Do you know the two system's of thought and that you are a slave to one?

Have you ever had the experience of feeling like you are a slave to your immediate reactionary response to something someone says or does? Perhaps it is an intense fear of certain situations? I have had this experience and it really can interrupt the flow of my relationships and experiences.

In order to understand how to slow our reactions we first have to understand the two different systems of thought. These two systems have many names, but I am going to reference Daniel Kahneman’s theory of the two systems:

System 1 thinking is characterized by: Fight or flight, sympathetic nervous system, limbic or reptilian brain, impulsive, irrational, unconscious, FAST, without self-awareness or control, acts on limited information. We live in this system a lot of the time and so our actions and behaviors tend to be unconscious and fast.

System 2 thinking is characterized by: Rest and digest, para- sympathetic nervous system, prefrontal cortex or frontal brain, conscious and deliberate, controlled, rational, self aware, seeks all of the information, SLOW. We are barely intuitively in this system and so our job is to slow down to get in this system.

As I mentioned, we are usually in system one thinking. In fact,

we tend to be a slave to system one.

In system one, we want to act differently but can’t because we are unconsciously reactive. I find this is the heart of why people have depression, anxiety and relational problems. This stuff is complicated so bear with me here. But imagine a person who was criticized all of their life. This experience was traumatic and put them in fight or flight. They deeply fear criticism. When they interact with others they go into an immediate, impulsive and reactive state to anything they perceive as criticism. Because they are in system one, they do not take in all of the information and this leads to negating the full picture where there may be love, compassion or understanding present. This will affect this person’s relationships because they will constantly be defensive to others causing a disconnect. It is a painful cycle. Perhaps you can relate to this? I know I can. This is why relationships are work, because they force us to break the chains of our “system one incarceration”. Our job is to get out of system one and into system two. But how?

I find that there is no one answer to cover the range and individuality of all of us. But rather a combination of things. Here are a a few tried and true tools I have found that help people get into system two and break the cycle of system one hijacking:

1. Get into your body. Yes, getting onto the body will immediately slow you down. You can do this by bringing your awareness to your breath, going for a walk, scanning your body and naming each part and how it feels in the present moment.

2. Medication. I know this is a very personal decision, but in my own experience, finding the right medication has allowed me to live more in system two. I am able to slow my thoughts down and notice what information is missing. I can use more cognitive tools to see my partner from a conscious and intentional way. And that feels amazing. So, in some cases medication is a real miracle, and I encourage anyone who finds themselves caught in system one to consider medication.

3. Cognitive practices and tools. This one is a really big help. Again, it is also very individual. I fond that using the phrase “make a different choice” really helps a lot of the people I work with. It reminds them that they have choice in their reaction. And that they need to slow down and evaluate their thoughts and actions. I also find that Tara Brach’s idea of radical compassion for myself and others tends to help me hold all perspective’s. Along with that, I will suggest the third reaction rule which is simply acting not on your first reaction which is always system one, but waiting for your third reaction by investigating what is happening inside using meditation or journaling. The third reaction is usually more system two thinking. Watch the video below to hear Kahneman's description of the two systems:

I want to add that sometimes just really focusing on listening can be a way to switch from system one to system two. If you do not feel that you can react yet, that is ok. Try listening for understanding. Keep clarifying until you really understand the big picture of where the other person is coming from. This tends to slow us down and take in all of the facts. I find it helps me resist my narrow and narrative mind.

As usual, I hope this helps at least one of you out there. Try practicing coming into system two daily. You will find a huge difference in your stress levels and state of mind.

From my heart to yours,

Ariel

Reserved for Expectant Mother's Only

There is a parking spot at my local grocery store, it has a sign that reads “reserved for expectant mother’s only”. I have passed that sign many times. And never could park there. For some reason that sign has always stuck out in my mind as a good summary of my infertility journey.

There has been a lot of waiting

Waiting to park in that spot, to plan adventures, vacations, to relate to people who were parents and to create a family together.

As you can imagine this waiting took its toll on both of us. I waited to be a mother and my husband waited for me to stop postponing making plans in our life. Infertility can take over your life. It is slow, when you start there is hope; after all science has come a long way, there are options. But year after year it breaks you down. It strips you of your pride, your hope and your faith in your own body. We dealt with unexplained infertility for 5 years. No doctor had any answers for us as we suffered loss after loss. It is a very isolating experience. You enter a world of infertility with it’s own language which no one speaks but those in it. Your suffering is invisible to others. This is perhaps the hardest part. Our culture is quite naive when it comes to infertility. There is not a lot of education about it or acknowledgment.

We celebrate successful parenthood, we do not acknowledge almost parenthood.

There is also the unsolicited advice; “you should just relax”, or the assumptions; “God it must be so wonderful to not have any kids you can do anything you want”. Infertility is not the only place this happens, we all have an assuming mind and we all have invisible pain. So it is important to remember all of this; you cannot know another person’s circumstance and perhaps it is always best to consider that your assumption is not the whole story.

There comes a point on this journey where you have to ask yourself will I let this process break me or will I reclaim my life? For us it came later. First there was the fight in me, the anger and frustration, and then there was this slow acceptance. You could say I lost hope but also I came face to face with my attachments to what was supposed to make me happy. Maybe we would just not have kids? And if so then what? Would I say my life was no longer meaningful?

So this is where I started really thinking about option A vs B. And how our expectations and wants are not always useful to get attached to. I have always wanted to be a mother, I have witnessed births, it has always been my element. This was my option A. This is just something I expected. But my expectation and desire for these things was draining the inspiration out of my current life. I had to face the question; is this worth it and what else is there? That is my option B. Could Jason and I enjoy a life of rock climbing, our work, and adventure? Could we fill our lives with other people’s children? The more I thought about and wrangled with my expectations, I started to loosen my grip on option A and my life opened up again.

This is resilience, the ability to take ownership of where your life leads you. When I sit with people as a therapist, I am always deeply compassionate towards their loss and struggles. After all, I have had my own. And yet at one point, for each one of us, the question we need to ask is how do I know I will be ok? There is no rush with this question. It took me years, therapy, meditation and a medication to get there. Right in the midst of this whole journey my dad got cancer. It was terrifying. I remember the night I googled “cancer in the bones” and realized that usually meant it had metastasized everywhere. It was stage 4. I lay there wondering how will I survive if he dies? I could not imagine a world in which he was going to die and I would be ok. But the truth is we only have two choices in life; be ok or wither and fade. Apparently I am ok. and I realized that despite the pain of infertility I had to be ok. I tell my clients this too. We have to be ok. So, what can you trust in yourself, your situation and others? I guess I could trust that I have a partnership and a shared commitment to making the most of our lives. I also started seeing option B’s as really exciting. We could adopt which we had both said we always wanted to do. In fact that was our pivot. We pivoted towards that option and fell in love with the idea. My life felt really content.

As I write this blog post, I am, unexpectedly, pregnant. But I have a very different relationship to being pregnant than I did before. Yes, I do park in that silly parking spot, but being pregnant is now a miraculous surprise added to a life that is already really fulfilling. This is where we each want to get to. I understand that it seems impossible at times, but this is my goal as a therapist, to give you the ultimate choice in how you want to engage with your life. For anyone suffering a silent pain, I hear you. And I hope you can feel my arms wrap around you in your suffering. It will get better, perhaps you can trust my words as a starting point. Go through the grief so you can also see the light.

I hope this is helpful for at least one person,

From my heart to yours,

Ariel

Love Is The Antedote

My dad died 3 years. A fact which I still have a hard time getting used to. He was a very warm man. He had a trusting heart and he always aired on the side of forgiveness. He was deeply interested in people. If you met him, you instantly felt seen by him. He knew that the people in his life were his first priority.

My dad died upset that he had not accomplished more. He had not left this world with monetary riches. But he actually left this world a really wealthy man. He had 5 children and, at the time, 10 grandchildren (he now has 12 with one on the way) and a partner who he had renewed his vows with right before his passing. When my dad was in the active stage of dying his whole family was around him. As I looked at him I realized that, when we leave this earth we can’t take anything with us but the love. That is it. And I saw that he knew this too.

To this day I hold this lesson close to my heart, life is all about the connections we make and the people we make them with.

It is all about the people…

Connection is very important to human beings. We need it. And it makes us happier. We chase happiness in so many ways, but true connection is the way to find happiness. Something happens chemically in us when we are in service to other, give to other, receive from other etc. We are wired for attachment.

One of my yoga teachers, Stephanie Snyder, was asked to give a TED talk. I had always seen her as a very positive and optimistic person, but actually in this talk she spoke about her battle with depression. One of the branches of yoga is Karma Yoga or the yoga of service. She spoke about how being of service to others makes us feel good. If you would like to watch her talk (and I highly suggest you do!) just click on the link below:

Imagine that the antidote to depression is not isolation but actually connection. The key to contentment is not accumulating stuff but giving to others. This is a very different approach to our well being and mental health than just trying to fix the state of depression. We all will get depressed if we are without connection. This is a reasonable reaction to sourcing our contentment from inanimate objects. The fix may not always be in a pill or pathologizing our upbringing; but rather a radical lifestyle shift towards seeking more love in our lives. The idea that we just need more stuff is just false. What we need is more love, more nature and more connection. My father in law is a very happy person. His smile is infectious. When I first got to know him he was living in a small cottage in Tahoe living surviving on just his social security checks so he didn’t have to work. He was truly happy and content. More happy than I think he had been in his earlier years chasing monetary success, he finally had to time to connect with nature, take his dog for walks and talk to his children.

As I have returned back to the United States after living abroad I realize that the people in my life make me really happy. It feels good to love. My gratitude for others fills me with a deep contentment. It feels good to say “I really appreciate you”. When I leave this earth, I want to take with me the love and leave the rest. If you are feeling depressed, isolated, alone, reach out to someone you care about, volunteer at a local non profit, offer to take care of someone’s child, go for a walk with a dog, cross the divide between yourself and others. I promise, you will feel better…this is a radical new way of approaching your depression. Instead of thinking something is wrong with you, think something is right about craving connection. As always, I hope this is helpful to you.

From my heart to yours,

Ariel

Hey you, nourish your brain!

No really, my creative, studious, intellectually absorbed, hard working friend.

STOP and nourish your brain!

When I was studying for my MFT licensure exams, I took an online prep course. I chose this course because it was more focused on good and wholistic study habits. I knew that my challenge would not be knowing the information, but rather how to make the most of my time to take the test and study. I learned some really important tips which I have retained since I took those exams (which I did pass the first go!)

I should also mention that I have a learning difference. I have a form of Dyslexia called a visual perception problem (if you have ever taken a yoga class with me, you know how sometimes I confuse left and right- not the greatest thing for a yoga teacher!) So for me I wanted to learn how to keep my mind sharp and aware and how to maximize my time so that I could double check my answers. What I found out is that the solution had everything to do with feeding my mind, giving it a rest, listening carefully to the scenarios I was presented with and trusting my gut.

It makes sense that if you want to be more productive and focused that you need to feed your brain and give it rest like the rest of your body. This has a greater effect on our emotional well being. A brain that is tired or over stimulated becomes an anxious brain. We wander into what if thoughts when we are pushing our mind too hard.

What if we just let go and trusted that with rest and nourishment out minds can take us much farther than if we insist they give us more?

When I work with teens I encourage them to trust they know the material. I am encountering many teenage girls these days who are very anxious about school work, I suggest to their parents that they help these girls cultivate a sense of trusting themselves and their ability to retain information. They are learning different meditations to stay calm, focused and in their bodies.

So here are my suggestions if you want to stay productive and creative in your work, your studies, your hobbies or even your daily conversations:

1) TAKE A BREAK! Know when to step away. If you are studying, trust that your brain has retained as much as it can and don't study the night before a test. Instead, get good sleep and find ways to relax. Studies have been done suggesting that we do not retain any more information in that last minute cram. So, instead let your brain rest.

2) CREATE A BETTER STUDY HABIT. Spinning off of tip number one, instead of procrastinating, really map out time to get your task done so you don’t have to save it for the last minute. I suggest adding an extra few hours to whatever project you have and that way you can be pleasantly surprised. I call this the “time budget” and learning this skill is very important for success.

3) NOURISH your brain. When I was studying for my licensure exams my coach told me to take nourishing foods for my brain. This included fruit juice, fruit and protein. Make sure you eat these things during or before a big think session. Feeding not just your body but your brain will help you target maximum productivity out of your mind. I took these things with me the day of my exam and I did great!

4) GET UP AND MOVE get your blood flowing and maybe get upside down. Reverse the flow of oxygen to your brain! Your brain needs oxygen too!

5) STEP AWAY if you are caught in a creative rut. Then give your mind a new perspective. Perhaps it needs inspiration; take a walk in nature doing a moving meditation and see if that helps. My licensure exam was timed and I did need every second of it, but my coach stressed the importance of a small break. So I made sure I had a bathroom break and could walk around just for a few minutes.

6) GIVE YOUR MIND DIRECTION. As a yogi I teach others to find shortcuts to a pose. Alignments tips help us be the most efficient in a pose while also conserving energy. The same is true with your mind. Give your mind specific directions. If you are taking an exam, be clear on what the exam is testing. It may not be necessary to read every paragraph but rather to understand the key words. If you are doing something for work, understand what the purpose of that work is. If you are writing a song, give yourself questions which help you connect to the message of that song.

The take away here is that our mind has limits. It too needs a rest. Good work habits, nutritional foods, practices of rest and restore, will all help you realize your goals for productivity in your life. Work with your mind and care for it. As always…

From my heart to yours,

Ariel

Summer, Persephone and Self Care

When I was young I really loved the Greek myths. One story that always stood out in my mind was that of Demeter and Persephone. Persephone is Demeter’s and Zeus’s daughter (which means she is a double god which is really impressive if you are into the Greek myths like I am!) and she was taken into the underworld to wed Hades. Because Persephone ate the seed of a pomegranate, she only can be on the earth with her mom 9 months out of the year. The rest of the time she must reside in the underworld with her Husband. The months that Persephone is in the underworld is the winter. These are the months of Demeter’s grief. It is a time of turning inwards and reflecting. Demeter makes the earth cold and barren during these months.

But when persephone is with her mom, Demeter creates an abundance of sunshine, flowers, vegetation, and procreation; the time of summer. This creates a very stimulating environment and, like Demeter, we are drawn to the beauty of the natural world a we feast in it’s riches. This is the time of turning outwards and engaging with out environment.

Later, when I was in graduate school I learned that Carl Jung really equated the time of winter as the time of the unconscious and the time of summer as the time of consciousness. Meaning, it is important to turn inside to discover what is there.

So summer is a time of over stimulation. Because of this it is important to remember to come inside once in awhile. Stanley Keleman describes this as the natural pulsation of all things. Every cell pulsates out and in. This pulsation creates balance. In mindfulness we talk about the eye gazing out and the eye gazing in. We must always attend to what is going on inside as well as outside. This keeps us from getting overwhelmed by our environment, it keeps us regulated inside and aware. So, what are your practices for getting internal? Do you like to take walks? Meditate? Cook? Run? Does music take you inside? For me, it is meditating. As the summer is filled with the beauty of people, the vibrant colors of nature, the overwhelming aromas of cafe’s and the bright sunshine I am reminded to do my meditation. Another great way to go inwards for me is to do my yoga practice. I focus on forward bending since this is associated with going inwards. Whatever your self care practice is, remember to do it during the summer months. As usual, I hope this touches your day in some way that is useful.

From my heart to yours,

Ariel

Small person big emotions; how can I help?

Kids come in all packages, and some come with more heightened emotions than others. Kids find their way to me because parents are concerned about how they can’t seem to manage their negative emotions. I always suggest that this is a very insightful and sensitive kid. and that is an asset. But they are lacking the skills to manage that gift.

So how do you teach your children the skill they are lacking? Well the first step is to not take any part of that skill for granted. For instance, I am working with an amazing 11 year old right now. He gets really angry. And so he is seeing me for tools to control his anger. Our last session I realized that anger is the emotion he knows and can recognize so that is the label he puts on it. But actually he is getting frustrated first. We spoke about the difference between frustration and anger. We both realized that he was overlooking the fact that he was frustrated and the question was why was he frustrated and how might we help him there? So, dont take for granted a skill you might have as an adult; your child may not have developed that skill yet. Another important thing is to treat your kid as you would an adult. Listen and explain when needed. Kids actually can grasp pretty complicated concepts if you use their language. This same client and I had a great conversation about his expectations. If he changes his expectations he won’t get frustrated and if he doesn’t get frustrated he won’t get so mad. The process by which we listen for understanding is called drilling; make sure you drill your child in a meaningful way. 

I cannot stress enough that kids don’t mean to be overly angry or act out in defiant ways. They just don’t know how to cope. Below I have listed some helpful tips if your child is dealing with larger than life emotions:

1. Don’t underestimate the power of a good hug! Bio feedback always helps all of us. Sometimes kids need to feel that you can provide them with a physical boundary to all of their emotion a good squeeze will do the trick.

2. Help them identify and name the emotion

3. Help them see the hierarchy of emotions. For example, frustrated isn’t as potent as angry. This helps them slow down. “We can solve frustrated you don’t need angry.”

4. Listen and drill. Let them know you care instead fo getting frustrated with them. Make sure you really understand what is happening for them.

5. Help them identify the skill that is missing here. Is that you can’t control your emotion? Is it that you don’t know how to express yourself? Is it that you don’t know how to make goals instead of expectations?

6. Introduce them to ways to turn down the volume on their emotion: meditation, breathing techniques, exercise. (For those kids who have been doing school online they still need a recess!!!)

7. Help them to form a gratitude practice. I have another client who does gets very angry with his brother but he does soften when he remembers that his brother plays with him. This is helpful for him. Kids are not too young to start finding their gratitude.

8. Remember to explore and explain skills using their language they are not too young to understand things like how expectations lead to negative emotions. I have had 7 year olds meditate with me!

I find that all of these tips have been very useful in my psychotherapy work with kids. I am always amazed by the good use they make of their time with me. Kids are grateful to receive help, they just want to receive it in a collaborative way. I hope this helps at least one parent not feel overwhelmed and their kid gain the skill to cope. 

As always from my heart to yours,

Ariel

How do we heal?

I have an interesting relationship with the word “heal”. Many people refer to me as a healer and I object to that title. Being a psychotherapist doesn’t mean that I heal people, it means that I facilitate people healing themselves. When people come to me I don’t see them as broken or needing to be fixed. However it is true that we can be injured both physically and psychologically and that requires healing.

So how do we heal ourselves?

What does healing look like? One of the big features of healing is adaptability. We have to be able to adapt to the state we are in presently and offer it patience and time. If we expect to be healed instantly then we are going to get frustrated. I am reading a great book by Katherine May called “Wintering”. May compares injury to the times of winter and she speaks about the importance of accepting that we are in a dark or injured time. We must prepare for this time of hibernation and rite of passage. It is the time of contemplation and toning down our energy output to recharge our scant resources within.

The other part of adaptability is accepting that who we are right now is ok. We are inherently ok. And that means that our expectations of how we should be are dropped. To heal we must first not only accept, but really love and nurture exactly who we are. May refers to this as not wishing that winter be summer. Letting go of that wish opens us up to the beauty of winter. This is a very mindful approach to injury.

There are many ways to approach healing the psyche. It is a process of figuring out whether this is an injury of attachment or an injury in terms of a shock. Often we need to go back and renegotiate the trauma; an opportunity to experience something we would have liked. You can do this by simply offering yourself the parenting you didn’t get. Offer yourself the compassion and empathy the injured part of yourself needs. We can also renegotiate the trauma by finding the places in the story where we were, and still are, resilient. When I was in the Peace Corps I was attacked. It was scary and traumatic. But what I held onto is that I now know I am strong and courageous. This is my renegotiation of the trauma and it lead to healing. If you want to know more about renegotiating trauma then read my blog post on it.

Healing means telling our story to others. It means integrating the parts that got scared and ran away from the scene of the crime. I love Rumi’s poem called “The Guest House” in which he talks about our emotions being like guests in our house. We must sit with each one and offer it a cup of tea and really listen. Healing is simply caring for the parts of yourself that need to be heard, validated and loved.

We can come through injury with grace. We can learn about our own resilience and we can also learn to nurture and grow ourselves through the injury. I hope this gives others hope about our capacity to heal.

As always from my heart to yours,

Ariel

5 Simple Steps to Becoming Present

Most of the time my head can be filled with many disparate thoughts; like highways crossing each other creating a busyness inside. Quieting my mind, so that I can clearly be in the present moment, is really imperative for me.

When I was young I found dance. I loved it. I did not know how to explain what I loved about it until I was older. But if I could sum it up, I guess it was a way to express myself without words. My mind did not do the talking, my body did. When I was dancing I was completely absorbed in dancing. I was in total body flow.

Dance was replaced by rock climbing which upped the ante. While dance was a form of expression , rock climbing became a test in concentration and focus and a certain kind of moment to moment attention that I had not found in any thing before. When I rock climb, I am just climbing, I am not thinking, in the future or the past, I am just in the exact moment…fully. I love the feeling of being in complete flow. I find recreating this in my daily life takes a certain commitment. I catch myself falling into the trap of my thoughts which pull either away from the present moment or mold it into the version I perceive instead of just what it is.

However our present moment is really all we tangibly have. And once it goes we don’t get it back. That is why learning to stay in the present is both rewarding and important for a sense of connection to ourselves and our life. It is in fact deeply fulfilling.

Here are a few quick tips to stay in the present moment:

1. Bring your attention to nature. I find that if I go for a walk and really focus on naming the things I see and their color, smell, texture I can achieve that feeling of being completely immersed in the present moment. You don’t need to be on a hike to take in nature, it is everywhere!

2. Use your body. When we get into our bodies we do start to feel more present. Becoming embodied is a form of becoming present. So use your body in some way and see if you can let yourself become completely absorbed in that activity.

3. Try a practice of gratitude for the present moment. I find that when I name something I am grateful for right now it brings me back to the present.

4. Track your sensations for a few minutes. Tracking sensations and naming whether they are pleasant, unpleasant or neutral will bring you into the present and connect you to what you are experiencing.

5. Focus on your breath. If you are truly focused on your breath then you will always come back to right now. This is because we are always breathing so at any given moment breath is always happening. It is a wonderful tool to bring you back to now.

I hope these tips are helpful, I know they are for me as I write this after a really great rock climbing session!

As always, from my heart to yours,

Ariel

“Out of sight out of mind?”

You know that phrase “out of sight, out of mind”? Well it is not really describing a healthy feature of attachment. In fact the phrase that is true of most humans is “out of sight, in my heart”. This is because of Object Constancy.

When we are born we internalize our caretakers or attachment figures as good or bad objects. So objects refer to people in this sense. Most of the time we internalize our parents as good object. These are the people who soothe us, take care of us, and provide comfort to us. As we get older, while that good object may not always be able to soothe us in the moment, we recall their voice, an imagine of them or even their smell to comfort us. This means that even when someone is out of sight, they are far from out of mind. They are always in our psyche and we can call upon them at any time to feel loved. This is what we refer to as object constancy. Object constancy is the reason why, when someone dies we can still feel them with us or why we can move away from our loved ones and still feel the attachment and connection.

Object constancy perpetuates relationships even though we are not in daily contact with our good objects.

For example, I live on a different continent from my mom right now, but I know she loves me and is thinking of me. I also can remember her and recall my love for her and this comforts me.

So what happens if object constancy does not form and how does it not form? Well, when parents are inconsistent with their nurturing of the child, the child can’t really internalize them as a consistent good object. It becomes like ground hog’s day where each day they have to start over again with the process of attachment. The child just doesn’t know what kind of object they are getting that day. As a result the child cannot have a sense of an internalized object. This leads to someone who is deeply insecure in attachment as they believe the other person will forget them or it leads to deep cut off in attachment where the person can leave others without having any regret or forethought. They simply cannot imagine feeling grief at losing that person because they can’t keep the person as a constant object. By the way, both of these outcomes can exist in the same person. They can be insecure about others leaving and also leave others without much sense of loss. I have found the most effective way to work with this is to actually imagine your loved one inside of you and imagine you inside of them. Some of my clients have actually imagined a mini version of themselves inside of their good objects and vice versa. This has really helped develop a sense of object constancy. Another approach is to create a transitional object. Give someone a card or ask for a letter from them so that you may have a reminder of their caring. This will help your psyche internalize them over time. I have found this also to be helpful for those who struggle with insecure attachment and fear of abandonment. I hope this is helpful, and as usual, from my hear to yours,

Ariel

When our girls lose their greatest "NO"

When I was in graduate school I read about a psychologist named Annie Rogers who worked at Harvard doing research on girl’s self confidence as they transition from a girl to a teen. Annie’s work really shaped my interest in working with teens. I suppose I wanted to be an advocate for kids as they navigate these rocky developmental stages.

As a somatic psychotherapist my job is to work with our natural pulsation. Pulsation refers to our ability to open up to our environment and engage with it and also to go back inside and attend to ourselves. This pulsation is often reflected in, and managed by, our body. For instance, when we are trying to get away from our environment the body will squeeze and contract resulting in a hunched posture or stomach issues. When we are stuck in our external environment, as is the case with hyper vigilance, the body can look rigid, erect and defended; think of a military stance.

So what does this have to do with our girl’s greatest “no”?

Well, when girls are little they feel free to pulsate outward. They feel free to say “NO'“ or “YES”. They have no inhibition about establishing their boundaries and taking delight in themselves and their environment. If you have ever watched a little girl, it is a really delightful experience. My favorite is the spontaneous twirl or scowl. They are markers of a self assured spirit. However, somewhere around 11-13 something happens for our girls. They become afraid to say no. They begin to become aware of their environment in a different way.

These confident little girls who had a spontaneous leap through the air, begin to retreat inside of their own bodies.

I have seen this in my office. I have seen teenage girls sit hunched on the sofa when they talk about self harm thoughts or worry about not being good enough. I have seen them afraid to look me in the eye and it breaks my heart. I affectionately call them my “little women” and we often talk about putting their broken pieces back together to make a beautiful statue larger than life.

So how do we prevent this loss of confidence? How to do we set them back on course? And why am I seeing more and more of this? I think the number one thing is to never shame our girls. Let them twirl, and honor their no’s; in fact celebrate them. I believe this is happening more frequently because our girls are exposed to so much. They can compare themselves to each other, to the images they see on screens. They over hear everything. Trust me they do. I have had an 8 year old tell me she needs to lose weight mimicking older female figure sin her life. The way we talk about how we look, stereotypes we assign the different genders (perhaps they don’t even identify with their gender) etc. has a huge impact on them. Please, don’t just tell your little girl that she can be just who she is, model it. Expose her to powerful women who said no. Expose her to women who do not manipulate to get what they want, but treat men as their equals. Don’t tell her she is just pretty, tell her specifically how she it capable of earning her place in this world. If she feels not worthy, keep showing her the ways she has succeeded. Be aware of her friend group and what messages are in the homes of her friend group. This has a huge influence on her sense of self. Do yoga with her, and each day take a super woman stance and remind her that her body can open to the world instead of shrinking away from it.

This is a huge job I know. I am here to help. Each teenage, 20 year old and woman I see, together we pick up the pieces and look at each one and embrace her. We learn to love her as we glue piece by piece back together. I hope this is helpful for all of you out there who have a little girl, were a little girl or support a woman in your life.

As always from my heart to yours,

Ariel