Metal-Head

Why is somatics so hard when you have a metal-head?

“Drop in to your body”.

The words from the soothing, albeit tinny sounding voice from my Somatics Trainer. Instantaneously my ADHD brain buzzes “WTF!?, what does ‘Drop in to your body’ mean?” - I am trying to decipher the logic - where do I drop in and to where? Immediately I’ve lost the next thread of instruction and am now frustrated and struggling to keep up.

I am training as a Somatics Experiencing practitioner to become a better coach, to offer these tools to my clients. My training from 30 years ago as a holistic massage therapist taught me the importance of what the body holds. And it’s important for me to experience these tools - not just read and intellectually bypass them - before passing them off as “oh yeah babe, of course they will heal/fix/integrate.” And this is part of my own healing journey. In January this year I noted on my vision board a desire to ‘feel’. A year after losing my beautiful mum, a year after quitting my corporate career, years after experiencing trauma - I felt numb from the neck down, body and senses dulled. Emotionless and overthinking, stuck in my dorsal cave.

Back to the practise: I am trying to locate the tension in my body, and as I ‘drop in’ my attention goes straight to my head. My brain already feels buzzy, like it’s loud, I have some weird tinnitus anyway, and it’s always white noise up in there. So that’s where my attention went to. Trying to describe what I notice. “It feels like I have a metal head - kinda cold and heavy”. I can’t get below my head! Am I broken? I immediately want to give up. I ask myself as I watch the other participants elegantly name their left hip. I can’t feel beneath my neck!

Again a wash of shame for a defective brain/body experience. I am about to jack it all in. My amazing partner, sensing my state, brings me back to notice and narrate my metal-head landscape, it’s kind of soothing as I do that, it begins to feel lighter. We work through the rest of the process and what came up for me was actually profound, an inner, ancient wisdom from my nervous system and soma. I gave thanks to my metal-head.

I took the practice to a few of my clients. Interestingly the same thing happened. ‘Dropping in’ felt hard, about 70% of them got stuck in their heads, about 50% mentioned they felt they had a heavy metal head (ACDC or Iron-Maiden?). We laughed as I shared my initial experience, bonding over our metal heads. I recalled that moment where Bella Swan in Twilight discovers her magical powers post vampire makeover. Perhaps our heads are our shield?

But this got me to thinking. I often tell my clients that it can feel like we are one big giant bobble head with our ADHD - as if head and body are not the same size. Head thinking/feeling too much and body numb and disconnected. But with the ‘Dropping in’, it felt that the first place to land was the head, which for many of us with ADHD feels like the source of all our angst & chaos. So of course we start to overthink and get stuck there.

So the next time I shared the practise with clients, I asked them to pull up into their body, starting with their toes. We used tapping to feel where there might be tension in the soma. It worked! The distraction of the Uno Reverso tactic plus the tapping seemed to help refocus away from the head.

Somatics can be super-hard for Neurodivergent systems, but not impossible. We can struggle to focus, lose focus, start mind-wandering and we can struggle to feel too. I experience the same in my breathwork practise. Some days are easier than others, feeling pressured to perform makes it a little harder. What I have found is that identifying an entry point and practise are key. Recently, I heard somewhere that it takes over 300 times of consistent practise for an athlete to be good at something. I kind of liked that concept, it brings a certainty and hope to practise. And often our ADHD brains want that predictability, an outcome.

I know from my own coaching and therapy journey, that to begin with - all I wanted was a quick fix - tell me what to do - so I can intellectualise it, likely bypass the feeling and just ‘know it’ in my head. But over the past 5 years, what I’ve come to really understand deep in my knowing that we need to practise at ‘feeling’ and learning to be with them, walk with the emotions that feel a little uncomfortable or just our of reach and cherish them, regardless of how painful they are, because if we don’t learn to connect and process, our bodies do it for us and it comes out in pain and illness.

So, if like me, Somatics and experiencing feeling feels hard - don’t give up. Dip in daily to the feel of wind or weather on your face, tune in to the sensation of water on your body in the shower, focus on how your feet hit the ground and walk. Mindfulness is and can be hard for racing brains, I don’t try and devote 5 hours to practise, but 5-30 minutes here and there through the day. That doesn’t feel impossible and nor does it feel like a threat to a demand avoidant system that is often locked in the ‘I can’t’ frame. I know I can, I just don’t want to… because it feels dull.

I am having to learn discipline and willpower - sitting with the uncomfortableness is part of the process. This practise helps me to be with more the deeper, more uncomfortable feelings, the ones from trauma. It stretches my window of capacity.

Someone challenged me recently, asking me if I was denying our neurodivergent needs by proposing this practise. My view on this: Our neurodivergent-ness is a reason, but it’s not an excuse. Part of the journey is how we acknowledge the uncomfortableness, the struggles, accept the difference AND still find different ways in to support our human journey. In doing so we start to increase our capacity settings; we begin to use neuroplasticity to rewire our brains; we learn how to dive in to our emotional field and work with the fear/emotions that sit under our procrastination and limiting beliefs, the one’s that hold us back from our human potential.

It’s 07:35am here. I have my breathwork practise to complete and a body/back exercise to practise - Does my system want to do it - no. Because it feels hard, effortful, it’s making up several excuses all at once, my buzzy brain has already started mentally checking all the things I ‘must achieve’ today. My reframe is - this IS how I achieve my day.

After all. It’s just 30 minutes and afterwards I get to have Cacao.