Trauma Training Tip
It’s winter! The time of year associated with the Water Element, the emotion of fear, the signal initiating our self-protective response, and our capacity to find safety and distinguish discomfort from fear. In Chinese medicine, the Water and its organs, the Kidney and Bladder, have a resonant relationship with the bones.
The bones play a very important role in our survival response. First off, they protect our internal organs in the event of physical trauma and support our mobilization response to move and escape danger. Those small bones in the ears also mediate hearing, a critical aspect of our orienting response to danger.
More subtle research tells us that bones are also an organ of our endocrine system. They secrete a hormone called osteocalcin that has a wide range of impacts:
- It plays a crucial role in regulating blood sugar, insulin, and energy
- It supports production of testosterone and male reproductive function
- It plays a direct role in memory and mood, influencing anxiety, depression, and memory
- It even crosses the placenta and helps shape the fetal brain!
Of particular interest in our study of the human response to threat is the observation that osteocalcin rises quickly and dramatically in the acute stress response. In fact, osteocalcin is necessary to trigger the acute stress response. It inhibits the parasympathetic system’s function to brake “fight or flight” impulses – leaving our sympathetic tone unopposed.
We can speculate that the higher levels of osteoporosis in trauma survivors may relate to their need to repeatedly draw on their osteocalcin to mobilize protective fight or flight responses.
The hypothesis that osteocalcin is a hormone essential in situations of acute danger offers the most convincing argument for links between the physiological functions that it regulates – and the common manifestation of complex multi-symptom illness in trauma survivors.
One caveat: much of the research on osteocalcin has been done with mice, but the extent to which these results translate to people remains an interesting, but open question.
Karsenty G. That Feeling in Your Bones. Cerebrum. 2020 Jul 1;2020:cer-05-20. PMID: 32802269; PMCID: PMC7409776.
Alaine’s Two Cents
This poem by David Steindl-Rast is a beautiful exploration of the spiritual gift of Winter, cultivating in us a deeper capacity to quiet, to listen, and to find the deeply restorative power of the Yin of the Kidney. In his spirit of the interaction of science and spirituality, we could also call this deep restoration, low tone in the dorsal vagus nerve.
May you grow still enough to hear the small noises the earth makes in preparing for the long sleep of winter, so that you yourself may grow calm and grounded deep within.
May you grow still enough to hear the trickling of water seeping into the ground, so that your soul may be softened and healed and guided in its flow.
May you grow still enough to hear the splintering of starlight in the winter sky and the roar at earth’s fiery core.
May you grow still enough to hear the stir of a single snowflake in the air, so that your inner silence may turn into hushed expectation.
David Steindl-Rast is an American Catholic Benedictine monk, author, and lecturer. He is committed to interfaith dialogue and the interaction of spirituality and science. He is the co-founder of A Network for Grateful Living, an organization dedicated to gratefulness as a transformative influence for individuals and society.
Check This Out!
Here is a pair of offerings coming from Mily Gomez, Tao of Trauma Clinical Assistant in Yuma, AR. They are pre-recorded classes that each have their own workbook.
Anxiety: When the Survival Response Doesn’t Turn Off
Trauma causes our bodies to not calm down after experiencing a threat, resulting in a stuck state of heightened arousal and vigilance often called anxiety. The other side of this is a state of shutdown, which presents as depression.
This workshop explains what is anxiety, how to identify it, the fight/flight/freeze response as survival responses, developing body awareness, somatic interventions to regulate the nervous system, and a detailed demonstration of the coping tools. The workbook teaches you how to begin finding safety and understanding your body so that you can develop the body awareness you need to begin regulating your nervous system.
Shame: The Feeling that Paralyzes Us
Shame is the feeling that a person is, at their core, bad or wrong. A person might feel shame for no reason at all, or long after they have made amends for a misdeed.
In this workshop, you will learn how compassion helps with the feeling of shame and how to begin building compassion. You will have a better understanding of your feelings and why you feel the way to do. The 1-hour recording will explore exercises and tools that will help you begin your healing journey. In addition, you receive a workbook that further explains shame and several exercises to do on your own or with your therapist.
More info and register here.
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’m a mental health provider with a 43 year old female patient with a strong trauma history – She’s been a victim of street crime, sexual assault, and I suspect developmental trauma. She often feels immobilized or collapsed – unable to stand up for herself in even mild altercations at work. She’s quite fearful, quite thin, and easily confused, anxious, and depressed. I’m thinking about a referral for bodywork, what would you recommend?
A.
So glad she has you!
Somatic approaches that “touch” her below the level of cognition will be very helpful to her. I recommend engaging with her somatically – help her cultivate her interoception – her “felt sense” as Eugene Gendlin described in his book, Focusing and is taught in the Somatic Experiencing training program.
Teaming up with a bodyworker is an excellent instinct. Her “collapsed” state is both psychological and physiological. Your suspicion of developmental trauma, occurring before she had language, is a clear call for somatic approaches. “Talk” alone will not meet the disrupted physiology created by developmental trauma.
Zero Balancing is a touch modality that directly works with the relationship between our body-energy and our bones. The bones have a resonant relationship to the Water Element, the regulation of our signal for threat, our capacity to access our deepest power, and to find quiet, peace, and safety. The bones are both structural – together with the muscles, fluids, and fascia, they hold us up – and they are energetic. Their hormone, osteocalcin has many functions that Chinese medicine associates with the Water Element and the Kidneys.
Zero Balancing uses skilled touch to address the relationships between energy and bony structures. Finger pressure and gentle traction on the bones and joints create fulcrums, or points of balance, around which the body can relax and reorganize – and the bones can be invited into greater regulation.