is so helpful? There can be very good reasons that people have turned off the part of their brain that tells them about their body's emotional response to the world. If a person's skull-brain has no way to respond to messages from the body-brain (for example, if the burning, bubbling, cramping, twisting sensations that come with intense emotions have never been acknowledged, or if every one of these unchanging sensations feels like a driving hunger or a craving for an addictive substance), then a person may need to learn to ignore the body-brain. In other words, if emotions are an unbearable trip to unrecoverable emotional hell, then turning off body sensations can help people manage their world. It can be a solid survival strategy to have no idea what is happening in the body. Connection with the body can be unendurable. So it is important to take this journey slowly and acknolwedge that reading about this information may seem simple and unemotional but can awaken old trauma and restimulate old pain.

> If you find this to be true for you, slow down. If we move slowly enough, we can simultaneously build a capacity for resonant, calming response at the same time that we awaken the voice of the body.

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