Shine: How to Overcome the Trauma of Living and Feel Our Way to Authenticity

By Julia Fry

SHINE: Sensing Holding Integrity Nurture Empower
We’re beautiful and remarkable because we survived and continue to survive in a world that is stuck in judgement and conflict. But the ways we learnt to survive early on in life don’t always help us thrive. Our inner saboteurs can appear in myriad ways. Have you always put other people before you? Or do you sit on the couch feeling like you cannot stop watching TV? Or do triggers suddenly happen and you’re in an immobilised or enraged state? We have automatically practised our self-sabotage habits for a long time. The SHINE Method invites us to practise new habits that help us connect with ourselves, other people and other-than-humans in ways that feel enriching and loving. This is your time to SHINE.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Julia Fry
• Release date: Jul 14, 2022
• ISBN: 9781005103859

Julia Fry

Julia Fry is a Writer, Therapeutic Coach and trainee Creative Psychotherapist, who has spent many years researching and experimenting with recovery from childhood trauma. She has lived in Brighton, UK, since 1989, which felt like a colourful land in comparison to the small grey town she escaped from. She loves going off for adventures in her little campervan. Most of all she loves her connections with herself, other humans and other-than-humans.

Book preview

Introduction

This book is for you if you feel like you’re dysregulated, hyper sensitive and just can't seem to relax even though you do try. Or the triggers happen like that (clicks fingers) and you’re in a contracted, non resourced state. Or you’re afraid you’ll just be curled up on the sofa for the rest of your life. Or you sit there on the couch and cannot stop watching TV. Or you beat yourself up all the time and then go to the fridge and get a load of food and start comfort eating and you beat yourself up some more. Or you’ve always put other people before you and now you’re beginning to think actually you’ve got to learn to put yourself first, and it feels very uncomfortable. Or you want to have friends but because you’re lonely you feel unworthy so you don't go out and make friends. Or there is that desire to be seen and to become visible and to have your voice heard but at the same time you feel that it's so much safer to not be visible. I get it. There are so many ways that we get stuck.

In 2010 I had a breakdown. I couldn’t work. I isolated myself from friends and family. I was on a government financial benefits scheme - Employment and Support Allowance. I was alone every day except when I went to a weekly drop in service. I had depression, anxiety and post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). I spent my days writing about how crap everything was, which made me feel worse. Energy flows where thought goes.

I knew I could spend the rest of my life in this hole. But there was a part of me that wanted me to grow and share my gifts with the world. But what could I do? I had no idea. I didn’t feel fit enough to restart my coaching business. I definitely couldn’t do a full time job. The National Health Service had given me a short course of Cognitive Behavioural Therapy, which barely scratched the surface of my issues. I needed long term psychotherapy. I felt stuck. If you’ve ever felt completely useless and helpless, you know it’s a desperate place to be.

I’ve always loved films and they were a helpful distraction back then. One day I watched Mona Lisa Smile, in which Julia Roberts played a university teacher in the 60s, teaching young women about art history. I LOVED the open questions she asked to get them thinking. It inspired that part of me that didn’t want to stay stuck in the hole. I couldn’t stop thinking about the film and its depiction of university learning. That was it. I wanted to go to university.

To get to university I had to overcome social anxiety (you can read about how I did that in the next chapter - Your Inner Sage Part(s)). University wasn’t the wonderful experience I’d hoped it would be partly because I was still so traumatised and had no clue about how to heal. I was using coping mechanisms like comfort eating, smoking, drinking alcohol, and drugs such as ecstasy to avoid the difficult feelings that trauma triggers elicit. I was triggered and dissociated most of the time and I procrastinated in order to avoid the shame of not being able to concentrate properly on academic work. Somehow I managed to get a 2:1 in Moving Image.

I had no idea that all of the coping mechanisms were directly related to the trauma back then and I just felt ashamed of myself a lot. So I was beating myself up, thinking other people were judging me all the time, comparing myself to other people and coming off worse, binge watching TV curled up under a blanket slowly licking then eating crisps, getting into relationships with people who couldn’t respect me, spending days in bed after taking drugs, and the list goes on. I don’t touch some of these coping mechanisms at all now and some of them only occasionally (I still love licking the flavour off crisps before I eat them, but a big bag of crisps is just an occasional treat now). I don’t need them. I can tolerate and even love my feelings and be ‘in’ my body, enjoying the sensations and knowing my needs. I have amazing friends with whom I share nurturing relationships. I have strong boundaries in my relationships with my family and I can uphold them gently. I enjoy my creativity and being in service to my clients. I am in a place in my healing journey that I never would have believed possible back in 2010.

I do not claim to have found The Way and my intention is not to suggest that what I share in this book will make you rich, recovered and happy. What I do intend to do is share the wisdom I’ve picked up from my own journey of recovery from childhood relational traumas in the hope that it may be of use to you (you will decide). Some of this wisdom I’ve discovered through trial and error, some through reading, some through courses and most of it is practical. It can become a practice that can be grown over time, and there are tools that can be used in times of stress or crisis. I have become more grounded, embodied, and enjoy life a lot with the help of these practices. When life throws me curve balls these practices keep me safe and able to tolerate what’s going on and how I feel about it (even when in deep pain), whilst staying in my body.

I have designed the book to take you on a journey of psychoeducation with chapters on sage part(s) and saboteurs, and practical application of the SHINE method, with chapters on Sensing, Holding, Integrity, Nurture and Empower. However, as you likely know very well, choice is incredibly important to people who’ve survived traumatic experiences, so feel free to start anywhere you like. You’ll find the Contents section is detailed to help you go straight to sections you find interesting and / or helpful. I’ve created the SHINE chapters to build on one another but you could well benefit from choosing a chapter at random. Or you might like to work your way through from beginning to end. As you might have noticed, my aim is to use language in ways that invite (with phrases such as you might like to and feel free to), rather than instruct, which is, again, because freedom to choose is so important for people who don’t get to experience that much in patriarchal societies. I’ll give you a brief overview of the chapters in this introduction (we like to know where we’re going, right?) and a little background on me to start.

I am trained in coaching, person-centred counselling, art and I’m currently training in creative psychotherapy at masters level. That’s a whole lot of psychological training and with my research into overcoming trauma, and turning self-criticism into self-compassion, I’ve come to understand this material really well, which helps me, alongside my intuition, in coaching my clients.

I did my coach training in 2006 and chose it over psychotherapy - I was avoiding delving into the past and the trauma I’d managed to disown for years. Yet now here I am, having done a shed load of inner work, training in psychotherapy. Hooray! One of the things I’m truly grateful for is I am now having the university experience I craved back when I was in my breakdown - I love my course and the tutors who ask me open questions and create safety to answer them.

I’ve been researching how embodiment and self-compassion can positively affect mental, emotional, physical and spiritual health for about 5 years. I used to be hyper self-critical to the point I wasn’t even aware I was being self-critical and I was hardly ever ‘in’ my body so I often didn’t know what I needed and used coping mechanisms. I’m now kind to myself a lot of the time and love being aware of the sensations and feelings in my body, and it makes a massive difference to my life. I’ve found that a mix of approaches works and that starting from a bottom up approach - using mindfulness to notice body sensations, for example - can allow us to begin to appreciate and own our bodies (Pat Ogden is an advocate for bottom up approaches in therapy - this is a link to one of her journal articles: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S2468749920300466?via%3Dihub).

It was 2010 when I first recognised my self-critical voice was separate to ‘me’. I was in my kitchen. I’d just gotten back from a Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) group session where we had been taught to recognise thoughts that make us feel bad. I remember writing those thoughts on post it notes and sticking them on the whiteboard in the hospital room, feeling totally exposed and ashamed in front of the CBT therapist and other patients.

I left there feeling like something was terribly wrong with me and that it needed fixing. As I stood in my kitchen, waiting for the kettle to boil, I heard the critical voice and knew it wasn’t me. I felt shocked and even more crazy and defunct (I’m using crazy as a word to describe my subjective feeling at that point; I don’t condone the use of the word to describe someone who is mentally unwell).

I knew about Dissociative Identity Disorder and was scared that this was it - maybe I had other personalities that took over and did all sorts of things I wasn’t aware of. I had blanks - periods of time I couldn’t account for (which, I now know, is a natural trauma response). What if this voice criticising me was just one of many?

Turns out it was one of many! And that’s very okay. But I didn’t know it at the time because all I had was the CBT, based on the medical model ideology of ‘patch ‘em up and send ‘em out to work’. The medical model labels us as problems to be fixed. When we feel like there’s something wrong with us it often induces feelings of shame, guilt, and despair, to name a few. I’m not totally against diagnoses because they can help people get the additional help they need. This is necessary in societies where ableism is the norm. But I am against systems that induce shame and self-criticism.

What I know from my experience, my reading, and my work with clients is we use self-criticism and other forms of self-sabotage when we live in situations that don’t feel safe. This tends to begin in childhood when we make ourselves ‘bad’ so that we can love the parents and caregivers who don’t unconditionally love us. We continue to use self-criticism when we’re away from the people who didn’t love us unconditionally, not least because the institutions (schools etc.) in our societies are set up to criticise rather than prize us. When we prize someone we celebrate who they are. Prizing is a way of valuing someone for being themselves. When our systems and societies view us as faulty, it can feel like it’s true: we are bad or broken.

But we’re not.

We’re beautiful and remarkable because we survived and continue to survive in a world that is stuck in judgement and conflict. My sense of how we survived is by segmenting the ‘good’ from the ‘bad’ and making parts of us ‘good’ and parts of