Week 4 | Cftgroup

SUMMARY

Thank you for your continued efforts and courage with our work together.

This week we explored the importance of both safety and safeness. Clearly whatever we do we need to pay attention to our safety, be it driving a car, crossing the road or even eating healthy foods or preventing people from hurting/exploiting us. However, sometimes we can get so locked into this that we only focus on preventing bad things and not creating helpful or useful things. When we feel safe then we start to explore the environment and take risks. We call this creating a secure base, one that encourages us to try new things at times to play and engage the world in new ways. Just a few notes for this week -

Personal Practice

Part of creating a secure base is to begin to think about our connections and perhaps becoming more open to the support and helpfulness of others. There are particular systems in our brain that respond to receiving helpfulness, and so one of the exercises we practiced today was imagining a compassionate other being compassionate to you. People who are lonely or distrustful can find this difficult but the idea is to help those systems in our bodies and brains work as well as they can because that will help us to feel secure in the long term. So don’t worry if you struggle with it, it’s a practice and can take time to build and feel.
See if you can note times during the week when you might imagine your compassionate image supporting you kindly, or imagining what a good friend might say to you if you are struggling. We call this proximity seeking which means moving towards and bring into mind helpful interactions. We are trying to turn on systems in our bodies and brains that will be helpful. The idea is to turn towards what is helpful within us when we struggle rather than get caught up in a sense of aloneness or self-criticism.

Feel free to reach out this week if we can be of any assistance.

Wishing you well