Acknowledging the role of past experiences in shaping current behaviour and relationship patterns is vital. It involves recognizing the signs of attachment trauma and understanding its root causes. Self-reflection and introspection, facilitated by a mental health professional or self-help resources, can be instrumental in this process.
2. Develop Connections That Encourage Strength & Resilience
Establishing secure, supportive relationships can provide a strong foundation for recovery. Positive interactions and healthy relationships can foster a sense of security and belonging, promoting resilience and emotional wellbeing.
3. Get Comfortable With Honest Communication
Honest, open communication is a cornerstone of healthy relationships. This includes expressing your thoughts, feelings, and needs, listening to others, and resolving conflicts in a respectful way.
4. Connect With Your Body
Mind-body practices such as yoga, meditation, and mindfulness can enhance self-awareness, promote relaxation, and help manage stress. These practices can be particularly beneficial for individuals with attachment trauma, who often experience high levels of bodily tension and emotional distress.
5. Consider Trauma-Focused Therapy
Therapies specifically designed for trauma, such as EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing), Trauma-Focused Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (TF-CBT), and Sensorimotor Psychotherapy, can be extremely beneficial. These trauma therapies can help you process traumatic memories, develop healthier coping strategies, and improve your relationships and quality of life.
When we discuss “vibing,” the proverb “birds of a feather flock together” is highly applicable. You’ll notice that when you’re always down or whine a lot, you tend to attract and associate with other people that have these traits. Similarly, when you are happy and optimistic, you will find yourself surrounded by happy people who see the glass as half-full. All they will do is draw themselves to you.
We naturally become happy when we do various activities to heighten our consciousness and purify our vibrations. We’ll discover that people notice our positive energy and become drawn to it.
Let’s examine a few easy strategies for increasing our vibration and reaching our full potential.
Be Aware of Your Company
Our social circle plays a crucial role in our spiritual and emotional development. Those who resonate with us tend to be liked and socialized with more. They have the power to uplift us to a higher frequency or to pull us down and keep us bound to the ordinary.
We are affected by the thoughts of others. We sense when they are in a happy or negative mood.
Our mind and thoughts are like radio waves. You have the option to tune out certain (negative) frequencies and tune in to some (positive) ones. To prevent yourself from tuning into a negative frequency, you need to practice. Here’s when knowledge comes in handy to block off harmful vibrations.
Increase Prana, Life Energy
When your prana or life force is low, you experience all the negative emotions—you feel down, angry, tired, and doubtful. And when your prana or life energy increases, negative emotions are transformed into positive ones—you’re enthusiastic, productive, energized, and positive.
Hence, strengthening our life energy is a crucial step in raising our vibrations. This can be accomplished through regular yoga or meditation, pranayamas, or targeted breathing exercises like Sudarshan Kriya, among other daily routines.
Silence Improves Vibrations
Our energy is spent thinking. So, even if you do nothing except sit and think, you still lose energy. Participating in guided meditations and observing quiet can be highly beneficial.
Just a few days of a Silent Retreat helps cleanse the mind and spirit of unnecessary impressions, cravings, aversions, and distortions like hate, lust, and jealousy—all of which hold us down from growing spiritually and restrict our true freedom.
Spending Time in Nature
Our environment shapes who we are. If this is the case, the simplest method for clearing our vibrations is to spend time in nature. Nature is filled with the purest vibrations, and spending quality time in the lap of Mother Earth can do wonders for mental and spiritual health.
When we are outside—whether walking in the woods, gardening in the backyard, or just sitting by an open window to feel the breeze and sounds of the natural world—there is more sattva. Find methods to spend time each day indulging in this uplifting sattva, wherever you reside.
Half wheel pose, or ardha chakrasana in Sanskrit, is a standing backbend. With the hands on the low back, the yogi arches backwards, lifting the chest toward the sky and releasing the head back. While the pose looks simple, it requires a great deal of strength and flexibility to bring the body into this deep backward arch.
Instructions
Begin standing with the feet as wide as the hips.Place the palms on the low back, fingers pointing up.Inhale and lengthen the spine.Exhale and slowly arch the head and neck back as the chest lifts toward the sky.Breathe while holding the pose.Inhale and rise.
The effects of yoga on sympathetic and parasympathetic regulation and circulation are a big part of the effects of a yoga practice that we can explain right now. Our capacity to efficiently & effectively regulate stress and recalibrate the nervous system responses and increase blood flow. Interestingly enough a large number of pharmaceuticals target the nervous system to create their responses and yet we actually still know very little about the nervous system and the brain.
Then there’s the flip-side. The sympathetic also gets a bad rep. New research also shows that the power of stressing the system is really important to our health & longevity, with things like intermittent fasting and athletic training being examples. What’s important is that we can rise to the challenge and then smoothly transition back to a more parasympathetic dominant state. With such a diversity of movement and more introspective practices, yoga is an excellent way to train these shifts in the nervous system.
“A painful emotion caused by consciousness of guilt, shortcoming, or impropriety” is how the dictionary defines shame. Some individuals, I’ve heard, define shame as being associated with “I am bad,” whereas guilt is synonymous with “I did something bad.” This is how they separate shame from guilt. One study even defined shame as “negative emotions in which the feeling of global self-evisceration is experienced.” Global self-evisceration. Oof! Shame is extremely unpleasant and painful, and it can affect one’s identity and self-esteem.
How does shame operate?
For the sake of this discussion, we’ll actually claim that people utilize shame as a coping mechanism to get by. We’re going to consider it to be more of a reaction than a main feeling. Even the dictionary definition explains that it is caused by “consciousness of guilt”, making it appear secondary. As we’ll discuss below, this can help us take greater control over how we respond to shame, but first, let’s discuss how shame functions.
Shame is less of a fight reaction and more of a flight/freeze reaction. Imagine a little youngster who is feeling ashamed. How do they go about things? They elude us! They retreat, get melancholy, and become silent. Shame serves to protect us by allowing us to focus inward on ourselves in the midst of pain. Although it can help us survive, there are moments when it doesn’t seem to be doing any good.
If we look at shame as secondary, then what feeling is underneath that shame? Unloved, inadequate, incorrect, or horrible? Let’s take unloved as an example. Let’s say you get broken up with, making you feel unloved. The voice of shame could enter and say, “You need to learn how to love yourself more so that this doesn’t happen again. You got broken up with because you are so unloveable, no one will ever love you.” Can you see how shame is attempting to keep you alive?
The unfortunate part is that shame tears you down and makes you focus inward. Shame makes you feel in control, but it’s not. You wouldn’t be in pain if you could somehow make yourself lovable—it’s not clear how to do that. During this process, you are simultaneously losing sight of the relationships and even the reality in front of you as your attention becomes more inward focused. Have you ever witnessed someone “shame spiral”? When it began as a single bad emotion, how did they come to believe that they were the worst person on the planet? Then, despite your best efforts to reassure them that you’re not the worst person alive, they genuinely don’t believe you? It can be rather difficult to watch someone follow that course.
Shame keeps you mired in place. It continues to persuade you that you are weak, incompetent, wrong, and without power.
What can you do about shame?
The first action you should take is to recognize shame when it appears. Try asking yourself these inquiries when you observe yourself acting in a shameful manner:
What feeling is intolerable or unpleasant that shame is using against me?
What is shame telling me?
What is true about myself even in this pain?
Once you have shown yourself that shame is lying to you, you can work to focus on the feeling underneath the shame. You can validate your feelings and tolerate them so that you don’t need shame to keep you stuck in the pain. You have the freedom to respond to the uncomfortable feeling in a different way that keeps you connected to people and support. The next stage would be to re-engage with the safe people in your life so you can feel cared for and supported, as shame flourishes in solitude.
Anna Godfrey 
You must be logged in to post a comment.