This episode marks the beginning of a series up to episode 62 where I am going to present to you the importance of involving the body in your personal development journey in episode 57 I will talk in more detail about the poly-vagal theory and starting from episode 58 I will tell you about different body techniques and how they can help you in your personal development.

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And so to start this series, in this episode I am going to share my point of view on the limits of coaching and personal development or mindset because for me when it comes to personal development and the ability to connect to the other it requires working on the body, that is also why I include psycho-corporal approaches in my coaching practice because personally it changed my life and the more I practice them on the people I accompany the more I see how much it transforms their way of approaching the world and others. And for that I am going to base myself on the book by the psychiatrist Bessel Van der Kolk “The body keeps the score” A book that has sold more than 3 million copies worldwide. He is a professor of psychiatry at Boston University, founded the Trauma Center in Boston. He conducted in-depth studies on the nature of traumatic memory and played a leading role in the first studies on psychopharmacological treatments of PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder, in French SSPT ). He is particularly interested in psychopathology and he coined the term “Developmental trauma disorder” to designate the complex range of psychological and biological reactions to trauma during human development.  I loved this book because it tells the story of his path as a psychiatrist who at first gave the greatest importance to the head, until he came to understand the role of the body in psychology. I had the totally opposite experience because I started from my body’s reactions (bulimia episodes, emotional overreactions, I talk to you more about this in episode 1 of the podcast) to make the link with what I had experienced in my past. 

I wanted to share with you in this episode his main findings to explain to you the limits of working through the head, of coaching and of personal development.

So a little disclaimer, I am not a scientific person so I hope I will not make mistakes in the way I retell what he wrote in the book. I invite you to read the book yourselves because it is really really worth it if this is a subject that interests you. So in his book Bessel Van der Kolk explains that he worked with Vietnam War veterans and also that he worked in institutions with people who were interned for various mental illnesses and that these experiences allowed him to observe that ultimately the “bodies” of these people showed common imbalances such as for example:

• Poor agility or poor body coordination
• Sleep disorders
• Emotional overreactions or on the contrary a dissociation from the body
• Self-destructive behaviors endangering life or seeking to hurt oneself such as stopping eating, mutilations…
• Flashbacks and hallucinations where the body really reacts
• Obsessive thoughts about the event

He also noticed that at night the patients told him more about what they had lived through, the abuse, the experiences of war, of violence, and he wondered whether the madness they told about during the day was not ultimately a fragment of the feeling of their trauma that kept going round and round inside them. During his career he lived through the arrival of medication in psychiatric treatments, its benefits (he even studied pharmacology for the treatment of PTSD) but that pharmacology also had its limits notably it did not solve the underlying problem or that for some people the medication did not work. And so he started doing brain scans of people who had experienced post-traumatic stress syndromes (these are “strong” traumas such as war, violence, abuse/rape, parental neglect) He therefore recorded brain scans in 2 cases:

• The first where they had them reread the scene of their trauma that they remembered
• In another case where they described a scene where they feel safe 

He then analyzed the scans to see a little which area of the brain was reactivated by these traumas and noted 3 things :

• Simply rereading the trauma scenarios again triggers the person’s physical reactions from the time of the trauma, reactions such as dread, sweating, stupor even if the person was not reliving the experience.
• For some people the emotional brain went on alert (sounds and sensations of the event were reactivated) and made them stay in their past traumas and prevented them from connecting to the present moment even though the danger was no longer there. It is as if they remained “stuck” in their traumatic experiences.
• And the third point was the prevalence of the body’s information over the brain and as long as in fact as long as the body perceives a “danger” and this perception of danger happens through the body’s signals, the body’s sensations and the effect of these sensations on your organs, your viscera, the head cannot be reasoned with. 

In summary this means that if you have experienced a trauma you can do all the mindset you want to try to calm yourself down, to reason with yourself, it is useless as long as your body does not feel safe. He also explains that for people who have experienced a trauma, this trauma has three additional consequences :

• That the level of normality is that of the trauma so basically one may seek to relive the “chaos” and to relive the “trauma” because it is the normal level.
• That because of the trauma you are activated faster, sensitive to danger and that you have more difficulty feeling safe.
• And finally that you can cut yourself off from your emotional feeling and so this cuts you off somewhat from knowledge of yourself through your emotions and sensations.

And finally in his book he puts into perspective the approaches that exist to regulate one’s emotions and illustrates this with the example of the horse and the rider. The rider is your head and your reason (your rational brain). When the external environment is safe, the rider manages to steer his mount, make it trot, gallop and jump. The horse (is your emotional brain which is itself connected to your viscera) And he sums up by saying that if the horse feels in danger, the rider has only a weak capacity to influence the horse. He says in English “no insights will silence it”. No reflection, no realization will silence the horse. It is this observation that led him to consider the work of Stephen Porges  who explains that the autonomic nervous system also plays a role in our capacity for attachment and connection to others (I will talk about it more in episode 57 with my expert on the polyvagal theory) because we are mammals and group membership is decisive for our survival and so it is important to know who we can team up with or not. Stephen Porges explains that our feeling of safety is influenced by how we perceive others. This perception of others is largely influenced by whether the body feels safe or not, following the emotional traumas we have experienced. Your autonomic nervous system has 3 levels of safety :

• 1st level We are looking for social interactions and are also able to connect to others and feel connected. The person is relaxed, has a slower heart rate, deeper breathing.

• 2nd level Our body goes into stress (fight or flight) and we are alert to danger, social engagement is harder, we become more sensitive to noise and have trouble communicating. 

• 3rd level Our body thinks there is no solution anymore (freeze), the body shuts down by lowering the heart rate, breathing becomes difficult, our intestines stop working. We play dead in the face of the environment (disengagement or even panic) to the point of losing consciousness 

When a person has emotional traumas, their autonomic nervous system is dysregulated because not only does the body remember the trauma, but it can remain stuck in trauma-reaction mode. Thus, even if the threat has disappeared, the body still perceives danger and its defenses remain engaged. This impacts their behavior on several levels :

• They have more difficulty entering into intimacy and may limit their social contacts to a superficial level.
• They have trouble telling when they are safe.
• They are more wary of the outside world.

Emotional traumas are not limited to the situations that may have caused post-traumatic stress syndrome. Dr Nicole Le Pera, a clinical psychologist and author of the book “How to do the work” also called the holistic psychologist, explains which insecure attachments can cause emotional traumas. It is when the people who mainly take care of you (parent, teacher) or when family members (brother/sister) : – deny reality. – do not see you or hear you – live vicariously through you or mold you. – do not set limits – focus too much on your appearance. – cannot regulate their emotions I would also add any experience that makes you feel any kind of “danger” or involves your body (accident, birth, illness, being forced to do or eat something, addictions, medical operations, intrusive medical care, chronic stress), sudden and unexpected events (death or illness of loved ones, sudden or shocking event, war), peer pressure (mobbing…). In summary an emotional trauma is the repetition of experiences perceived as stressful where the person did not feel safe and did not manage to regulate, either by themselves or by co-regulation with their entourage. This information can revolutionize your love life. Yes it is good to work on your behaviors and communication so that it works in love. But as long as your body does not feel safe, connected, it is useless. So how do you make your body safe ?

• Deactivate your past emotional traumas from the body and their reaction patterns. My psycho-corporal approach which will go and find the first traumatic event and deactivate the reaction that makes the body stay on alarm in order to reprogram a reaction where the person takes back their power over the situation. To recalibrate your autonomic nervous system to a “normal” level.

• Show your body that it can count on you to develop its sense of safety : listen to its basic needs (drink, eat, sleep) feel its comfortable and uncomfortable emotions in the body and not in the head. I will give you more leads in EP 58 Reconnecting with your body, in EP 60 my guest will give you tools to reconnect with your inner voice, your intuition, and in EP 61 I will talk about Kundalini yoga also called the yoga of consciousness which is particularly interesting for its effect on the autonomic nervous system and hormones.

• Become aware of the situations that put your body into stress, try to describe precisely what the physical manifestations are and estimate at which level. Observe the actions that allow you to regulate yourself on your own and through others. Because it is unique for each person. In episode EP 62 I present to you a tool called the roadmaps of the polyvagal theory.

• Gradually increase your margin of resistance to stress either by developing more resilience to your stressors or by releasing the body from stored emotional traumas. In EP 59 you will discover the Wim Hof cold therapy which allows you to develop more resilience to stress. In EP 21 you can find out more about Breathwork  a breathing technique that helps you empty this emotional stock from the body. The second psycho-corporal approach that I practice during the Day of the Past allows the emotions that have remained stored in the body to come out.