Practical ideas to help Parisians to cope

As someone who is sitting on the other side of the world from the Paris attacks, I watch as a voyeur. But I have a family member in Paris who was involved and so I offer these thoughts in the spirit of our common humanity in the hope that will be of use to someone.

Constant reminders of what is happening will pierce people's consciousness and reactivate their panic. I'm going to talk about how to cope with fear, how to cope with the big and complicated feelings that will be running through people, and finally the art and the act of coping itself.

Managing fear & panic

In the context of a bomb blast, fear is a logical and appropriate emotional, physiological, and motion state. No doubt it got many people to safety. The swiftness of their actions were driven by the adrenaline pumping through their body... The difficulty with a prolonged trauma, or the aftermath of a trauma, is that the body does not trust it can turn this fear state off.

There are several important things to understand about a fear reaction. The body is mobilised by adrenaline pumping through the bloodstream, activating the heart, the muscles, the thoughts. The adrenaline turns off the human part of our brain and we go into fight or flight mode. This is our animal survival mode where we are ready to either run, fight, or play dead in order to survive. Survival is the single and only imperative at this moment. The human parts of language, of planning, of reflection are not available tous. In the aftermath of this trauma, if people are still experiencing the symptoms of adrenaline - palpitations, sweating, clenching teeth, flushing in the face, rapid or shallow breathing -then it is possible that their brain is still somewhat shut off.

Each time a noise or picture on TV or conversation activates the fear response, you are left with a panicking brain that cannot make sense of what has happened or what to do next.  Every fear it thinks up is possible and credible and cannot be challenged -when in reality it can. 

The next thing that's important to understand, is often in this panic response our breathing is short and shallow and this also perpetuates this heightened state. Often this is out of our awareness, but the more we can slow and deepen our breathing the sooner we can turn off this heightened panic response. 

Why do we want to do this? Because once the immediate danger is over we need our human brain to be able to talk, to be able to think, to be able to communicate with others, to be able to think about others, and to work out what we're going to do next to cope. Fear perpetuates fear, and once relative safety has been achieved we want to start the recovery process. The recovery is physical, the recovery is for our community and our relationships, and the recovery is for our soul.

This is a difficult time because great feelings of grief, loss, disbelief, anger, anguish..., will continue to roll on through, again activating our fear response. In this early phase the mantra is still "Safety first". People will find themselves having to calm down many many times a day, an hour, or a minute.

So how do we calm down?

The first thing we have to do is notice the change fear has brought in our body: we have to ask ourselves "Have I crossed my adrenaline line?". This is a short hand for asking ourselves "Is my body showing the signs of activation by adrenaline?". There will be early, middle, and late signs. The late signs are obvious - that's us screaming running down the street, frankly dissociating and losing touch with reality, or wanting to fight or cower. But there are subtler signs of adrenaline activating our body. These can be starting to feel flushed in the face or clenching our teeth, feeling like pacing or hyper vigilant - looking around, not being able to focus on anything. Feeling a knot in our stomach or tension in our shoulders. Then there are the even more subtle signs that we will have to pick up, like a certain tightness or sickness in our stomach that doesn't leave us. Everyone is different, but note your early, middle, and late signs that adrenaline is starting to activate your body, because we need to do something to calm it down again.

For me, the quickest way to tell is to check my breathing, when it is short and sharp, when it is quick and shallow I know I am well on my way. Short breathing is an accelerant to stress and slow deep breathing is the beginning of calm. Observing our breathing is often a quick way to check where we're at in terms of crossing our adrenaline line.

Calm the body to calm the mind

Once we have noticed if there are signs of adrenaline activation in our body we need to calm down to sort our head out, because we are trying to solve very real life problems with a head that is not completely working. It is working on animal brain, but we need access to the human, calm, reflective, resourceful brain. Different people calm down differently. Some people need to relax, other people need to tension up and actually feel present and enlivened in their body. For the people that need to relax start with a grounding exercise. Always start with the feet, feel your feet on the ground and then move your awareness through every joint in your body, noticing your posture and noticing the tension and trying to slowly relax and soften your muscles. This need only take two minutes but it can help your body deactivate. Why do we want to calm the body? Because that is how we calm the mind. If we use mental strategies at this stage with a messed up mind that is in panic mode they're doomed to failure. If we calm the body we can reduce the adrenaline flying around, get our human brain back, and start to challenge our panic infected thinking. This grounding exercise should be accompanied with slowing and deepening of the breath and observing how our body changes as it comes under that adrenaline line. Our mind will scream at us to return to our fears and racing thoughts but we must be resolute and stay on task. It may take a few goes to do that, but the more aware we are the better control we have at pulling our self down and pulling our mind back into its best frame.

For people who find relaxing distressing, tensioning up their muscles can be good. Again, we start on the feet and we notice where they are on the earth -in the present moment. Then we can rise up a little bit on our toes and take the weight and the balance in our toes, and feel the wobble and the balancing through all our joints in our body. If necessary, we can sway a little bit and try and sense the balancing between the two sides of our body. Another one, if people need a stronger stimulus through their muscles, is to go over to a wall and gently and firmly try and push it over. A third method is tilting back on our chair slightly, without falling over, and taking the tension in your thighs and slowly returning the chair to the ground and feeling the weight in your thighs.

All these techniques enable us to sense into our body, check where it's at, and calm it down.

Calm the body by focusing our senses.

The last component of this grounding and calming the body step is to help focus our senses. Some people like to sense inside the body - focusing on their breath and the simplicity of the in and the out. This can be assisted with a seed mantra such as "Ohm" which is a low grumbling sound that vibrates from our throat as we breathe in and out slowly. The trick is to sense into that vibration in our throat and sense into the rhythm of our breathing and try and stop our mind straying back toward the panicky thoughts. This technique of sensing into the body is called introception.

For some people, their internal environment will feel too chaotic, and doing that will only heighten their panic, and stress, and fear. For these people, often focusing on external stimuli will help bring them back to ground. Examples of this are listening for four sounds, seeing four things - I often look at four things that are colored red, focusing on the feel of four different textures and really sensing into the difference between each texture, smelling four different things. We are using our senses to orient back to the present moment and the simplicity of the now moment, and as it helps calm our body we are trying to tell our panicking busy mind to slow and quieten.

Once we have calmed the body and we have moved under our adrenaline line we can check to see if our human brain has come back. We will tell this because our language capacity is better, our thoughts flow more naturally and slowly, and we are able to reflect on things rather than have a confusion of thinking in our head. Once this is done we can finally challenge our negative thinking. We can agree that we've been through something terrible, but at this moment right here right now we are safe enough and we are with the people in our community. We don't know what the future holds, but in this moment -here and now we're okay, we're alive and we're able bodied enough to help someone else.

Sweep the horror images from your mind

 
For some people, their anxiety will be triggered by lots of pictures of the horror. These pictures will keep reactivating the fear and the sorrow. Sometimes in order to calm the mind, once we have calmed the body, instead of challenging our negative thinking, we have to sweep out the negative and triggering images with a mental broom. There are three different visual/mental brooms that I use to sweep out all the triggering pictures in my head. The first is the Sanskrit Ohm sign. I have it printed on a piece of paper with pictures of butterflies drawn through it. As I look at this image I close my eyes and I mentally pass it from the front of my head through my skin, my skull, the front of my brain, past my ears, through the back of the brain, and finally out through the back of my skull and my head. As it does that it collects all the pictures and pushes them out to the back of my head and out with the broom, leaving the Ohm sign in its place. You can also do this with a red traffic stop sign that you imagine to be very large and very bright, or with a beautiful picture that is neutral and peaceful such as a butterfly.

Re start the daily life movie in your head

One of the challenges with a significant trauma like a terrorist attack is it's like the clock stops still at the moment of the terrorism. We are trying to slowly move it forward. So whenever there is a repeated image of the horror, of the shooting, of the carnage, we need to then sweep that image out and move it forward to the next hour, and the next day, and the next morning and try and help the movie reel in our head not get stuck on that first riveting image.

These procedures aren't a one size fits all and you will find which bits work for you. I imagine you will have to use them repeatedly throughout the day as all the emotions and the horror continues to dawn on you.

And now, the big feelings rolling through…

The next thing to deal with are the large and disorganizing emotions that will sweep through you like a flood, like a river after a torrential downpour. These will be big powerful feelings that throw you off your course and are hard to handle. Some people are better at dealing with feelings than others. Everyone is better at dealing with one particular feeling than another. For instance, some people can handle sadness but not tolerate anger, or handle anger but not tolerate sadness or emptiness. Different feelings disarm people in different ways so they block the disarming feeling because it feels unsafe.

Accelerator & decelerator feelings

There are a few important things to understand about feelings. Just as stress can activate us, some feelings can act like an accelerant. These can be positive or negative feelings such as joy, happiness, excitement, rage, fear, anxiety. But they have an accelerating effect on the body and the mind. 

Other feelings have the opposite effect, they are like hitting the brake in our car and they stop us in our tracks: Grief, sorrow, guilt, or shame are very powerful in this way. But also calm, relaxation, and serenity.

The reason I talk about the accelerator and decelerator feelings is that sometimes they can interact in a complicated way. Sometimes even though we might feel very, very sad there is an imperative that we continue to move, we can't afford to be stopped in our tracks. Sadness can make us vulnerable and impact on our ability to cope and so we can wrap it in a protective outer coating feeling. This feeling is big and loud and takes all our attention. A common combination is being very angry on the outside, but underneath having a deep sadness that threatens to overwhelm us.

It can work the other way too, sometimes we can feel very, very enraged but this is a threat to us and to our survival so we can either coat it in numbness or we can coat it in a sadness.

The issue about the covering up of feelings is that often they are covered up to us as well and they are feelings that we are no longer aware of because they are so disguised and pushed down. The problem this leaves us with is that first of all, we can't tend to these feelings, but secondly we are left with the protective coating. Nothing seems to remedy the protective outer loud feeling and it doesn’t seem to go away. This can explain why sometimes people walk around angry and irritable, but when you check and inquire for, what I call other sneaky feelings, or the covered up, whispering feelings, they are there underneath. Once the sneaky feelings are understood and are there in our awareness we can afford to let go of the protective covering. But until that time we often don't feel like we can take that protective covering off.

The three commonest coverings, or big loud shout-y feelings, are anger, sadness, or numbness. Underneath there can be a complexity of many different feelings all operating at once, some accelerator feelings, some decelerator feelings. We don't know until we look and in order to look we have to be in a safe place. A safe place can simply be a conversation with a supportive and trusting friend or with a therapist.

Okay, so how do we deal with all these feelings?

Well, just like dealing with stress we do it in three stages.Notice something in our body, sort something in our head and finally do something to make it better.

The first is we have to notice that we have a big feeling coming through and try and name it. Some feelings are obvious and easy to name, some a little harder because they’re vague, and some feel more like a physical body sensation. Often the more primitive, raw ones have this latter quality. But we have to pause and we have to inspect what is going on for us and come up with some names. It might take a bit of time and a bit of reflection but we have to put a name to that feeling whether it's visceral, or emotional, or mental.

Once it has been named we know what we're dealing with. We are no longer punching at shadows or running from phantoms. It is measurable and nameable, which means it is something that we can now address.

  

The next step is to check for sneaky feelings. We have named the big loud feeling, but are there some of those sneaky feelings underneath. Somehow the mere act of giving ourselves permission to have nuanced, sneaky feelings that whisper under the big loud feeling is enough to liberate them and let them bubble up. Often as they bubble up they mention their name, either through a sob or through a gasp or through a big sigh. But once we've checked for sneaky feelings we can start to deal with the emotions that are knocking us about. This process takes time. You need to pause and withdraw to a quiet space where you can hear what's going on for yourself.

Finally, once we have noticed in our body the emotion and named it, when we have sorted in our head whether we think there are sneaky feelings, we can move to the third stage of doing something.

Accelerator feelings

For the accelerator feelings, again we have to sense into the physical, embodied component of the feeling. We are not going to get caught up in the thoughts that come with this feeling at the moment, we are going to notice it in our body. We are going to locate it and we are going to quantify it. I often name it and describe it’s physical shape and dimensions. "Wow, that's big -look at it, it's here. Wow I feel so angry" Or "I feel so sad, it's in my stomach, it's so heavy".

Feelings have the form of a wave or a set of waves where they peak, they crest, and then they roll to shore. Notice where you are in that cycle. Imagine you are on the beach and you are watching it in all its strength as it rises up in you as a physical entity and arcs through your shoulders and says its name. Watch it then break and diminish in your body and notice how big it is now compared to when it rose up. This whole process might be as short as three minutes, from the peak of a sob to a quiet weep, or the scream of rage to a shaking of your head. But notice the physicality of it and watch it run to shore.

Finally, when it has reached the shore and the strength of it has passed, then you can start to think about what it is about and what it means and what you are going to do, but when the feeling is at its strength and its peak you must attend to the physical nature of it and not the thoughts that come with it. Because if you do you will end up having emotionally infected thinking that might direct you to act in a way that you later regret. Just as with big stress, big feelings mess our head up.

Decelerator feelings

Now, for feelings that slow us down - "break" feelings. Sometimes sensing into them this way does not help us as they are an absence of energy rather than a presence. For these feelings we use a technique developed by Peter A. Levine called "Pendulation". This is where we locate the negative feeling in our body and where it sits, whether it is shame, or guilt, or sadness. We don't have to go right into the middle of it, because that part of it is actually overwhelming and has the potential to render us very vulnerable. We just sense the edge of it and stand there as a caring bystander for several seconds.

Then we remind our self of the part of our body that is positive, and creative, and optimistic, and energized, and enabled. We go to that bit, whether it's our dancing hips, or our running legs, or our proud shoulders thrown back, or our heart bursting with love. We then move to that part of us and sense into the richness and the warmth of that and sit with that for a few moments, and then we pass back to the negative bit, to the absence of feeling, to the sad or guilty bit. We sit there again -as its friend and as its companion, and notice and respect it. You can continue this process on for several swings of the pendulum until the intensity of it seems to abate and we have integrated both states into our bodies sense of itself. You will know when to stop because the pendulum will have come to a standstill and there will be no polarity between the two extremes of the feelings. Again, once things have settled you can then reflect on what the feeling's about and decide what you would like to do, but in the throes of the strength of the feeling it needs a physical management such as pendulation to help you get through.

A final little trick: if the feelings are coming up thick and fast and you are going to burst into tears in public and you wish to be private, lift your chin up and they will be a little less strong. Maybe enough for your eyes just to water. I do this at the sad parts of movies.

Now that your feelings are known and more manageable, honour them, share them with others, gently understand them and figure out what you want to do about them.

Coping

Finally I would like to talk about coping. Coping is about survival and in my book, all coping is good and has its use. Over the next few days in Paris there will be remarkable, quirky, funny, sad stories of coping that people will share with each other. But in my mind I divide coping into two general forms. The first is helpless coping, where our power is taken away from us and we are at our maximum vulnerability. In that moment all we have is cowering, playing dead, or hiding. It comes with despondency and it comes with fear and we are waiting for our fate. This correlates with the vulnerability of us as a child, as a baby. Where we were totally dependent on our caregiver.

The good thing is as we grow up we learn more appropriate ways of coping. So as a young child all we've got is tuning out, sleeping, crying for help, or shutting down. But as we get to walk and talk and think and have relationships with people, we increase our coping resources. The ultimate is moving to helpful coping, where the problem gets broken down from a big unmanageable problem to one that we can now tackle. I call this high value coping because it adds value to the process - some work has happened with the problem to make it smaller.

On the journey from helpless to helpful coping there is an earlier stage of high cost coping. This is the more primitive coping that we can use such as drugs, or alcohol, or daydreaming, or eating, or playing computer games, or avoiding and denying a problem. This reduces our stress and anxiety by parking it on the roadside so that we can just get through -and there's nothing wrong with that. As a long term strategy however, it has a high cost, because the problem gets put on hold so we can get on with things, but it doesn't get broken down, it doesn't get sorted out and once the coping strategy has stopped we're right back to where things were -but maybe with even more time and energy wasted, so it risks the problem getting even bigger. I think high cost coping is a short term strategy and when it's used in the long term it creates its own problems.

Mobilising our resources

Finally we think about the resource that we have in ourselves that can be mobilized to get through a situation, whether it's our intelligence, our persistence, our strength, our sense of agency, and then there are the resources that we have from our community - through being connected.

In a terrorist crisis such as Paris is going through, it is the resilience of the community that will get people through. It is all the little micro caring that happens on the ground, that is spontaneous and that is heartfelt that helps people work through this together. Out of these natural bonds of caring, little organic solutions will take hold and give the community a sense of its power back. This is the opposite of terrorism, this is the silk like threads of a web that combines a community and helps it rebuild a big and beautiful city. I hope these ideas have been useful and will help people over the next few days and weeks.

The bottom line is, if you're feeling helpless and overwhelmed and don't know what to do - go and help someone else.