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Tag: anxiety

  • Are You Stuck in a Pattern of Your Own Making?

    The Locked Brain and the Surfboard

    A brain locked in a pattern of its own making, A free surfing brain.

    Look at the image at the top of this post. Have you ever felt stuck in a pattern, just like this image suggests?

    On the left, a skull, chained and padlocked, sealed inside a glass case. On the right, a living brain, richly coloured, roots trailing like a nervous system still reaching, perched on a surfboard.

    I’ve been sitting with that image all week. It does something that a thousand words of neuroscience struggle to do. It says it in one frame.

    What neuroscience is telling us about trauma and the brain

    Recent advances in our understanding of the brain have given us a useful idea. In a healthy mind, neural networks move fluidly between states, integrating, separating, reconfiguring in response to what’s happening. The system is flexible. It can be surprised, moved, changed by experience, and return to itself afterwards.

    Neuroscientists call that metastability.

    Trauma destroys it. The brain locks into a narrow loop, stuck on one channel, unable to shift. Not because something is stored in the tissue, but because the system has learned that movement itself is dangerous. Stay still. Stay defended. Stay right.

    That’s the skull in the glass case. And the padlock, if you look carefully, is on the inside.

    The ocean, the board, and what I learned before I had words for it

    I grew up in Bude. The sound of the ocean was a constant companion; I could just peek it from my attic window. I learned to read weather in it before I knew what I was doing: the ebb and flow, the change in rhythm before a storm. There was information in that sound, and something settling in it too. I didn’t have the word for it then, but I was learning something about what it means to move with what’s coming rather than brace against it.

    Many of my clients surf. It would surprise me if they didn’t. We live on the North Cornwall coast, and the sea is always there. I understand the flow state they’re describing, that quality of complete absorption where thinking stops and something else takes over. For me, it’s jazz piano. Facing the technical demands of the music, at a certain point, I’m no longer planning or deciding. I’m simply in it, and whatever wants to come out comes out. The board and the keys are different instruments for the same thing: the brain finding its way back to the freedom of childhood imagination.

    When guilt becomes the padlock

    Can you imagine a client whose flow state is surfing, and yet he can barely get to the beach? Not because of injury or illness. Because the responsibilities of work and family have slowly closed around him, and somewhere in that closing, pleasure started to feel like selfishness. The paddle out, the hour in the water, the thing that restores him most reliably, now arrives wrapped in guilt. So he doesn’t go. The padlock goes back on, this time not from trauma in any clinical sense, but from the accumulated weight of obligation and the gradual withdrawal of giving himself permission to be fully alive.

    That’s metastability collapsing in ordinary life. The system can’t move toward what would restore it because moving has come to feel dangerous, self-indulgent, and wrong.

    When being right becomes a matter of survival

    And then there’s a different kind of locked brain. Can you imagine a client who must never lose an argument? Not because they’re arrogant, but because somewhere along the way, losing ground came to feel like losing themselves entirely. The self is too fragile to risk contact without armour. So arguments get created where none exist. Positions get defended past the point of reason. And the people around them, partners, friends, colleagues, gradually stop trying to reach them. The very rigidity designed to protect the self ends up isolating it.

    That’s the glass case with the padlock on the inside. The system can’t be moved, can’t be influenced without feeling annihilated, and can’t lose an argument and still find itself intact on the other side.

    Two very different people. The same image.

    What the therapy room actually offers

    What the therapy room offers, when it’s working, is a place where movement becomes possible again. Where the client who’s locked out his own pleasure can sit with someone who takes his aliveness seriously. Where the client who can’t lose an argument can be genuinely met without being beaten, and discover that the ground doesn’t disappear when they yield a little.

    That’s not technique. It’s not cognitive retraining or processing stored content. It’s the therapist being present enough, free enough in themselves, to model what metastability actually feels like in a human body, in a room, in a relationship. The surfer who knows how to ride uncertainty rather than lock it away.

    Healing isn’t excavation. It’s the return of movement.

    Neuroscience is catching up with what relational practitioners have always known. Flexibility, genuine contact, the productive uncertainty of real relationship: these aren’t nice extras. They’re the thing itself.

    The brain on the surfboard isn’t free because nothing bad ever happened to it. It’s free because it has learned to move again.

  • Anxiety: Your Body Is Trying to Tell You Something

    Right now, as I write this, I am picking my nails, pulling at my beard, pushing my thumb into the palm of my hand. This is the first paragraph of an article on anxiety, and my body knows it. Something is building, something I am not quite sure about, something that could be hard. And yet I know that once I get going, I will be fine.

    That is anxiety. Not a disorder. Not a malfunction. Information.

    If you have arrived here after searching the word “anxiety,” you will have passed through an overwhelming wave of diagnoses, categories, techniques, potions, mindfulness scripts and breathing exercises, all of them premised on the same assumption: that anxiety is something wrong with you, something to be reduced, managed or cured. This article is not that.

    A natural phenomenon, not a disorder

    When we name something a disorder, curiosity stops. We label it, file it, fix it. We begin to relate to it from a cognitive distance, as though it were happening to us rather than in us, as though it were an intruder rather than a messenger. Every nervous system response is a natural phenomenon. Anxiety is no exception. It is your body doing something for a reason, and the most useful question you can ask is not “how do I make this stop” but “what is this telling me, and is it still relevant?”

    It starts in the body, and it starts early

    My earliest memory of anxiety is vivid. I am three or four years old, in my aunt’s garden, digging with a red-handled metal fork. A bee appears. I know bees sting, so I step back. Flight. But the bee seems to follow me, so I pick up the fork and wave it in front of me. Fight. I end up running around the garden, fork raised, a bee apparently in determined pursuit. My nervous system was doing exactly what nature designed it to do: read a signal, generate a response, and move me towards safety.

    Not long after, I refused to go to the school canteen. It was noisy, full of older children, nothing like the warm familiarity of home. I sat down in the classroom and cried. Eventually, my father came. He took my hand and walked me into that tin-shed of a room with its hundred children and crashing acoustics. He sat me next to a girl I felt safe with, and that was enough. My nervous system settled because the relational context had changed. I was not broken. I was responding. And what settled me was not a technique or a strategy; it was the felt safety of another person.

    How a response becomes a pattern

    Well into my twenties, I was still having a physical reaction to bees and wasps. I would freeze, shut my eyes, try to pretend I was not afraid, though my body told a different story entirely. It had logged that early experience and kept the file open.

    Then, as a primary school teacher, a bee got into the classroom. Children were shouting, running, and screaming. I was the adult in the room. I found a glass and a piece of card, captured the bee, opened the window and let it go. From that day on, my body stopped reacting as it once had. The pattern broke, not through a technique or a course of treatment, but through action in a relational context, being the person someone else needed me to be.

    This is how anxiety works. It begins as a genuine response to something real. Over time, the nervous system learns to anticipate, to fire early, to stay on alert in situations that echo the original one, even when the actual danger is long gone. It is not irrational. It is a pattern, wired in for good reasons, and it can be rewired.

    When anxiety takes over

    I have been a performer most of my adult life, and I learned early on to recognise performance anxiety as excitement, energy I could channel rather than suppress. But I have also had social anxiety so severe that I could not easily speak to people. My response was cigarettes and a great deal of beer, enough to get me through the door. It helped in the short term, but it did not touch the anxiety itself. If anything, the anxiety grew, became less predictable, harder to read.

    And then there was The Gambia.

    The breaking point

    I was leading a group on an African drumming trip when one of the group members became seriously ill and died. After contacting the insurers, arranging accommodation, and ensuring everyone got home safely, I was calm, practical, and present, the person the situation required. That evening, I sat in the bar with a friend, and we talked it through. Everything felt steady.

    Then I got up to walk to the toilet, and I fainted.

    I came round to find four men carrying me through the streets, aloft, running, shouting, taking me to the nearby hospital, the same hospital where she had died. Passing that room again felt surreal. The rest of the night passed in that same ward. When the doctor discharged me the following morning, I asked him whether I was going to die. He said no. He said I had had a panic attack.

    My nervous system is wired for movement, organisation and decisive action under stress. That is what it did, and it did it well. But it has an overload point. What I understand now, looking back, is that I might have reached that point later, or not at all, had I allowed myself to share the weight with my friend that evening rather than holding it alone, telling him not just what had happened, but how it felt to be the one responsible. The nervous system settles in the presence of another person. That is not a weakness. That is how we are built.

    What actually helps

    There are no universal techniques. Anyone who tells you otherwise is selling something.

    What matters is noticing: noticing what your body is doing, and finding a way to shift the energy in whatever way works for you in that moment. Scrolling on your phone is a mild anxiety symptom. What can you do as you swipe through that essential video of a dog rescuing a duck from a raging river? Notice it, stop, go for a walk in the park. When you find yourself checking your emails every thirty seconds, bake a cake. When your attention scatters, try focusing on one thing or one person, completely and without distraction.

    As a pianist, I used to shake my hands and flex my fingers for a full minute before sitting down to play. It was my way of moving the energy through rather than sitting on it. More recently, in Zoom training sessions, I found my attention drifting, my hands rubbing together, unable to engage with what was in front of me. I bought a fidget toy. It worked: a small, quiet outlet for the energy, and I could stay present.

    The question worth asking yourself is this: Is the anxiety pulling you into the present moment, or is it pulling you out? The answer usually tells you something about what it needs.

    A word, if you have been given a diagnosis

    A doctor may have diagnosed you with an anxiety disorder, recommended CBT, or prescribed medication – or all three. I am not here to dismiss any of that. What I am suggesting is something that can sit alongside it: a more personal curiosity about what is actually happening in your body, and what stories your mind is constructing around it. Anxiety is often protecting you from something. It is worth asking what that is, and whether the protection is still necessary, or whether it belongs to an earlier chapter of your life.

    What your body already knows

    For most of us, most of the time, anxiety is not a disorder. It is a nervous system doing its job, a body that learned something once and has not yet been shown that things have changed. It is information, sometimes urgent, sometimes subtle, always worth attending to.

    Your body generated this anxiety. It is quite capable of living with it, channelling it, moving it on.

    You do not need to make it go away. You need to listen to what it is telling you.

  • If Therapy Didn’t Work Before, This Might Be Why

    person choosing a therapist, looking out a window pensively

    You’ve been here before. You tried therapy, it didn’t quite feel right, and now you’re left wondering what that means. Was it your fault? Are you too complicated, too resistant, too broken for it to work? Did you do it wrong somehow, or is therapy simply not for you? Finding the right therapist is harder than anyone tells you, and when it doesn’t work out, the easiest person to blame is yourself.

    It probably isn’t any of those things. The fit was wrong, or the approach was wrong, or the level of work was wrong for where you were at the time. That matters more than most people realise, and nobody tells you this when you’re starting out.

    I’ve had several different therapists over forty years, for many different reasons. Some felt right. Some were limited in their helpfulness. And some have been an absolute haven. The difference was rarely about their qualifications or experience.

    The right therapy for the right season

    At a very raw time, a bereavement counsellor handed me a paper assessment form. I started ticking boxes, felt something in me resist, screwed it up and threw it in the bin. She didn’t seem to mind. I carried on seeing her for a few weeks because I desperately needed some support, and she provided it.

    But that was containment, not the deeper work. She was right for that occasion. What I needed then was someone steady to sit with me while things were very raw. Most people aren’t told there’s a difference between that kind of support and longer-term relational work. If therapy felt surface-level or the changes didn’t stick, it may simply be that you were offered crisis support when what you needed was something slower and more relational, or the other way around. That’s not failure, it’s simply a mismatch.

    When the approach gets in the way

    On a couple of occasions, my partner and I saw a sex therapist together. In each case it wasn’t particularly helpful. It felt more like being in a remedial class at school, being handed homework to get us back up to scratch. The therapist wasn’t really relating to us as a couple; we were being put through a process rather than being understood for who we were and what the issues actually meant on a deeper level.

    We later found tantra groups where we were encouraged to explore massage, mindfulness and breathing. We were getting to know our own bodies and what we needed, rather than following someone else’s protocol. The difference was simple: in one setting we were a presenting problem to be corrected; in the other, we were two people trying to understand ourselves.

    That distinction seems important. A therapist who is more interested in applying their model than in understanding you will leave you feeling processed. You might not be able to name it at the time, but you’ll feel it.

    What a good fit actually feels like

    I’ve been seeing my current therapist for over three years. I cycle to her each fortnight with a few thoughts going through my head, but I never arrive with an agenda. Stuff just spills out. She knows my background, elements of my childhood, my relationships, the highs and lows of life past and present. She knows about the imagery of my inner child and parts of my experience where feelings are more vivid than factual detail. Each session takes us on a journey inwards.

    As we come to a close, she asks what I’m doing afterwards. It started as a way of reminding me to ground myself before getting back into ordinary life. Now she knows the answer: I will find a café, order a hot coffee and something comforting to eat, and spend at least an hour alone. No social contact, no talking, no scrolling. Just sitting with whatever happened in the room, letting it settle.

    That question, “What are you doing after this?”, is a small thing. But it tells me everything about how she sees me. She is thinking about me as a whole person, not just the fifty minutes. She wants to know I’ll be alright when I walk out the door.

    That is what a good fit feels like from the inside. You arrive without a plan, something moves anyway, and afterwards you need to be alone because you’re full.

    So what are you actually looking for?

    Not credentials. Not a long list of models and modalities. Those things matter less than you’ve been led to believe.

    Start with the profile. Does something in it connect with you? Does this person seem interested in people, or in problems? If nothing lands, move on.

    If something does, there’s often a phone call. Notice how you feel during it. Do you feel heard, right there in those ten minutes? That’s information.

    If you get to a first session, notice what happens in the room. Do you feel like a person or a case? Are they following you, or leading you through their process?

    And pay attention to the hour after. Do you need to sit quietly and let things settle, or are you left with a vague sense of discomfort and unfinished business? Both can be useful information, but they’re different kinds.

    The felt sense of a session is data. Your body is registering something your mind hasn’t caught up with yet.

    If therapy didn’t work before, you probably knew something was off. You just didn’t know you were allowed to trust that feeling. You are.