| Trauma Training Tip |
 We can’t go through the Winter/Water season without exploring Acupuncture and Asian medicine’s beautiful and unique concept of Jing. Jing is a substance that we receive from our parents at conception – it is something like our genetic code – or our essential essence. We receive a finite amount of it at conception, spend it through our life and when it is gone, it is our time to become an ancestor. This special substance is stored in our Kidneys – the organ associated with our Water element, and the season of Winter. We can protect our Jing with a healthy lifestyle, good food, moderation in physical exertion, and good sleep. As you can imagine, those who live a “rough” life spend their Jing more quickly than those who are pampered. This bears out in research on survivors of pre- and peri-natal trauma. Without healing attention and care, these people will have an average 20-year shorter life expectancy. Our Jing is essentially the genetic transmission of our parents. In Western terms, we can think about Jing as being profoundly influenced by what neuro-scientists are calling the “epigenetic” impact of traumatic stress. We now know that traumatic stress influences genetic expression.  For example, male mice who were subjected to foot shocks while the smell of cherry blossoms was pumped into their cages develop a stress response with smell of cherry blossoms – and interestingly, their pups and grand-pups exhibit similar sympathetic arousal with the smell of cherry blossoms! Dad and Grand-dad transmit information that influences threat signaling. (Dias, B., Ressler, K. Parental olfactory experience influences behavior and neural structure in subsequent generations. Nat Neurosci 17, 89–96 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1038/nn.3594)Human beings are much more complex than mice. However, there is research that seems to confirm this dynamic using survivors of the holocaust, the mid-Atlantic passage, and the September 11, 2001 attacks as subjects. In Asian medicine, we always look through the lens of Yin and Yang – everything expresses itself in duality. On the one hand, these epigenetic impacts can build our resiliency and enhance our coping – our ancestors have provided information and guidance for navigating life. On the other hand, this impact can also leave us more vulnerable to errors in our threat signaling – we become hyper-alert to threats that are not actually part of our current reality. We make errors in our assessment of danger – and we can even appear to be “oppositional and defiant” – this imprint getting mis-interpreted as our personality. Interestingly, there is even research that indicates a possibility that epigenetic imprints that leave us more vulnerable remain dormant in the absence of a relevant environmental trigger. Our task then is to help cultivate the epigenetic gift from our ancestors as support for our resiliency, and mitigate its potential to leave us vulnerable to errors in threat signaling that can make it hard for us to be socially engaged rather than threatened.  Children are particularly important. If we can shift the imprint of traumatic stress before they have children of their own – we have the opportunity to transform the future! These are protective factors that support resilience in children: Supportive adult-child relationships – just one is enough! A sense of self-efficacy and perceived control Adaptive skills and self-regulatory capacities Sources of faith, hope and cultural traditions(Nurturing Resilience: Helping Clients Move Forward From Developmental Trauma – An Integrative Somatic Approach. Kathy L. Kain and Stephen Terrell)An essentially simple, but programmatically complex summation is: In some people, epigenetic expression may confer greater vulnerability. In others, it may confer enhanced coping. Its impact may depend on experiences and social context in later life. Creating safety and relationship in our communities will help! It seems that building safer communities and cultivating relationships across differences can help build resiliency in survivors of ancestral trauma – and help create safer communities and greater capacity to build relationships across differences for future generations! |
| Alaine’s Two Cents |
A lot of us in the U.S., and perhaps around the world, have been focused on our national elections. I felt a certain exhale when the major media outlets declared the Biden/Harris team the winner. However – I couldn’t fully celebrate when I looked at the numbers.While almost 80,000,000 Americans celebrated Joe Biden and Kamala Harris’ win, another nearly 74,000,000 are feeling despair. How did it come to pass that so many white Americans, in particular white American women, expressed an alliance with policies and outlooks and political leaders whose actions serve the top 1% of Americans, sow division and chaos, and deepen the suffering of poor people and people of color? How did this alliance become the place where they feel a sense of belonging and membership? In this podcast episode with A New Normal on the theme of Transcending Tribalism, I take a look at our election through the lens of our nation as a trauma survivor. What influences our experience of “belonging” in a community, or a tribe? How does that affect our actions in the ballot box? Trauma physiology has much to teach us about the critical importance of safety and relationship as the foundation for being able to access our neocortex – and more relational, nuanced, compassionate and creative decision making – as well as the critical importance of being able to find humanity in people who are not our gender, race, sexual orientation, or ancestry. How can we help build a different, more inclusive culture? As Resmaa Menakem (My Grandmother’s Hands), Ibram X Kendi (How to be an Anti-Racist), and Robin DiAngelo (White Fragility) are teaching – it’s all about creating a new white culture. It’s all about healing the inter-generational impact and manipulation that can be understood through the physiology of traumatic stress.In that famous Yin/Yang world of Asian medicine – I would also confess a certain sense of affinity with the vocal right – I too have experienced mis-trust in mainstream media, suspicion about everyone’s vote being honored, and uncertainty about who our government is actually serving. The content of our mistrust, suspicion and uncertainty is very different – but the experiences are similar. I am hoping that finding this bridge may make it easier for me to be in a conversation that transcends our differences and creates a possibility for meaningful dialogue. |
| Check This Out! |
| Students with high Adverse Childhood Experience (ACE) scores are 32 times as likely to have learning or behavior problems in school! Wow. The burden of CoVid 19 on teachers and students is heavy across America and the world. Here is Part II of the webinar series I offered for the American Education Research Association’s Peace Education Special Interest Group on the Impact of Trauma on Learning: An East meets West Approach. In it I explore factors influencing resiliency in people with the potential for epigenetic traumatic stress imprints – and the significant ways that culture and ritual can support those ancestral factors to turn into greater capacity instead of greater vulnerability. |
https://integrativehealingworks.us11.list-manage.com/track/click?u=deb045cdc4e89719f972d161f&id=1053d11316&e=fe13204a06
| Learn more about cultivating resiliency in children through the Southern Kennebec Healthy Start program, in Augusta, Maine’s Resilience Questionnaire here. And in case you missed it, here’s Part I. You may notice that it’s a wee bit bumpy near the beginning, we had some disruptions that needed to be edited 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. My patient is pretty complex. She’s got fibromyalgia and irritable bowel syndrome, is highly anxious and doesn’t sleep well. With so much going on for her, where do I begin? A. A pretty complex patient! She’s probably been to many specialists, each one trying to help her with discrete symptoms. What she really needs however is core regulation – and you are the perfect person! She needs someone who can, by setting up a context where she can discover safety and relationship, help her find and experience a more settled inner state. This will give her the stability to work on the trauma history that’s likely giving rise to all of these symptoms. One good question to ask is “When in the last little while have you felt truly alive?” Help her somatically locate how she feels when she feels truly alive. Look for signs of coherence – the experience of different parts of her physiology (or different people) functioning more harmoniously together. Perhaps her musculature relaxes and she takes a deep breath and her eyes soften. Or perhaps you both experience a greater sense of coherence between the two of you – your eyes meet for a wee bit longer, and with more softness. A sense of trust is building, you can feel it. Once you and she have discovered ways to help her find coherence, then you will be able to work with the more complex and highly charged material likely involved in her trauma history. She will need a solid foundation as something to come back to when (probably not if) she veers into the hyper-arousal that’s tucked away in her tissues. So glad she has you. Let me know how it goes. |