I just spent a few days immersing myself in a Somatic Integration and Processing Training. I really loved it, and one of the ideas that kept my brain kept circling back to was how often we accidentally leave our bodies out of the “mental health” conversation. It doesn’t work when we just try to re-train the brain and re-write our thoughts and we leave our bodily felt sense out of the equation.

"What is rewarded gets repeated. What is punished is avoided."

~James Clear from his book Atomic Habits

I enjoyed the book Atomic Habits. I thought it was excellent. I appreciate this quote. But it doesn’t tell the whole story.

Let's talk about what I mean.

You might have been rewarded in ways that aren't obvious.

“But from this moment on, I understood that feelings, no matter how powerful, aren’t fatal. And they are temporary. Suppressing the feelings only makes it harder to let them go. Expression is the opposite of depression.” - Dr. Edith Eva Eger p 178-9 of her book The Choice: Embrace the Possible

Were you really being selfish? Or were you in survival mode without realizing it?

This is a question that I often ask my clients when they say “I feel like I’m being selfish.” In order to understand the question, we need to go into a bit of therapy lingo.

Adaptive Information Processing, or AIP for short (not to be confused with the diet) is the theory behind EMDR.