It seems difficult for people to talk about their nightmares. Even if the person has told me during their assessment that they suffer from nightmares, I often find people don’t talk about them in any detail until we have been working together for a while. Maybe by...
Neuroscience and Trauma in Childhood
Types of dreams
Types of Dreams Every dream is as unique as the dreamer, but there are specific types of dreamsthat most commonly find their way into my consulting room. These are daydreams, vivid dreams, recurring dreams, lucid dreams, nightmares and night terrors. This month, I...
Dream Journaling
How To Remember Your Dreams I often work with people who dream frequently and are interested in their dreams. Many suffer from nightmares and night terrors which they remember vividly. I will be exploring these in a later post. But a lot of people don’t remember...
Dreaming
Photography by Gregory Pappas on UnsplashPsychotherapy and Dreams During an initial consultation with a potential client, I often ask about their dreams. Do they dream regularly? Do they have significant dreams from childhood? Do they have recurring dreams? This is...
Time for a Mindset Spring Clean
March is a hopeful month. Officially the first month of spring with emerging colour, bulbs bravely shooting through the ground and trees starting to sprout buds. A couple of years ago in the UK we had a mini heatwave in March. With the unpredictability of the climate,...
Cyber Bullying
Cyber Bullying When researching this subject, I was shocked to see the number of people who had taken their lives due to cyber bullying and sextortion. Between March 2019 and March 2020 19% or one in five children between the age of 10 and 15 in England and Wales...
Male Influencers
The MeToo movement has been wonderful for women’s rights and furthering awareness of sexual harassment and abuse. I know very few women who haven’t experienced sexual harassment at some point in their life and there is now an ability for women to have a voice, be...
What’s Your Online Persona?
Who Do You Think You Are? How Do You Want To Come Across Online? We all know someone who exaggerates their life online – we see the ‘official’ glitzy positive image they put on social media. For example, posts of holiday snaps look amazing but, when we meet to hear...
Striking the Balance – Parenting Children on Social Media
Children and social media: It can be a thorny issue for many parents. There is a common conflict. On the one hand, if you let your child engage in social media they can feel part of their friendship group and won’t feel left out or left behind, whilst on the other...
Phone Addiction – Are We Losing the Art of Being Able to be With Ourselves?
At a comedy show recently I sat in my seat during the interval and studied the art deco theatre. I was admiring the intricate ceiling and the décor and looked across from where I was sitting to see three people engrossed in their phones. They seemed oblivious to the...
Neuroscience –the study of the brain and nervous system:
brain cells that fire together wire together
Neuroscience has proven that prolonged stress can have a serious affect on the structure of the brain. The traumatic event (which we are trying to ignore) actually weakens the functioning of the prefrontal cortex area of the brain. This is the part that regulates our emotions, thoughts and behaviours.
The first few years of life are vital to shaping our brains. The brain’s connections or neurons are stimulated or restricted by the experiences they encounter. Each time we repeat a thought, action or feeling we strengthen the connection between the brain cells or neurons. Therefore if we have an experience which we find traumatic or highly stressful the brain’s neurons can freeze. If this trauma is repeated eg a baby or young child not having its needs met over a prolonged period of time, the immobilisation can increase with each experience. Which may mean that the child becomes very fearful and lacks self esteem. If the child is not allowed to express these feelings they can lead to anxiety and depression later in life.
Post traumatic stress can feel overwhelming when a traumatic event isn’t able to be processed. In a lot of cases the current trauma can bring up unprocessed feelings from an earlier trauma. This earlier trauma, often in childhood, has been left unprocessed because it is too painful to remember in any detail. So we can carry around some post traumatic stress from the original trauma.
However there is hope
MRI scans show that the brain can change at any age i.e. it is flexible. This is called neuroplasticity. New neuron patterns can be created in the same way that the unhealthy neuron patterns were. Hard data from research is proving what we already know about counselling from clinical experience with clients. Which is that we really can change our brains and improve our lives permanently.
I have found Daniel Siegel really helpful in explaining the integration of neuroscience and psychotherapy. His books The Developing Mind and Mindsight are great places to start.
Read my previous blog: Post Traumatic Stress