So many people tell me they feel stuck in their heads, trapped in thought, and the way out

is the very thing they are avoiding.

I remember when I was eight years old and I was sat on the stairs listening to an argument

below me and I had this, these thoughts come up of, I don't know why I'm not more

scared or more sad. And the reason I wasn't feeling those feelings was because I was avoiding them,

because I've gone up into my head as a way to escape. Now we have so many ways to

distract ourselves these days. There's obviously phones and social media but there's also

food, alcohol, exercise, so many things. But for all of us, the first way we learnt to get

away from overwhelming feelings was to go up into the head.

And that gets reinforced by a culture that emphasizes the key skill to develop is thinking,

conceptualisation, knowledge, intuition and feelings irrelevant. Don't even touch on them. But when we are kids,

as we have these really big sensations, what we really need is a regulated, attuned, calm, loving

adult who's able to be with us to help us to navigate those experiences.

Because if we don't have that, they do become too much.

So I remember taking my two daughters to the dentist and my two-year-old started freaking out

when she saw the nurses with

their masks. And so I took her in my arms like this. And I had an intention and an energy

of, I've got you. I'm not going anywhere. I was regulated in calm myself and even as I was interacting with the

nurses and sitting through my other daughter's session with the dentist, I made sure that my energy

was with my two-year-old and her nervous system tuned into mine and gradually calmed down.

And before long, she wanted me to put her down and she teutored off and was having a right laugh.

And this is a key thing because if I had let her be in her terror without tending to her,

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