Trauma Training Tip
Jack Dykinga, USDA, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
It’s Earth Time! The season for harvesting the sweetness of life. Have you had enough peaches yet?
The Earth Element’s organs are the Stomach and the Spleen. The Earth’s gift in the Self-Protective Response is to “Digest the Gristle” (no matter how well we have navigated an experience of overwhelm, there is always some gristle that remains) and to “Harvest the Lessons” – ideally lessons that expand our life rather than contract it. We may need to break down our experiences into smaller bits and sort out what to keep and what to pass on out our Colon.
If we became habituated to experiences of high arousal in infancy or early childhood, our Earth functions can be profoundly impacted. Peristalsis is slowed in the Stomach and Small Intestine, resulting in poor assimilation of nutrients and challenges to all the beautiful functions of our gut biome. If we don’t receive care, and because nutrition is central to life – we will have higher rates of morbidity and mortality. Our Spleen’s function to transform food into blood and qi and then nourish every cell, organ, and function in our body is similarly challenged. We may accumulate weight because we can’t transform food into blood and qi. We may have trouble with learning and memory because we are challenged to assimilate information in a way similar to our challenge in assimilating nutrition. We will surely not have the vitality we wish we did.
Our Earth Element nourishes the other 4 Elements and is central to life. No wonder this final module in the Tao of Trauma series is always so poignant – we digest our year together and harvest the lessons gained.
This year it is both sweet and bitter-sweet, as it is my last year “doing it alone.” I am looking forward to sharing the front of the room with my friend and colleague, Tracey Post, next year. Tracey is a Somatic Experiencing Practitioner, a skilled psychotherapist, and the perfect person to expand the scope of the Tao of Trauma more deeply into the world of mental health providers.
Here’s a sweet video of Tracey and I welcoming you to the 2025-26 Tao of Trauma series – live and in-person in Hamilton, NJ and Silver Spring, MD.
You can click HERE for more info and to register for 2025-26! Please feel welcome!
Alaine’s Two Cents
We are living in challenging times. I found these words from a Hopi Elder to be both reassuring and challenging – in a good way! What are you assimilating? What are you harvesting? Are the experiences of your life creating the blood and qi that will nourish you and your actions on behalf of yourself, your family, community, and world?
A Hopi Elder Speaks:
“You have been telling the people that this is the Eleventh Hour, now you must go back and tell the people that this is the Hour. And there are things to be considered:
Where are you living?
What are you doing?
What are your relationships?
Are you in right relation?
Where is your water?
Know your garden.
It is time to speak your Truth.
Create your community.
Be good to each other.
And do not look outside yourself for the leader
Then he clasped his hands together, smiled and said, “This could be a good time!”
There is a river flowing now very fast. It is so great and swift that there are those who will be afraid. They will try to hold onto the shore. They will feel they are torn apart and will suffer greatly.
Know the river has its destination. The elders say we must let go of the shore, push off into the middle of the river, keep our eyes open, and our heads above water. And I say see who is in there with you, and celebrate. At this time in history, we are to take nothing personally, least of all ourselves. For the moment that we do, our spiritual growth and journey comes to a halt.
The time for the lone wolf is over. Gather yourselves! Banish the word struggle from your attitude and your vocabulary. All that we do now must be done in a sacred manner and celebration.
We are the ones we’ve been waiting for.”
Check This Out!
I was honored to be featured in the NCCAOM PDA Monthly Newsletter for July 2025. Here’s a snippet of what I had to say that reflects the importance of what we have to offer in this critical time in history:
“We cannot afford to ignore the moral messages in our tissues (metal), be frozen by fear (water), anything short of the most expansive thinking (wood), allow disruptive elements to block our growing movement towards each other (fire), or the lessons of the day to contract rather than expand our world view (earth). Integrating ancient wisdom with modern science can guide and inform diverse leaders to serve the transformation of trauma that underlies the polarization that characterizes our times. All healing rests on embodied experiences of kinship.”
Here’s the link for the full article.
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 in her 60’s. She has irritable bowel syndrome and suffers from bloating, gas, and diarrhea – all of which is particularly challenging in August, in Late Summer. She craves sweets and is modestly overweight, carrying her excess around the middle. She also has high cholesterol and hypertension. She comes from a big family — and reports feeling abandoned or neglected as a child. Her “late 50’s” Dad was working or relaxing and Mom was unavailable. I’m a psychotherapist and love integrating somatic/touch approaches.
A:
So glad she has you! When there’s pre- or peri-natal trauma, we don’t “grow out of it” or “forget it.” Particularly when these experiences occur before we have language, they remain in our tissues, and in particular in the dysregulating vibrations that are stored in our tissues. These survivors often have complex multi-symptom illness and baffle providers who focus on symptoms rather than core regulation.
There are 3 places, 3 “legs of the stool” where you will be able to be so very helpful to her. Attuned touch, with a focus on cultivating her interoception, her body-awareness, will be key. When we feel overwhelmed, our Qi leaves our body – and cultivating body-awareness is key to supporting the Qi to return to the tissues. When the Qi is embodied, our inner-physician is present to do the work that needs to be done for our healing.
- The kidney-adrenal hold will help settle the “signal threat” message that it is responsible for. It was turned on too often and too strongly and has now become habituated. It needs to relax and have a break!
- The brain stem is where the Ventral Vagus nerve – both the more relational/parasympathetic Ventral branch and the high tone Dorsal Vagus branch, which is responsible for saving our life with a freeze response when we experience life threat. Attending to it, again with attuned touch and attention to cultivating interoceptive awareness, will help cultivate regulation to the brace or collapse remaining in this tissue.
- The viscera. This could be particularly important for this woman. The guts are necessarily compromised when our sympathetic system needs to be fully activated to mobilize a fight or flight response to save our life. We are left with either a braced or collapsed state in our guts. As infants, we don’t have Ventral Vagal function yet to self-sooth and if our caregiver didn’t respond in an attuned way, we became habituated to a high sympathetic state that could only be contained by high tone in our Dorsal Vagus – a freeze response. If our guts are not assimilating nutrients well, it has a profound effect on our health and well-being.
I generally start with the Kidney-Adrenal work and then move to the other 2 locations depending on what seems to serve building regulation and coherence for my patient. Go slowly, titrate your work, and focus on coherence. She will do well with you.
All good wishes. She is lucky to have you.