Trauma Training Tip
I’d like to open this month’s News ‘n Views with a heartfelt shout out to everyone who is feeling called to be especially kind-hearted, open-hearted, tender-hearted, kind, compassionate and loving – even in small ways. It matters and you matter.
While I firmly believe, I have to believe, that the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice as Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King has taught us, I also have to say, this chapter of our nation’s and our world’s story – well, it’s been rough.
The law of yin and yang alongside the clinical observation that there is a wave form inside our bodies and our world that moves between activation and de-activation and between resource states and states of arousal tells me that we will have easy times alternating with rough times and that easy times will be found inside rough times and rough times will also be found inside easy times. Just like the black dot in the white half and the white dot in the black half of the Tai Ji symbol.
As healers, we can support our patients to find greater capacity in what Western science calls the Ventral Vagus nerve and what Chinese Medicine calls the spirit of the Heart or the Shen. We can help our patients find a greater capacity to seek and find the “easy” states that help us cope with the rough times that will always be with us.
Especially in the Summer – the time of the Fire Element, where all matters of the Heart are most available, we can help people better access their Heart energy. When we live from our Heart we have more capacity to sublimate primal urges to bite, kick, steal (or shoot) each other; we can disagree and remain in relationship; and the health, balance, and regulation of every system in our bodies is supported. Diplomatic solutions to conflict are more available.
Small things can make a big difference. Smile with your eyes – especially if your mouth is covered with a mask. Use soft tones of voice, with melodic prosody. Hold a door, greet a store clerk kindly, let that other driver “in.” Touch kindly and with permission. Take time to play board games or team sports, dance, sing in harmony, have heart-to-heart conversations, invite a friend for dinner. You will be cultivating the Ventral Vagus nerve and the Heart Spirit. You will be helping you and your neighbor get through rough times – together, the way we are meant to get through rough times.
Alaine’s Two Cents
I chose this Chinese Folktale, “Holding Up The Sky,” as the dedication to The Tao of Trauma.
One day an elephant saw a hummingbird lying flat on its back on the ground. The bird’s tiny feet with raised up in the air.
“What on earth are you doing, hummingbird?” Asked the elephant?
The hummingbird replied. “I have heard that the sky might fall today. If that should happen, I am ready to do my bit holding it up.”
The elephant laughed and mocked the tiny bird. “Do you think those tiny little feet could hold up the sky?”
“Not alone,” admitted the hummingbird. “But each must do what he can. And this is what I can do.”
– Margaret Reed MacDonald, Three Minute Stories from Around the World to Tell or Read When Time is Short” (Little Rock, AR: August House, 2004)
The dedication goes on to say: “We dedicate this book to all the hummingbirds in our families, communities, and workplaces; in the halls of government and commerce; on the land, sea and air. Wherever you are, thank you for your service.”
My gratitude to all the hummingbirds out in the world this summer!
Check This Out!
Barbara de la Torre asks, in her podcast Third Opinion, MD, “Your inner doctor is calling. Are you listening?”
She invites us to Tap into knowledge you already possess about your health by adapting ancient wisdom to modern living. Liberate your perspective of health, recognize what your body tells you, and know what to do. It’s time for a healthcare revolution in each of us.
Here’s her interview with me, Healing Traumatic Stress with Modern Science and Ancient Principles of Chinese Medicine, that recently aired.
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 “Fire type.” She was born in the era when the discovery of a twin happened at delivery. She was the “smaller” (tiny) twin in a premature birth, and spent time in the neonatal ICU, awaiting proper lung development. She is quite shy, seems uncomfortable in groups, and has a hard time speaking her opinion or even her deeply-held values. She’s happy with whatever I suggest clinically, but never seems quite “here” with me. Do you have advice for working with her?
A.
Babies born in such circumstances can have a pretty strong habituated state of fear. We aren’t born with enough Ventral Vagal capacity to mitigate experiences of life threat through relationship – so she had to use her more primitive and clumsy Dorsal Vagus nerve to calm the messages of life threat that were overwhelming her heart. Fear overwhelmed her Heart then and it was a powerful vibration that has stayed with her to some extent.
We use our pericardium or Heart Protector to protect our Heart from hyper-arousal. Her Heart Protector/Ventral Vagus couldn’t serve that role at that time. Thankfully she has you and she has the capacity to cultivate her Heart Protector and her Ventral Vagus nerve now.
Exercises like the “May I Touch You” one described in The Tao of Trauma (page 229) can be so very helpful to help her find her “yes,” her “no,” and her interoceptive awareness of safety. Go very slowly. She “left” her body a very long time ago, and it may be challenging for her to know what it wants to tell you now. She needs to be assured that the right answer to your question is not the one she thinks you want – but the one that her body is telling her.
The more she moves to greater embodiment using exercises such as this one, the more effective your acupuncture will be. The Chinese Heart system is critical to the creation of Blood. It seems that the impact on her Heart at birth compromised her body’s ability to create adequate Blood. Blood gives us the capacity to take up our space, to feel embodied, and to make connection between our conscious and unconscious minds. Acupuncture, Chinese herbs, and nutrition that cultivate blood are going to be very useful to her.
Stephen Porges, developer of the Polyvagal Theory has a great and simple formula for understanding the impact of various autonomic states on us:
- Immobilization without fear = intimacy
- Mobilization without fear = play
- Immobilization with fear = collapse or death feign (this was your client at her birth)
- Mobilization with fear = threat
The more that we can create experiences of either mobilization or immobilization without fear, the more we mitigate internal states of threat and foster calmness, sociality, connectedness, and health. It is our evolutionary heritage to experience connection and safety with each other. We can help each other find our evolutionary heritage by being kind-hearted, open-hearted, tender-hearted, kind, compassionate, and loving.
Small actions, done with big intention, matter. Like that hummingbird’s wee feet. They matter and each of us matter too.