As a lifelong cyclist I know the harrowing things that can happen when we live life on two wheels. The good thing is that as a psychotherapist specializing in trauma, I know some of what it takes to process the trauma of accidents and near misses. I’m going to outline the simplest thing that we can do so that the fright of a near miss doesn’t get stuck inside our body, and compromise our ability to be safe on the bike.

Here’s a common scenario- you are riding and someone opens their car door right in front of you. Your natural reflexes take over and you slam on your brakes, swerve into the next lane, or so some variation of the two. Thank goodness, you don’t hit the door and there was no car in the next lane, so you were lucky and had only a close call, not a physical collision and trauma. As you stop, your heart is racing, and you may be enraged, or afraid, or even terrified; your heart pounding and pulse racing, and your body feeling both shaky and energized. Your sympathetic nervous system has mobilized to get keep you safe (fight/flight), and it has been fused with the shock from the opening of the car door. The evasive action that you took in that split second to avoid injury or possible death, though successful, isn’t enough to discharge (release) the tremendous amount of energy created by the situation, which gets bound up in the body and nervous system.

If you do as many of us probably have done, many times- you say ‘phew’ (or some variation), or educate the driver about how to open a car door properly, or pause for a few moments, then continue on with your ride. As you ride, you may feel shaky, nervous, easily startled, like your balance is a bit off, or maybe a bit ‘out of it’- like you can’t take in all the information in your surroundings, be it cars (moving or parked), potholes, etc., and things can startle you. If you have a close call while riding gravel, cross or mountain biking, you may find that you keep crashing, or almost crashing. All of these things add up to having a bad ride, and being at increased risk of injury.

The culprit for this strong reaction and resulting vulnerability is your nervous system- which did what it was meant to do- to keep you safe, but hasn’t had the time to come back to equilibrium. After the shock of the incident our nervous system needs time to settle, to metabolize, to discharge all of the shock and survival energy that was just created, and we don’t often allow this to happen, interrupting the body’s natural rhythm. In the above example, we halted the discharge/settling process by simply continuing the ride, or it could be by checking Strava, or sending a text, etc. All of which keep us distracted, and unaware of what is happening in our body- unaware of or disavowing the intense activation present in our nervous system.

Here’s how to do it differently. The next time you have a near miss or something else that frightens you- get to safety (so off the road or trail), and take a moment to notice things that help you orient to the here and now (I see a tree, I feel the cool breeze, I smell cut grass, I hear a crow calling, my friend is sitting with me, etc.). Now, take some time to give your body and nervous system space- be curious about what is happening inside, and give it space to express itself. This process may feel very odd and vulnerable, and as you do this, you may experience a rush of heat or cold, or you may feel some shaking, your face may flush, or you may feel some fear- some tears may come, or even some nervous laughter. All of these are signs that the shock to your system from the near miss is processing and your body is moving it through. The point is to give your body space to express itself- to do what it naturally wants to do- to allow the bound-up survival energy to come out, so that you don’t have to carry it with you for the rest of the ride, and possibly beyond. The good thing is that this process described above only needs a few minutes to happen, and once this wave has come through, your system will naturally settle- you will feel more grounded, present, focused, and ready to go on with your ride. The discharge of the energy may not be entirely complete, so when you get home, give your system some space to see if anything residual is left, by repeating the process I’ve laid out above.

I’m aware that the process I’ve laid out above doesn’t fit well with the culture of many group rides, and it would be great if this could shift. Educate your riding friends, and if you are on a group ride and are unable to give your nervous system time to discharge in the moment- do it as soon as you can afterwards, once you get home, or at the post ride coffee- before the energy has become really rooted inside your system.

If you do get hit or injured, or have a bad crash on your bike (or anywhere) and are dogged by the incident, reach out to a trained therapist that can help you move the residue from the accident – check out our referral list – https://bringingthebody.ca/referrals/.

I hope that this information is helpful, and that you take up the challenge to listen to your nervous system after your next close call- your nervous system will thank you for it. Have a safe ride.

In my clinical practice I see a thread of chronic shame woven throughout the fabric of life of many of my male, or male identifying clients; a thread just waiting to be plucked that sets in motion a degree of dysregulation and personal pain that will be avoided at nearly all costs. The difficulty is that this thread is most often initiated in their most intimate relationships— those of deep love, that are most precious, including their relationship with those tender, routinely disavowed wants and needs within themselves.

Many definitions of shame/chronic shame exist, and those which ring most true for me attempt to describe with heart the wholesale dysregulation, destruction, and attack on the very core of the person that shame elicits. Patricia DeYoung (2015) defines chronic shame as “one’s felt sense of self disintegrating in relation to a dysregulating other” (p. 18) and Dorahy (2015) includes the desire to hide, disappear or even die. For those who experience chronic shame, these descriptions begin to describe what it feels like psychologically and neurophysiologically when activated.

It’s important to differentiate between shame and chronic shame. Chronic shame appears much earlier than shame; first seen in the 2^nd year of life, prior to conscious memory, remaining in a wordless state (Hill, 2015). The dysregulation experienced by the child is “”affectively burnt in” the infant’s developing right brain” (Schore, 2014, p.390), becoming a thread that is waiting to be picked, touching “a wound made from the inside by an unseen hand” (Kaufman, 1989, p.5), that reverberates throughout one’s interpersonal life. Additional research by Schore (2017) shows that male children are at increased risk for a number of psychopathologies because of slower brain maturation, particularly on the right brain, which leaves them vulnerable longer to negative experiences, particularly relational trauma that form the fabric of shame.

For those with chronic shame, integrated strategies for avoiding and surviving shame (Hill, 2015) are woven into the client’s Internal Working Model (Bowlby, 1973) – the way that people see themselves, the world, and their place in it. If we add to this Daniel Siegel’s (2010) assertion that ‘the brain is an anticipation machine’, we can see why chronic shame states are so incredibly enduring, and that no matter how safe or stable things are in the present, the thread of chronic shame remains active, and when activated, the same neural affective states that were experienced as a child are re-experienced by the adult client. We must remember that because chronic shame is formed prior to declarative memory, it exists outside of the conscious memory system, leaving it largely impervious to cognitive therapies, rendering clients baffled by the repetition of these intensely dysregulating interactions.

The benefit of bringing shame more into our clinical awareness, is that it can shift our focus from simply attending to behavioural issues and patterns—addictions, disengagement, anger, perfection, procrastination, pleasing—and begin to see the role that chronic shame, which is often dissociated from the client’s awareness, is having on initiating or perpetuating these patterns, and focus not just on the fire, but the fuel that is feeding it.

Clinically, I see two common expressions of chronic shame that are often used unconsciously and interchangeably by the client. The first is to internalize the shame and implode or collapse in on themselves, feeling the full weight of the humiliation or mortification embedded in the affective states of their nervous system and psyche. The second is to externalize and attack the interpersonal other, feeling the grandiosity and righteousness of their actions in defense of the disintegrating self (shame reaction). Chefetz (2016) includes contempt, dissmell, and disgust within the shame spectrum of emotion, and I see this play out both internally and externally within each pattern. Needless to say, the severity and intractability of chronic shame creates massive turmoil and strain within their most intimate interpersonal relationships.

Research and my clinical experience suggest that what is needed for clients to work through chronic shame is for them to experience solid, stable, caring relationships, including the therapeutic relationship, where they can feel the pluck of the dysregulating shame and share it with another person, have it witnessed, and, against all expectations in their emotional being, have them not be judged or criticized, but witnessed and cared for. This deeply relational process, both within, and outside of therapy, creates opportunities for corrective emotional experiences that begin to unwind the chronic shame, both cognitively for the client, as they begin to develop a fuller relationship with this process that resides in them, and within their neurophysiology. Donald Kalsched (2013) sums this process best: “what has been broken relationally must be repaired relationally. This calls for affectively focused treatment” (p. 13, Italics in original). Processing chronic shame is long term work, and requires nuance and care to weave between the disintegrating, near automatic responses of the shame state, and the need to provide an attuned, caring presence: Over time “the therapist provides an emotional re-education and remediates a developmental void” (Maroda, 2009, p.20). Additionally, it is critical that the intense affect be modulated so that dissociation can be limited and the client can maintain connection to their adult witness within the present moment, as the healing of trauma can only happen in the here and now.

It is my hope that as clinicians, we can attune to this debilitating dynamic in our clients that is often overlooked or misinterpreted, but is actually hiding in plain sight.

Is your interest piqued? Check out my workshop on chronic shame.

References

Bowlby, J. (1973). Attachment and Loss, Vol. 2: Separation, Anxiety, and Anger. London: Penguin Books.

Chefetz, R. Catastrophic Shame and the Reorganization of Self, retrieved online Nov 4, 2018- http://csar.nyc/catastrophic-shame-and-the-reorganization-of-self/

DeYoung, P. (2015). Understanding and treating chronic shame: A relational/neurobiological approach. New York: Routledge.

Dorahy, M. (2015). Shame and Dissociation in Complex Trauma Disorders Webinar.

Hill, D. (2015). Affect regulation theory: A clinical model. New York: Norton.

Kalsched, D. (2013). Trauma and the Soul: A psycho-spiritual approach to human development and its interruption. New York: Routledge.

Kaufman, G. (1989). The psychology of shame: theory and treatment of shame-based syndromes- 2^nd edition. New York: Springer.

Maroda, K. (2009). Less is more: An argument for the judicious use of self-disclosure. In Bloomgarden, A. and Mennuti, R. B., (Eds.) Psychotherapist Revealed: Therapists Speak About Self-Disclosure in Psychotherapy. New York: Routledge, p. 17 – 30.

Schore, A. (2014). The right brain dominant in psychotherapy. Psychotherapy. 51 (3): p. 388-397.

Schore, A. (2017). All our sons: The developmental neurobiology and neuroendocrinology of boys at risk. Infant Mental Health Journal. 38(1): p.15-52

Siegel, D. (2010). Mindsight: The New Science of Personal Transformation. New York. Bantam.