Robin Vanderplank Clinical Psychologist Traumatologist

27/08/2025

12/08/2025

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13/07/2025

DON’T DO ANYTHING. JUST REST.

Don’t fall into the trap of believing that doing nothing… means doing nothing for yourself.

We’ve been conditioned to believe that not being productive is somehow a failure.
That if it doesn’t have a visible outcome, it doesn’t count.
That rest is wasted time.

We’ve become so used to being busy —
to checking off boxes,
to tracking our progress,
to measuring worth in output —
that we’ve forgotten something essential:

Rest is productive.

It’s the moment your body heals.
Your mind exhales.
Your soul whispers.

Reading a magazine.
Taking a long shower.
Sitting in the garden with a warm cup of coffee.
None of it is a waste.

Because time spent resting… is time well spent.

We’re not machines.
We’re not meant to hustle 24/7.
We are human beings.

And sometimes, we just need to be.

— Becky Hemsley
Echoes of Insight

01/07/2025

Befriend your own Nervous System - by Leanne Miller

Learning to understand our own nervous system and how it works is so important. As the name implies, our Autonomic Nervous System works automatically, well below conscious awareness. So when your nervous system feels Safe, this is when you can comfortably, actively and happily connect to others and to the world. When your nervous system doesn't feel safe ie it feels threatened and the world is seen to be unfriendly, it automatically puts you into Fight or Flight and when it senses even greater unsafety (danger, life threat) it will automatically put you into Freeze.

What does Safety look like? - Being interested, focused, peaceful, fun, active, happy, creative, inspired, playing, doing things with others, feeling safe to reach out to others when necessary.
Health benefits of Safety: healthy heart, regulated blood pressure, healthy immune system, good digestion, quality sleep, overall sense of wellbeing.

What does Fight/Flight look like? (rush of adrenaline and cortisol; chaotic, agitated, frantic, hypervigilant)
Fight: Angry outbursts, controlling, bullying, explosive behaviour, narcissistic
Flight: workaholic, over-thinking, perfectionist, anxiety, panic attacks, OCD, difficulty sitting still, addiction
Health consequences of Fight/Flight: headache, sleep problems, chronic neck, shoulder and back tension, high blood pressure, high cholesterol, weight gain/loss, can't focus, memory impairment, stomach problems, increased vulnerability to illness.

What does Freeze look like? Difficulty making decisions, stuck, dissociated, shutdown, collapse, weakness, no energy, too tired to think or act, despair, numb, isolating, the world looks empty, dead and dark, depression, foggy brain, memory problems.
Health consequences of Freeze: chronic fatigue, fibromyalgia, stomach problems, low blood pressure, type 2 diabetes, weight gain/loss, vulnerability to illness.

When we begin to befriend our own nervous system and start becoming aware of its state at any one time, we are then on the path to learning to address the stressors in order to heal and regulate our nervous system.

For more on the nervous system and how to regulate it, I encourage you to watch YouTube videos by Irene Lyon, a wonderful nervous system specialist. There is much to learn from her and as Irene says: "healing starts with learning and healing is learning applied."

27/06/2025

S7/E8 Sense of Self: WHEN YOU FIRST CONNECT TO YOURSELF, YOU CAN THEN CONNECT TO OTHERS

Final episode of Series 7 - From 'Intimacy and Solitude' by Stephanie Dowrick:

"It is useful to bring to mind that our judgements of others (and of ourselves) are inevitably matters of opinion and prejudice – for or against – and are also, and sometimes quite unsubtly, displays of how little or how much we have been able to accept ourselves.

The less we know and have come to accept ourselves, the more harshly we will judge other people, and the more adamantly we will believe we have a right to judge other people. Sometimes this goes along with an infantile lack of self-awareness, an intolerance for difference and a smug, limiting complacency which can be hard for others to take.

You come to the discovery of self in the company of others. You gain self-awareness alongside others. You are vulnerable to the environment around you.

Rich, power-filled people may seem advantaged when it comes to self, and to be running in a different race when it comes to self-acceptance. But beyond self-esteem, I cannot be convinced that understanding self, or expressing self, is inevitably easier for those who are rich, powerful or stereotypically male. On the contrary, serious wealth and the pursuit of power frequently demands shutting out an awareness of the needs of others, or even an awareness of the reality of others, to a very dangerous extent.

It may take a loss of what a person is most identified with to push them to discover a self which is not bound by inevitably limiting identifications:

* I have a big salary, but I am not my salary.
* I have a gorgeous face, but I am not my gorgeous face.
* I have won many prizes, but I am not my prizes.
* I have a rich husband, but I am not my rich husband.
* I have a Mercedes Benz, but I am not my Mercedes Benz.

The better you know your own self, and the more you can trust yourself to act with minimum conflict and good will, the more easily you can be aware of others. That kind of security allows you to discover that a deep connection is enhancing for your sense of self. More than that, connection with others leads to greater knowledge of who you are.

You make your discovery of self in the company of others. Through someone else's belief that you exist, and have a right to exist in your own way, you begin to find your solid ground within.

From that place of inner reality you are able to reach out - perhaps even to forget yourself temporarily - to make contact with others.

Being with others allows you to go on learning who you are. Feeling safe about who you are, you can afford to appreciate others’ differences, as well as the ways in which you are alike.

Knowing who you are, trusting that you are, you can also be alone. Not in a state of defensiveness against others, nor in a state of loneliness, but knowing that you are alone with your own self.

And who is that self? Someone with memories (which convince us of our continuity in time and are therefore vital as links to sense of self) and experiences of others."

26/06/2025

S7/E7 Sense of Self: I-SELF vs WE-SELF

Extract from 'Intimacy and Solitude' by Stephanie Dowrick.

"Without a reliable sense of self, relationships may feel dangerous: you could easily be overwhelmed, entrapped or even lost. Without a reliable sense of self, you may also be inclined to fall for the seductive illusion that greater and more desirable than an I-self is a we-self. This doesn't mean that you are choosing intimacy. It may mean that you don't trust that you have enough self to stand alone.

The we-self can also be called the adapted self (also called by others as a false self, pseudo-self, idealised, conforming self and an as-if personality).

What this term adds up to is a description of someone who is attuned to messages from the outside, rather than trusting in or having much sense of their own inner direction.

Such a person may well display characteristics which are highly praised in our communities. She (or he) may be loyal, compliant, intensely co-operative. She may be an excellent employee or the most devout member of a religious or secular institution. Equally she (or he) may be a rebel, but have chosen to rebel along well-trodden lines. (There is nothing essentially self-expressive about being a thug, an addict, a drop-out).

A person who has the characteristics of an adapted self may be happy enough. Yet they lack some human freedoms which we hold dear: the freedom to know one's own mind; the freedom to speak one own's mind; the freedom to be true to one's own self.

Adapted self behaviour can also be part of the life of someone who feels overly 'together', who would claim to know him or herself inside out. Of that kind of adapted self, analyst Harry Guntrip suggests: 'The more possible it is to predict consistently what a human being will do, the less of a real person he has become.'

Every one of us displays some degrees of adapted self behaviour when what we may want or feel has to be set aside in order to function co-operatively in a crowded society. This may mean biting your tongue when to speak your mind would give offence, or putting up with behaviour which irritates you or which you may even despise, or going to an alienating job year after year to provide for your family.

Those kind of adjustments, even when they involve minor dishonesty to your own sense of truth or justice, may not be harmful to your sense of self.

What does seem to matter is whether, in addition to this tolerance (or pragmatism), you are capable also of acting, thinking and speaking on your own behalf; whether your sense of gravity remains within yourself or whether you have an unresolved need to lean on other people, or be leaned upon by other people, who may seem to have more power over your life than you have.

Then the need to discover ways to be true to yourself become very urgent indeed. Until you know who it is who is acting/thinking/feeling/dreaming in your name and through your body, then contact with others will be as far out of reach as contact with your own self.

The goals of self-discovery are attuned to life.

When you feel real to yourself, whether you are alone or with others, and when others seem real to you even in their differences from you, you can count yourself lucky or blessed."

25/06/2025

S7/E6 Sense of Self: DOES YOUR INNER SELF MATCH WITH YOUR OUTER SELF?

Extracts on 'Sense of Self' from 'Intimacy and Solitude' by Stephanie Dowrick (this is a long one but so worth the read):

"Whether your sense of self comes easily or is hard-won, you are likely to feel more 'yourself' in some situations than others. Your sense of self will probably be harder to contact at times of stress or extreme conflict than during periods of emotional ease. You will almost certainly feel more yourself with some people than with others. At times of major upheaval - death, birth, the end of a relationship - your sense of self of 'who I am' may be especially hard to locate.

In my own life I am aware of how crucial and how difficult it has been to bring closer together a sense of self which I expressed on the outside - the me other people saw - with the way I felt on the inside. I understand how painful it is to have an existence on the inside (in the way you experience yourself) which markedly differs from the way you are perceived.

A split between the way a person feels on the inside and the way she or he feels on the outside is usually maintained at considerable cost, with increasing feelings of meaningless and decreasing feelings of choice. Such a pattern of splitting is likely to be set in place when there has been a trauma which the child is not encouraged to recover from or speak about so that what the child is feeling on the inside is given no legitimacy of 'mattering' on the outside. Inevitably, then, inner and outer become unbearably divided.

A similar pattern, splitting the way a person feels on the inside from the way he or she appears on the outside, can be established when the child's family cannot attune to who their child is, but insist on behaving toward him or her as the child they want, rather than the child they have. It can happen too in a family that has strong views about how a child 'should' behave, and even what kind of person the child 'should' be.

Some people do adapt to these requests for conformity, but when there is a strong sense of 'who I am' within the child or young person, and this does not conform to the family ideals, the struggle for a coherent reality can be awesome.

The price for being one's own self is often the loss of love and approval, which is simply too high a price for most people to pay. On the other hand, the price for conformity is also high: loss of an authentic sense of self; loss of authentic relationships with other people; anxiety or neuroses which speak of deep conflict.

The experiences of outer and inner selves not 'matching' demonstrate how a sense of reality within is not something that everyone can easily take for granted. What they also show is how harshly most of us judge ourselves when our sense of self (our sense of our own uniqueness and value) is waning or out of touch. At just the time we need to treat ourselves with patience and compassion, we strike the most painful of blows against ourselves - from within.

We do this largely through creating fantasies of how we appear in other people's eyes:-
"Everyone must have thought I was completely stupid."
"They were only nice to me because...."
"I can never go back there. I'm sure they must hate me".

Those fantasies rarely reflect accurately other people's judgements, for 'when your inner sense of reality is shaky, your own internal judgements of yourself will be infinitely more severe, and more damaging, than those of your externalised judges could ever be'."

24/06/2025

S7/E5 Sense of Self: SENSE OF SELF IS NOT CONSTANT

Excerpts from 'Intimacy and Solitude' by Stephanie Dowrick:

"It is your sense of self which also contributes significantly to a vital sense of permanence in your own life, as well as to a consciousness that you are living a life which is like billions of other lives, and is also unique.

Yet even the luckiest among us is unlikely to experience this sense of self as something constant. You do not grow up, find or establish a 'self' and have that experience of self, or confidence in it, for the rest of your days.

A reasonably steady sense of self allows you to know yet something else of tremendous value: that you are like other people, but you need not be overly muddled up with them (eg I am sorry you're sad. I can be with you in your sadness knowing that it is you who is sad and not me).

This differentiation from other people need not be part of your conscious thinking. It may often be known only at the level of sensing or feeling. What is translates into is a vital and vitalising security that 'I am alive not because you tell me that I am', and that 'I am a worthwhile human being, whether or not you are able to believe it'.

As dependent as most of us allow ourselves to be on other people's opinions - or what we imagine to be other people's opinions - taking to heart that insight can be astonishingly liberating.

It supports your awareness that you have a right to be alive in your own way and that your relationship with yourself is more intimate and more knowledgeable than anyone else's experience of you can ever be".

23/06/2025

S7/E4 Sense of Self: BEWARE THE PERSON WHO ALWAYS HAS THE ANSWER

Excerpt from 'Intimacy and Solitude' by Stephanie Dowrick:

"There are people whose self-confidence seems impossible to dent. But self-confidence is not necessarily confidence that one has a sense of self. (Beware the person who always has 'the answer'!) Self-confidence may mean confidence in a set of attitudes which can add up to not much more than your always being right and my always being wrong.

Attitudinising, posturing, emphatically dividing right from wrong are generally the props of someone with little interest in their own inner life, and little capacity to be empathic. Grandiosity, possessiveness, envy, jealousy, attention-seeking, prejudice, single-mindedness and self-absorption: these are all clues not to a strong sense of self, but to the defensiveness of a weak, fragile or unknown self.

All of us would fall into some corner of this sin-bin from time to time. How could we not? We are creatures of conflict, of ambivalence, often wanting two or more contradictory outcomes at the same time. It is when these symptoms are flagrant that they preclude rewarding self-with-other contact. This is because they almost literally stand between a person and their capacity to tune into what someone else is feeling - AND TO CARE ABOUT THAT - a capacity at the very heart of intimacy."