Step 5: Mindfullness
Learn to be aware of both your body and your feelings
For me, properly understanding what mindfulness, and being able to use this skill regularly and competently was a real game changer. It took a long while for me to really understand what this was (not helped by a psychologist who I don’t think understood this properly either!). For ages, I thought it was ‘being in the moment’, concentrating on what you are doing just now, noticing your surrounding, colouring books or meditation. Whilst these can all be mindfulness practices, they are not the essence of mindfulness itself.
Mindfulness is the practice of learning to adopt the role of the observer when it comes to thoughts and feelings. It means noticing thoughts and feelings are there, and observing them from a distance, rather than being scooped up and absorbed into the emotion of that thought or feeling. It is hard to do properly and consistently, but with practice it gets easier. It has been described as imagining yourself on a train platform and thoughts and feelings being the train passing through the station.
With mindfulness, you would watch the train pass through rather than stepping on it. Without mindfulness, you would feel compelled to get on the train and be in the middle of that turmoil and distress that the thought or feeling (and sometimes, if not often, that is physical) and you would be whisked along with it. Others have described it as watching clouds being blown across the sky.
Mastering this is hard work.
For me, I read lots of books (Ruby Wax for example) without properly truly grasping the meaning of this. The penny properly dropped when I read Janina Fisher’s book (more about this below), in which she uses a parts approach to managing PTSD. This is based on the internal family systems approach of Richard Schwartz.
The parts approach really encourages acknowledgement and then the mindfulness approach of standing back and just noticing.
I think mindfulness is difficult to get your head around, and its only when you master it properly that you see the benefits. This takes regular daily practice – and its can feel like its boring and hard work and for ages it might not bring any benefits.
But its really worth persevering.
It is my experience that you cannot start EMDR without really good skills in mindfulness. If you have an EMDR practitioner who does not teach this first, you probably need a different EMDR therapist, in my view any way.