Trauma Training Tip
Summer is the time of the Fire Element in Chinese Medicine. It is the most powerful time for healing its many spheres of influence.
- Have you suffered a breach of relationship?
- Has an experience of shame paralyzed you?
- Is intimacy challenging?
- How’s your blood pressure, vascular system, or sense of whole-body regulation?
- How about your capacity for a moment of time between impulse and response?
- Can your one small heart find the one big heart that beats in all of us?
The Fire Element manages all matters of the Heart. It carries experiences of traumatic stress in its many functions. Clearly, the Heart is more than a pump!
The Heart is known as the Supreme Controller in Chinese medicine. It is responsible for creating a regular rhythm that supports regulation in our whole body. In fact, it not only communicates and guides the harmonious function of our body – it also influences the bodies that are nearby with its powerful electromagnetic field.
When our Heart has a coherent and regular rhythm, every system in our body works more smoothly and effectively – our endocrine, immune, digestive, sleep, and menstrual cycles – all serve us in a coordinated, harmonious, and effective way – and we experience equanimity in our body-mind-spirit.
This inner, “auto”-regulation is cultivated by experiences of “co”-regulation with other people or mammals. That’s why we feel better when we play team sports, go dancing, engage in community theatre, take an in-person yoga or movement class, or have a “heart-to-heart” chat with a friend.
There are 3 organs associated with the Heart in Chinese Medicine – the Small Intestine, whose job it is to sort the pure from the impure, protecting the Heart by only allowing “pure” energy to reach it; the Pericardium or Heart Protector whose job it is to open its gates to allow connection and relationship and to close those gates down when it isn’t safe for the Heart to be touched; and the Triple Heater – known as an organ that “has a name but no place.” Similar to connective tissue, its job is to help us both connect and differentiate – with people, and within our body.
Acupuncture on these meridian pathways can support the many nuanced and critical functions of the Fire element.
Alaine’s Two Cents
The Fire Element is mirrored in Western neurophysiology by the function of the Ventral Vagus Nerve. The Ventral Vagus serves as our primary and most important “brake” on sympathetic arousal. It provides us with the capacity to solve conflicts without violence. It supports our ability to distinguish being “uncomfortable” from being “unsafe” with someone who may come from a different culture. It gives us the capacity to inhibit anti-social impulses that too often and too quickly can turn violent in words or actions.
As it becomes safer and safer for us to congregate in groups and be “up close and personal” with others – please take every opportunity to cultivate your Ventral Vagus with such “tickles.” Our communities, nation, and world needs more and more Ventral Vagal capacity.
Check This Out!
Didja know I am a Huskie! That’s a graduate of Northern Illinois University – Class of 1975!
Thank you NIU Alumni Association for this shout-out!
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.
I am a Shiatsu practitioner working in the UK. My client is in her early thirties. She has struggled with auto-immune illness (Graves disease) for many years. She is highly intelligent, has two children and a stressful and responsible job. She never stops to relax, always appears passive and calm, and reports feeling disconnected from her body completely. I note that her body is “buzzing” and her superficial musculature is highly braced.
She tells me she never experiences anger. Maybe her habit of not expressing her anger has also influenced the auto-immune disorder? It feels like she is at the beginning of a journey of discovery. I’m not sure how best to help.
A.
So glad for your contact and thoughtful approach to your work.
Auto-immune illness is one of those “strange, rare, and peculiar” dynamics that confound Western medicine and can be so profoundly helped by what I call “vibrational” medicine – like Shiatsu, acupuncture, cranio-sacral work, etc. “Vibrational” illnesses – like metabolic disturbance, chronic pain patterns, migraines, or irritable bowel – often have tendrils of pre- or peri-natal traumatic stress attached. The dysregulation is system-wide and influences many body systems.
She doesn’t need to tell you details of her early trauma – and in fact it may have occurred before she had language, leaving her without words but with a sense that something is very “wrong.” Her body is telling you that there is deep and profound dysregulation.
Trauma that occurs before we developmentally have capacity to mitigate arousal with our Ventral Vagus, requires us to use our more primitive, less nuanced Dorsal Vagus to shut down the dangerous arousal that is alarming our Heart. When it becomes habituated, this shut down can affect whole-body regulation and suppress the many functions of both the Kidney and the Heart.
All healing is built on safety and relationship. I hear your commitment to this orientation in your words and your care for her. I applaud it. In Chinese medicine, that dynamic is reflected in the intimate connection between the Kidney (safety) and the Heart (relationship). I suggest you look through this lens in your work with her. One specific suggestion is that you make use of the Kidney/Adrenal hold for a portion of every treatment. I suspect you will watch regulation move into her Fire functions as her Kidney/Adrenal comes into regulation with your attention.
Good luck! So glad she has you.