Trauma Training Tip
Feeling a little cranky lately?
We are tentatively coming out of a 2-year long CoVid “hibernation.” Like Mama Bear or Rip Van Winkle, we are waking up to more engagement and connection, and it may feel a trifle odd or challenging to navigate.
Even in “normal” times, Spring naturally gives rise to experiences of feeling cranky. It’s the time when new beginnings, like those tulips, are trying to push through dense, packed soil. We need a wee bit of cranky to find the power to push through the obstacles made dense by Winter’s harshness. We feel called to manifest our own growing season.
The Wood Element governs the Spring season. It mirrors the role of the Sympathetic Nervous System (SNS) in neuro-biology, and is responsible for our mobilization response – our fight or flight. Our SNS is always “on” and available to fulfill its function to protect and defend us and those we perceive to be vulnerable, by helping us orient to threats, and mobilize a fight or flight response.
Understandably, the Wood season’s emotion is anger. The Liver and Gall Bladder are its organs. The Liver is known as the “General of the Armed Forces” – and it is no wonder that a highly disturbed “General” invaded Ukraine as Spring was arriving.
However, as primates, our biology requires us to be in relationship with our community. Cranky and its relatives – frustration, anger, and rage – can get in the way of creating the warmth of relationship, compassion, and understanding that we also need to be welcomed into and protected by our community.
Our world is experiencing very high SNS arousal, manifesting with the inflammation that occurs when there isn’t an adequate parasympathetic brake. Our hearts painfully bear witness to two years of pandemic and 6 million dead worldwide; war in Ukraine, increasing repression in Russia – and the less public loss of life in conflicts in Yemen, Syria, Afghanistan, and Nicaragua; a critical struggle for racial reckoning here in the United States; and the threat to survival of global warming.
We need our Parasympathetic Nervous System (PNS) – especially our “social” or ventral vagus nerve to help our mobilization responses be thoughtful and considerate of the generations that will come after us, the impact of our actions on others – and our own long-term health and welfare. We need a healthy tension between our SNS and our PNS to make strategic, thoughtful, competent actions to protect and defend ourselves and those more vulnerable.
Our lives are in each other’s hands. This quarantine-thing, alongside historic manipulation of our attitudes around race, gender/sexuality, and citizenship has made nurturing the critical capacity of our primate brain to mitigate our stress response through relationship even harder. Without exercising our social engagement system on a regular basis – by engaging with our various communities in meaningful ways, we are left with the exclusive use of more primitive fight, flight, or freeze responses in charge of how we navigate the challenges that life presents.
These social connections will help us make good use of the Wood/Spring energy to help us mobilize helpful responses to protect and defend vulnerable neighbors and respond to experiences of threat with appropriate and commensurate levels of “fight or flight” to circumstances as they present themselves. It will also help to deepen our relationships as we build the very new and different future we are creating together.
Healers can help support balance between our Sympathetic and Parasympathetic nervous systems. So important!
Alaine’s Two Cents
An update from Acupuncturists Without Borders (AWB)
Our friends at AWB are actively organizing support for people being forced to flee Ukraine. Specifically, they are working with European acupuncturists to establish on-the-ground refugee support, with clinics currently operating in the Netherlands, Spain, Slovenia, and the United Kingdom. Their relationship with the Ministry of Health in Poland is growing – there are teams ready to go to Poland as soon as permission for acupuncturists to serve there is secured.
They are also training European clinicians, organizing distribution of supplies, and recruiting volunteers to serve. I am so grateful that the acupuncture profession has AWB’s history, skills, and organization to offer the administration, logistics, public outreach, and resource mobilization required to make a meaningful impact in such an important time and in such an important way.
Please join me with a donation here. Our medicine is truly a “Medicine of Peace.”
Check This Out!
The National Capital Area Chapter of Acupuncturists Without Borders (AWBNCA) is pleased to announce their partnership with CCI Health Services.
CCI is a Federally Qualified Health Center, providing comprehensive medical care to insured and uninsured people; to citizens, refugees, and immigrants.
Volunteers from AWBNCA are providing a weekly auricular acupuncture clinic for patients and staff at their Greenbelt, MD location, using the 12 Points for Restoration & Balance model.
Please contact awb-nca@gmail.com if you would like to volunteer or have questions. Training in the 12pts4R&B is available online through AWB.
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 an acupuncturist. I have a patient with complex PTSD. They experienced significant birth trauma – only weighing 2.5 pounds at birth, cord wrapped around neck and requiring “work” to get a first breath. They had several weeks in an incubator in a hospital where touch was not allowed. Their major symptoms are an aversion to being in their body, being easily startled, and a “fat fold” around their middle. In the last year they endured two rounds of life threatening septicemia/septic shock.
I’ve started working with their Metal, thinking about their “Animal Soul” or Po because of its role in that first breath and their startle response is so hyperactive. Everything we do in our work together is really, really, really SLOW.
My question is: shall we focus on the 7 primary diaphragms to eventually be able to ascertain that ease is experienced in all 7 before continuing on to Water?
A.
So glad they have you!
I am so glad to hear you say “everything we do together is really, really SLOW” – this is going to be very important. They will need time to integrate every movement towards regulation that they find. The terror they experienced also contributed to how challenging they find “being in” their body – they had to energetically “leave” way back when, in order to tolerate their experience of life threat. Their body is the locus of their terror, so you run the risk of bringing them back to that terror if you go any faster than one nibble at a time.
Their “fat fold” around the middle is another sign of developmental trauma. Their Ventral Vagus/Parasympathetic system was not developmentally available to mitigate their sense of life threat. They needed a highly attuned caregiver to provide them with the PNS they needed to bring comfort and settle their sense of threat. They likely made use of their Dorsal Vagus/shut-down function to stop their heart from arrest and in that shut-down, peristalsis in their guts was compromised. Now they struggle to convert food into qi and blood, and instead accumulate an excess around their middle.
I also imagine that diaphragm work will be very critical. The diaphragms are so important for containing overwhelmingly high levels of affect, such as what happens in pre- and peri-natal trauma. The profound terror of that primal experience of “can’t breathe” will likely reverberate from their respiratory diaphragm through their whole diaphragm system. You may need to spend some time in their kidney/adrenal system to build capacity for them to tolerate the arousal they will likely find in their diaphragm system.
You may be able to access all 7 of their primary diaphragms with attention on their respiratory diaphragm – or you may need to offer some additional attention to a particular diaphragm that struggles to move.
Their constitution can also help you choose which diaphragm system may be the most likely experiencing brace or collapse. If they are a Water type, the relationship of the pelvic diaphragm to the respiratory one may call you next; if they are Wood or Spleen type, the shoulder diaphragm’s relationship to the respiratory one may call you. The diaphragms energetically “hold” or contain the organs between them.
I would suggest you help them track their sensations and their experiences and see what element “wakes up” most clearly and most consistently. It may take some time and experience before their constitutional “type” shows itself. That will direct your next interventions most clearly.
You may or may not need to go to their Kidney/Water.