Trauma Training Tip
This month’s News n Views is dedicated to the 8 people, 6 of them Asian women, murdered in Atlanta on March 16, 2021.
My world woke up with my introduction to Chinese medicine in 1985. My goal has been and always will be, to honor the roots of Chinese medicine with my often imperfect, cultural humility and respect. As a white woman, practicing Chinese medicine, I see it as my responsibility to continually increase my awareness of the culture out of which this beautiful medicine arose, and give my Taoist ancestors as well as my blood ancestors the credit and respect they deserve.
Our distant ancestors found safety, a sense of resonant belonging, and comfort in their tribes. Other tribes approaching with different language, culture, styles of dress or language were viewed with suspicion – called risk intuition by sociologists – a survival mechanism that supported them to recognize safety. Without consciously cultivating cultural awareness and empathy, we risk reacting to others from this ancestral, implicit and unconscious bias that remains in our modern brains. (Deep Diversity: Overcoming Us vs. Them by Shakil Choudhury).
Our capacity for empathy – and our critically important ability to distinguish between being uncomfortable and being unsafe is rooted in the vitality of our Ventral Vagus nerve. Our Ventral Vagus, mirrored in Chinese Medicine as the Heart Spirit or Shen, is our primary resource for inhibiting anti-social, impulsive, and violent impulses arising from our Sympathetic Nervous System’s function to protect and defend us from life threat.
Covid 19, social isolation, economic uncertainty, racist violence, and environmental fragility have together created a world-wide fear pandemic. Too many have been driven to dysregulation in our autonomic nervous systems, resulting in a profound lack of empathy for those different from ourselves – resulting in the unconscious, impulsive, and racist violence that gave rise to these murders. In fact, hate incidents against Asian Americans rose by nearly 150% in 2020, with Asian American women twice as likely to be targeted.
The Spring is the time of the Wood Element in Chinese medicine. The Wood is mirrored in Western medicine by the Sympathetic Nervous System and our capacity to protect and defend ourselves. That benevolent function to protect us must be tempered in order for us, as well as tribes and communities we live in, to thrive. Human beings are tribal animals, we need each other. Our world has become more diverse, more complex, and more intersectional. Our survival is rooted in our capacity to cultivate relationships and find safety across differences in appearance, language, or culture.
Alaine’s Two Cents
Healers have a special role to play in cultivating Heart Spirit/Ventral Vagal function – and in mitigating over-active Wood Energy/Sympathetic Arousal in our patients and our communities.
We can support our patients and our nation to take a precious moment to find humanity in those we judge.
We can help develop capacity to inhibit anti-social and violent impulses, and cultivate awareness of the destructive impact of white privilege and patriarchy.
We can help water the seeds of empathy and support a new cultural awareness to take root and grow.
Our nation needs its healers!
Check This Out!
Asian Americans Advancing Justice-Atlanta is the first nonprofit legal advocacy organization dedicated to protecting the civil rights of Asian Americans, Native Hawaiian, Pacific Islander (AANHPI) and Arab, Middle Eastern, Muslim, and South Asian (AMEMSA) communities in Georgia and the Southeast.
Please consider making a donation.
One way we can take action to protect our communities is to learn ways to intervene effectively as a bystander without compromising safety.
Hollaback! and Asian Americans Advancing Justice | AAJC are partnering in free virtual workshops on bystander intervention. Their one-hour, interactive training teaches the 5 D’s of bystander intervention: Distract, Delegate, Document, Delay, and Direct and promises to leave you with ways you can intervene effectively as a bystander without compromising your own safety.
Here’s more info and to register. April dates have filled but there are openings still in May.
Here’s an upcoming offering shared with me by one of our ToT community members.
Saturday, April 10, 2021
9am – 11am PDT / 12pm – 2pm EDT
“Trauma Informed Group Work,” a moderated panel discussion with Lydia Violet Harutoonian, Vahisha Hasan, Tabitha Mpamira and Maggie Ziegler.
A panel discussion exploring the relationship between individual, systemic, and collective trauma in the context of facilitating group work. The panelists and moderator will share the wisdom and perspective they’ve gathered on their diverse paths of studying and working with trauma as well as tangible tools and exercises for trauma-informed facilitation that can increase distress tolerance and improve capacity for collectively holding the traumas group members may be carrying.
More info on the speakers and registration can be found here.
Clinical Curiosity
Where is your clinical curiosity carrying you?
Send me a question or two and I will explore them with readers in this corner next month.
Q. My patient is a 45 year old heterosexual man. He’s very handsome and very seductive. He has an “open” marriage, and while they enjoy active and playful intimacies, his wife encourages him to go outside the marriage for additional sexual expression. He enjoys the process of seduction and has been successful in “scoring” with massage therapists and other healers he has worked with.
His background includes the death of his father in an industrial accident at a young teen. He managed his profound grief at that time by masturbating a lot. He’s aware of some anxiety in his chest arising when he speaks of his father, which then quickly moves to strategizing how to “score” a sexual encounter. Plus, he’s terrifically handsome. Did I tell you he’s terrifically handsome?
A. Complicated, eh? I hear issues of unresolved grief, “bypass” of emotional upset and a wee bit of ethical consideration.
I wonder if you can encourage him to stay with the arousal he feels in his chest? Slow it down and explore it. The movement from his arousal to his management strategy of strategizing for a sexual encounter is where the nugget for his healing will be found. That bypass has helped him live with his grief for a very long time – but doesn’t really cultivate his ventral vagus, his heart spirit that longs for connection and intimacy.
That means you are the perfect person for him! He can experience his desire for a conquest with you, and you can maintain your professional ethics, allow him to experience his arousal, but not act on it. Questions like “what’s it like to have that feeling, knowing that you don’t have to worry about me acting on it?” may be very helpful in getting to the tragic and important dynamics beneath his impulse.
Meanwhile, make sure you are taking care of yourself and attending to your own needs for intimate connection and expression so your own attraction doesn’t become a distraction.
Good luck! So glad he has you.
You might enjoy the virtual workshop I am doing on Ethical Considerations for the Treatment of Trauma Survivors at NWUHS on April 9. Full conference schedule here.