Its not your fault, p.1
It's Not Your Fault, page 1
PRAISE FOR
IT’S NOT YOUR FAULT
‘Alex Howard has done it again! It’s Not Your Fault is a book that will benefit everyone, though the reader will feel it was written specifically for them. Alex addresses a complex topic with empathy and understanding while providing tools to navigate the impacts of past traumatic experiences.’
ANDREA NAKAYAMA, FUNCTIONAL MEDICINE NUTRITIONIST, EDUCATOR AND SPEAKER
‘Alex Howard squarely places himself among the giants with It’s Not Your Fault, where he brings Mind-Body Medicine from an idea to life with heart, stories, and vulnerability. It’s Not Your Fault is a candid and refreshingly honest journey into the wounds and emotions we do everything to NOT feel and the powerful path through to the freedom we each desire for our future. It’s Not Your Fault is an essential, practical, and living read for anyone with a human body, emotions, chronic illness, or in the chaos of escaping emotions. I recommend this book to all those seeking healing!’
DR. AIMIE APIGIAN, FOUNDER AND CEO OF TRAUMA ACCELERATED HEALING
‘Heartfelt, powerful, and brilliant – this could be the best book on trauma I’ve ever read. It combines good science on the neuropsychology of trauma, personal stories, and tons of useful methods. Alex Howard provides a new comprehensive framework to move this field forward. Clearly and beautifully written, it carries the reader along quickly, with useful insights, warm encouragement, and practical tools on every page. A gem.’
DR. RICK HANSON, NEW YORK TIMES BEST-SELLING AUTHOR OF HARDWIRING HAPPINESS AND RESILIENT
Published in the United Kingdom by:
Hay House UK Ltd, The Sixth Floor, Watson House, 54 Baker Street London W1U 7BU
Tel: +44 (0)20 3927 7290; Fax: +44 (0)20 3927 7291; www.hayhouse.co.uk
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Tel: (91) 11 4176 1620; Fax: (91) 11 4176 1630; www.hayhouse.co.in
Text © Alex Howard, 2023
The moral rights of the author have been asserted.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced by any mechanical, photographic or electronic process, or in the form of a phonographic recording; nor may it be stored in a retrieval system, transmitted or otherwise be copied for public or private use, other than for ‘fair use’ as brief quotations embodied in articles and reviews, without prior written permission of the publisher.
The information given in this book should not be treated as a substitute for professional medical advice; always consult a medical practitioner. Any use of information in this book is at the reader’s discretion and risk. Neither the author nor the publisher can be held responsible for any loss, claim or damage arising out of the use, or misuse, of the suggestions made, the failure to take medical advice or for any material on third-party websites.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Tradepaper ISBN: 978-1-83782-077-1
E-book ISBN: 978-1-83782-079-5
Audiobook ISBN: 978-1-83782-078-8
To my two most important teachers:
Sandra Maitri and Prakash Mackay.
I fear I wasn’t always an easy student, but I hope
this book shows that your love and patience were
not wasted, and a few things did sink in!
CONTENTS
A Note from the Author
Part I: Decode Your Trauma
Chapter 1: The Wounds That Shape Us
Chapter 2: Trauma as an ECHO
Chapter 3: Discover Your Trauma Events
Chapter 4: Context Is Everything
Chapter 5: How’s Your Homeostatic Balance?
Chapter 6: The Outcomes of Your Trauma
Part II: The RESET Solution for Trauma Healing
Introduction
Chapter 7: Recognize Which State Your Nervous System Is In
Chapter 8: Examine Your Personality Patterns
Chapter 9: Stop Running, Start Feeling
Chapter 10: Put a STOP to Your Unhelpful Behaviors
Chapter 11: The Six Emotional Defenses
Chapter 12: Inquire Into Your Emotions
Chapter 13: Moving Beyond Inner Resistance
Chapter 14: Transform Your Inner Critic
Part III: The ABCD of Healing in the Real World
Introduction
Chapter 15: Ask for Help (The Power of Yes)
Chapter 16: Build Better Boundaries (The Power of No)
Chapter 17: Commit to Your Healing
Chapter 18: Decide What Your Trauma Means
References
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Empower You: Unlimited Audio Mobile App
Continue Your Journey with Hay House
Index
A NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR
When writing a book about trauma, one is highly aware of standing on the shoulders of giants, and this is uppermost in my mind because I have the privilege of interviewing many of the pioneers of trauma research for the annual Trauma Super Conference.
My conversations with such experts as Dr. Peter Levine (Somatic Experiencing®), Professor Stephen Porges (Polyvagal Theory), Dr. Gabor Maté (Compassionate Inquiry®), Thomas Hübl (Collective Trauma), and Dr. Arielle Schwartz (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing, or EMDR, and Therapeutic Yoga), to name just a few, have impacted me significantly.
While planning the content of this book, I had to make some sensitive choices. It was tempting to produce a ‘greatest hits’ of the extraordinary body of work in this field, but I chose not to for several reasons. Firstly, there are some excellent books and blogs that already do this job well; and secondly, I wanted to create a practical and effective roadmap for change informed by my own personal experience and 20 years in clinical practice.
Given that my psychology-based online RESET Program® is 30 hours in duration, and that my team and I have recorded more than 250 hours of interviews for our Trauma Super Conference series, my challenge in writing this book was to prevent it from becoming overly complex or pulling in too many directions at once. Therefore, may I ask you to assume that the omission of others’ ideas and theories is made in full awareness of and respect for their work. And in the spirit of delivering a guide with tools that you can use today to create change in your life and reset the impacts of your trauma.
CHAPTER 1
The Wounds That Shape Us
It was a cold, frosty early morning in South Wales and the final day of a week-long retreat in which I was taking part, something I did several times a year to understand myself more deeply. As a successful therapist, I ought to have been in my comfort zone and having the time of my life, but in truth, I was in my own personal hell.
Unable to sleep and needing to move my body, I decided to take a walk to try and clear my head. The silence of the retreat center was palpable as I slipped out the back door and followed one of the routes into the forest behind the building. As I picked up the pace to keep warm, my mind drifted back to the previous day’s teachings.
The subject of the retreat was opening to our unprocessed emotions and learning to feel them and heal them. The idea sounded simple, but to me, it felt like a path worse than death. In fact, several years earlier, I’d attended this same retreat and halfway through I’d walked out mid-lecture and driven home, telling myself it just wasn’t for me.
At this time, my emotions were far from being a safe place; indeed, I was starting to realize that unconsciously, I’d designed my life in such a way as to avoid feeling them. The problem was it was becoming harder to do so.
My Trauma Healing Journey
In the 18 months prior to the retreat, I’d experienced debilitating panic attacks that had almost consumed my life. During the daytime, I ran the gauntlet of anxiety and fear, but that was nothing compared to nighttime, when I had to face the terror without distractions; at one point, I found myself in one unhealthy relationship after another simply as an alternative to sleeping alone. I’d always been proudly independent, so this situation had only deepened my sense of hopelessness.
The timing of my falling apart couldn’t have been more disastrous. At the age of 26 I’d already achieved many of my dreams – after fighting a seven-year battle with myalgic encephalomyelitis, also known as chronic fatigue syndrome (ME/CFS), as a teenager, I’d gone on to make a full recovery and had set up the kind of clinic that I’d longed for when I was ill: one specializing in fatigue-related conditions.
Located in London’s prestigious Harley Street, the Optimum Health Clinic (OHC) had established an outstanding reputation for innovation and excellence. I was also in demand as a public speaker and had been offered my own BBC TV series, which was, rather ironically, called Panic Room. On the surface I was leading a glamorous life, driving a sports car, and living in a penthouse apartment in London. And, given that I’d been mercilessly bullied throughout my school years, I was also proud to be dating the kind of women I could once only have dreamed of.
However, by the time I joine
Emotional Shutdown
When I reached the far side of the forest, I slowed my pace a little, gazing at the mist lingering over the mountains in the distance. As I walked on, I found myself reflecting on my childhood and how some of the events that had occurred back then had shaped my current life. I realized that, ultimately, my inability to feel my emotions must have been a natural response to the traumas I’d experienced during my early years.
The word trauma didn’t mean a great deal to me at that time. I thought of trauma as the physical injuries sustained in a serious accident or, say, the experience of living in a war zone. The idea that the childhood I’d normalized had been ‘traumatic’ seemed strange to me. I knew that many people had experienced far more difficult things than I had, and yet I did recognize that the shutting down of my emotional capacity must have originated somewhere.
From a young age, my sister suffered from significant mental health issues. Severe anorexia and bipolar disorder were the diagnoses at the time, but those labels did little to capture the lived experience for her and those around her. She spent periods in mental health hospitals and foster care, and although her own pain was intense, the effects of her illness on the family and others were also devastating.
I have countless childhood memories of my sister being violent toward family members and smashing up the house. And on multiple occasions I sat in the back of a police car with her, trying to soothe her as she was once again taken into enforced residential care.
Growing up with someone whose feelings were so explosive and destructive, I’d learned a clear lesson: Emotions are dangerous and the more we express them, the more we and those around us get hurt. The problem was that now, on the retreat, I was being asked to open up to and feel my feelings, but they were simply not accessible to me. And the closer I got to them, the more severe the panic and terror became. Never in my life had I felt more stuck.
Taking a Leap
Later that day, I had a private session with one of the retreat’s teachers. These were designed to help us integrate the theory of the teaching into our everyday experience, but so far, I’d generally seen them as something to get through, and certainly not a place in which to be truly vulnerable.
My teacher, Prakash, was a stocky Glaswegian in his late fifties whose voice was a bit like Sean Connery’s. When he wasn’t teaching retreats, he lived in Hawaii, and I’d been having online video sessions with him for the past year. During that time, we’d talked a lot about my growing predicament of emotional ‘stuckness,’ but I’d not managed to move beyond it.
As I sat with Prakash and updated him on how the week had been for me, he listened patiently and empathically. When I was finished, he regarded me with a stern but compassionate look in his eyes and said, ‘Alex, I think the time for talking is done.’ He then invited me to lie on a mat on the floor and close my eyes. I did as I was told, even though a huge part of me once again wanted to pack my bags and run. But I feared that if I did, I might spend the rest of my life running, and that wouldn’t be a life worth living.
Prakash asked me to put my focus on my breath and to pay attention to the sensations in my body; in doing so, he was encouraging me to deepen my focus on my inner experience and to give up trying to control it. At first, I felt nothing but the familiar stuckness and hopelessness. But then, as I felt into the feelings, to my surprise I noticed something else was there, and one word came to mind to describe it: hatred.
The feeling was mainly in my chest, but it was growing. It felt cold and toxic, and it was almost as if there was a demonic force rising within me. It occurred to me that I might be about to get more than I’d bargained for. Prakash suggested I stay with the feeling, and I realized that this was a pivotal moment. If I’d really decided that my life couldn’t continue in the way it was, I had to dig deep and grow my courage. I allowed the feeling of hatred to spread more fully into my body, and as I did so, I started to get images of my father. I say images, but they were more vague ideas of what he might look like – I’d grown up without my father and had only ever seen two photographs of him.
As I did my best to continue to allow the feeling, it started to build. I knew that there would be a tipping point, when the control would no longer be mine, and I gave myself over to the feeling and to Prakash’s guidance. As someone who was used to being in control, this wasn’t easy for me. The tipping point arrived, and before I knew it, I’d taken a leap.
Suddenly, out of nowhere, the feeling of hatred became overwhelming. It was like a poison infecting every cell of my body. I began to scream, making the most murderous sounds I’d ever heard. And one phrase, on repeat, came out of my mouth between those screams, as if they were the only words I knew: ‘I hate him. I hate him. I hate him so much.’
By then, my entire body was shaking intensely, and at one point, I thought I’d be sick. For a moment, I found myself wondering what the hell was happening. Where had all this intensity come from? Thankfully, my years of meditation practice had taught me to stay present in difficult circumstances, and I knew that if ever there was a time to keep my attention steady, this was it.
Our Pain Is the Gateway to Our Healing
Until I was in my early twenties, it had barely crossed my mind that my father leaving the family soon after I was born had impacted me in any way. It wasn’t until I stumbled across a weekend workshop on exploring family dynamics that I was faced with the undeniable truth – my father walking out had been a defining event of my life.
I wasn’t aware of the circumstances of my parents’ separation, but I did know that my conception had been a failed attempt to save their marriage; indeed, they had even argued about what to call me. Eventually, my mother divorced my father on grounds of mental cruelty. He stopped visiting us a few months after the divorce was finalized, and we had no contact with him at all after I was about six months old.
My father didn’t just leave us physically, he also left us financially, failing to pay a penny in child support. As a result, at one point my mother had to work three jobs to support my sister and me. At a young age, I became the man of the house – I had to be strong, and when my sister lost one of her ongoing battles with her mental health, I was often the person who tried to make it better. And, despite being one of the most bullied kids in my school, I’d still try to protect other kids from bullies by standing between them. I couldn’t bear to see other people suffer – to see them feeling the pain that I felt, deep down.
Alongside the physical and emotional stress of the events of my childhood, I learned something deeply formative: the pain I was experiencing was my fault. As children we are egocentric – we believe the world revolves around us, and, more importantly, is caused by us. Therefore, the trauma that happens to us – be it a parent leaving, or other emotional instability we experience – must, on some level, be our own fault. Right?
As I lay on the floor in that retreat center, with Prakash kneeling over me and my body trying to purge itself of the poison that was consuming me, for the first time I understood the difference between anger and hatred. Anger has a fiery, hot quality, while hatred is cold. I didn’t just want my father dead, I wanted to kill him, and I wanted it to be slow and cruel. I wanted to hurt him in every way that he’d hurt us.
I knew there was a good chance that my father was still alive. So why had he never reached out? At the very least, he could have checked to see if we were OK. There had been nothing – not a single phone call or letter. It hurt. It hurt so much.
After what felt like an eternity but was probably closer to 15 minutes, the hatred in me began to dissipate a little. Prakash gently asked me what I was feeling now. At first, I hesitated. I desperately didn’t want it to be true, but I knew that my hatred was really a defense against something even more painful: I wanted my father. I needed him. More than anything in the world, I desperately longed for my father to love me.
