emotional healing

How To Heal Emotional Trauma

Sumelevate Life Coach Sume Chatz recently interviewed me for his video podcast about how I work with my coaching clients to help them heal emotional trauma from the past so they can move on to a happier future.

The interview packs a heap of information into a half hour, covering topics like:

  • How family of origin issues can set you up for emotional problems down the track
  • The impact of poor communication skills on our world view as children
  • How to heal overwhelming anxiety
  • The role of the subconscious and how to work with it
  • Mindfulness and the importance of living in the present
  • What I actually do in Skype sessions with my clients
  • How to coach someone in emotional trauma
  • How to get motivated towards your goals

That’s a lot of valuable information for one half hour! I recommend you check it out.

emotional traumaThe one thing I didn’t mention explicitly was what exactly emotional trauma is: the emotional residue left in our brains and nervous system attached to memories of any emotionally overwhelming past event that we weren’t able to fully express and release at the time.

Healing trauma is important because emotionally charged memories from the past restrict our ability to be freely self-expressed and get on with life in the present.

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By Graham Stoney, ago

How To Work With An Empathy Buddy

What Is An Empathy Buddy?

Get A Male Empathy Buddy

Get A Male Empathy Buddy

An empathy buddy is a great way to receive some non-judgmental emotional support from another person, without having to spend big dollars on therapy. They can be particularly valuable if you:

  • Have difficulty identifying or expressing your feelings or needs
  • Feel isolated and in need of connection
  • Don’t trust other men to treat your feelings with respect
  • Need ongoing emotional support

An empathy buddy isn’t a replacement for a therapist; if you have emotional wounds from the past that are causing you fear or anxiety in your day-to-day life, get a therapist. But if you’re looking for another way to expand your emotional vocabulary, reduce your emotional isolation or manage feelings of shame you may have about your emotions, an empathy buddy can be a great way to do it.

The idea is to have a buddy who listens to where you’re at without judging you and occasionally reflects back how you’re feeling and what your needs are. I suggest talking to your empathy buddy on a regular basis, such as every week or fortnight. Like any relationship, it may take a little while to feel fully comfortable with your empathy buddy, but following the guidelines below will help you build trust and rapport together more quickly.

The idea of an empathy buddy comes from the Non-Violent Communication (NVC) community. NVC is a style of communication developed by Marshall Rosenberg with the aim that everyone can get their needs met by communicating feelings and needs clearly and directly. Showing empathy is also a core skill for relating to other people so it’s a great thing to learn and practice in its own right.

Having an empathy buddy gives you a safe environment to explore feelings that may otherwise undermine your self-confidence, since your buddy gives you permission to feel how you feel without telling you that you’re wrong or should be different. I believe that healing unresolved feelings, especially when there is shame involved, requires us to connect to another consciousness; and an empathy buddy can help us do just that.

This is powerful stuff. (more…)

By Graham Stoney, ago

How To Stand Up To An Adult Bully

Today I want to talk about how to stand up to an adult bully. This is particularly important if you are like me and you got bullied a lot when you were a kid at school. Adult bullies now are your opportunity to stand up for yourself and to heal the emotional damage that was done to you when you were a kid. Because although you might have felt unsafe standing up to the bullies when you were a kid and you might have been carrying that fear with you, now that you’re an adult it’s actually quite safe to stand up to bullies and so the adult bullies that invariably come into our lives are an opportunity to heal the bullying from the past.

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By Graham Stoney, ago

The Biggest Factor That Undermines Self-Confidence

Hey there, it’s Graham here. Now, if you’re interested in making some serious inroads into boosting your self-confidence, then you’ve come to the right place because what I want to do is talk about the number 1 factor that undermines our self-confidence the most. And it’s an interesting one because very, very few people are even prepared to talk about it. So you’re probably wondering, “Well, what is it?” Well, it’s very simple. In one word, the problem is shame.

Now, you probably recognize shame as a feeling of embarrassment or as a feeling of inhibition that holds you back from doing things sometimes, and it’s often accompanied by the thought in your head of “What are people going to think? If I do what I want to do, if I act on my impulses, then what are people going to think?”

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By Graham Stoney, ago

How To Get Emotional Healing

Hey, it’s Graham here again with another confidence building idea for you. And today I want to talk about a serious subject which is the weighty topic of getting some emotional healing, if you need it. Now what tends to happen to us in life is invariably we go through a series of events, some of which are great and some of which are not so good, and some of the ones which are not so good can be so heavy that they’re really traumatic and they leave us with some kind of emotional scarring deep down in our psyche that hangs around and affects us for the rest of our life until we get to the point where we’re ready to deal with this stuff.

Now, the way that your subconscious works and that your emotions work are that any time you have a event that happens with a strong emotional response, in particular an emotional response that’s too strong for you to deal with at the time, we end up with a traumatic memory stored deep in our subconscious. And what happens is that any time in the future that we’re in a similar kind of situation, we’ll have the same emotion arise because we’ve been programmed for that by the traumatic event that’s happened back in our past.

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By Graham Stoney, ago

How To Heal Deep Emotional Wounds

Peter Saxon

Holistic Counsellor Peter Saxon

Emotional wounds from early life can have a profoundly detrimental effect on our self confidence and our ability to be successful in life.

Even wounds that we’re unaware of or reluctant to acknowledge can still strongly effect us because they operate on the unconscious or subconscious level. These wounds can lead to self-sabotaging behaviour that may be obvious to other people, while we remain oblivious to what’s going on. Yet we keep encountering similar painful experiences in life over and over, unable to pinpoint what’s causing this pattern or how to break out of it.

Often deep emotional wounds that we may be unaware of are at the heart of our ongoing suffering. Fortunately my good friend Peter Saxon is an expert on dealing with exactly this problem in men’s lives, and I recently seized the opportunity to interview him on the topic.

My favourite quote from this interview is:

“When we really get to experience our feelings directly without avoiding or grasping or going to the emotional drama of the feeling, and are actually be able to sit with it, and then look to identify what the need is underneath that feeling, and getting help to meet that need: life changes dramatically.”

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By Graham Stoney, ago

What To Do When You’re Emotionally Triggered

Do you ever experience situations where you suddenly feel really bad in response to something happening around you, and have a compelling urge to withdraw or shut down? If so, you’ve probably been emotionally triggered.

I’ve been doing some acting training lately with a local theatre company which does shows based on Forum Theatre. This style of theatre is highly interactive: The actors perform a play in which things end badly for one or more of the characters; but then instead of leaving it there they go back and replay some of the scenes using suggestions from the audience as to what the characters could do differently that might change the final outcome. We even get members of the audience up on stage to role play their suggestions while the other actors remain in character to see how the ideas from the audience play out in practice.

The role I was being trained for was to act as the Joker: a kind of cheeky M.C. whose role is to liaise between the actors and the audience, asking for suggestions from the audience and encouraging them to get up on stage to play those suggestions out. While the introduction to this part of the play was scripted, the audience interaction is all improvised based on the suggestions that the audience offer. Some suggestions will be worth running with while others may need to be modified or combined depending on everything from the values of the organisation presenting the show to the time constraints imposed by the venue.

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By Graham Stoney, ago

The 10 Secret Keys To Happiness

Many people are looking for the answer to the basic question: how to be happy?

We all want to enjoy life and avoid suffering, but there’s more to it than just that. So here are my 10 secret keys to happiness:

#1: Make A Difference To Other People

No man is an island. We’re all biologically wired to live in community, and to make a contribution to the greater good. Of course we’re also wired for self-protection and to get our personal needs met, but millions of years of evolutionary development living in tribes means that we can’t do this in isolation. Loneliness is one stark reminder of this that motivates us to reconnect with our fellow man.

If you make yourself the center of the universe, and your life solely about meeting your own needs, you create personal misery. At the other end of the spectrum, martyrdom will make you bitter and resentful. The primary key to happiness is to find ways to make a positive difference to other people in a way that energizes you without depleting you.

#2: Use Your Gifts, Talents and Passion

To be energized in the long haul while you’re busy making a difference to other people, you need to be utilizing your unique gifts and talents in ways that you feel passionate about.… Continue reading…

By Graham Stoney, ago

How to Recognize and Overcome Perfectionism

Perfectionism will undermine your self-confidence like nothing else. Trying to maintain a facade of perfection all the time and holding yourself to unachievable standards is exhausting; I know, I’ve tried. But before you can do anything about perfectionism, you need to be able to recognize it.

Here are some clues that you might be suffering from perfectionism:

  • A deep fear of failure, and sense of devastation when it happens

  • Getting upset when you don’t win all the time

  • Feeling ashamed of your thoughts and emotions

  • Holding back on expressing how you really feel

  • Fear of what others might think of you

  • A sense of self-consciousness

  • Using sarcasm or passive aggression when relating to others

  • Communicating non-assertively

  • Being driven to high achievement all the time-to-time

  • Difficulty relaxing

Any of this sound familiar?

Ok, so now we can see the problem, here are two different ways of looking at it:

  1. You’re not perfect, and never will be. Neither is anyone else. Pretending to be perfect when you’re really not is living a lie. It cuts you off from relating deeply to other people, because they can’t relate to your facade of invulnerability. As a result, you sometimes come across as distant or aloof.
… Continue reading…
By Graham Stoney, ago

How to Recover From a Controlling Mother

Growing up with a controlling and/or domineering mother can suppress your masculinity and leave you stuck feeling and acting like a boy in a man’s body. My mother was the dominant figure in my family of origin and with a relatively passive father it was a disastrous recipe for my developing masculinity.

A controlling mother creates a relationship dynamic that will undermine your confidence in yourself as a man unless you take steps to counter its effects. So here are some steps to take to help you recover from growing up with a controlling, dominant mother:

Recognize that Your Mother is Controlling

Did you have a controlling Mother?

Did you have a controlling Mother?

The first step to dealing with a problem is to recognize that it exists. It took me a long time to even see that my mother was controlling. It wasn’t until I did The Landmark Forum in my mid-30s and they started talking about how controlling most of us are that I had this insight.

When I was a child, my mother used a physical leash to control me; partly for my own safety, and partly for her convenience. As I got older, verbal stoushes with my father made it very clear that the masculine point of view wasn’t welcome in our household.… Continue reading…

By Graham Stoney, ago