Trauma Training Tip
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It’s Winter in the northern hemisphere. It is the time of the Water Element, the Kidney, the Bladder and all their resonant correspondences – our bones, our discernment of fear and of safety, our capacity to create distinctions between discomfort and fear, our tolerance to hear even what we are afraid to hear, and the depths of our acquired wisdom and the wisdom of our ancestors. The Water’s function in the Self-Protective response is to Signal Threat.
There’s a lot of threat being signaled in the Middle East. The arc of trauma in this part of the world is hundreds of years old. There are decades and decades of thwarted impulses to protect and defend the lives of individuals and those perceived as vulnerable. This is true for Israelis and for Palestinians from diverse religions, ethnicities, economic classes, genders, and sexual expressions. It is also true for Jews and for Palestinians all over the world – each carrying an epigenetic imprint of thwarted protection.
Many scholars and activists are exploring the truth or falsehoods of the historic accounting of the many conflicts and dynamics in this land. The “facts” are subject to interpretation and bias – as well as the “illusory truth effect” – which describes our tendency to believe false information to be correct after repeated exposure. Politicians as far back as Napoleon and right up to today have used this tendency to win people to their positions. It makes “facts” kinda slippery. I can’t and won’t begin to speak to them.
I can speak to the impact of traumatic stress on how survivors understand and make sense of history.
More and more research and practice is exploring how traumatic experiences are coded in our brains and bodies more as implicit than explicit memories. Implicit memories are rooted in sensations, images, or impulses. It is acquired and used unconsciously – and affects thoughts and behaviors. Neuroimaging studies support this.
On the other hand, explicit or declarative memory belongs to the realm of words and more linear thought. It is a conscious, intentional recollection of facts, experiences, and concepts. Traumatic stress leaves survivors and their progeny often struggling with creating a coherent narrative that integrates their implicit/felt sense “truth” with what their more cognitive explicit memory has named “facts.” They may feel disjointed, confused, and disconnected in how they name and use the lessons inherent in their traumatic experience. It’s hard to skillfully navigate the future when the foundations underneath us feel incoherent or shaky. We may feel drawn to complete those thwarted mobilization responses with a fight or a flight, and not even see opportunities for a diplomatic solution.
There are Western neurobiological and psychological treatments that focus largely on explicit memory – talking about, writing about, and visualizing traumatic experiences until they become less upsetting. Research with Veterans at the VA National Center for PTSD suggests that “information processing” approaches may support some trauma survivors.
Other approaches, including the Tao of Trauma, look at supporting people to metabolize the felt sense of their implicit memory, as a foundation for greater organization and integration of implicit and explicit memories so survivors can come back into a new and different relationship with themselves and their bodies.
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Generations of traumatic stress is concentrated in the bodies, minds, and spirits of the people of the Middle East. Survivors may understandably experience their implicit memories as explicit facts. And so – impulses to protect and defend get clothed as necessary and as rooted in facts – when actually, they are rooted in both current experiences of danger (life-threatening violence, food insecurity, lack of medical care, clean water, adequate housing, racism, sexism, etc.) and legions of ancestral experiences of threat. Unconscious, impulsive violence is the understandable and unfortunate outcome.
People are dying. People are killing each other. The burden of traumatic stress on the bodies, minds, and spirits of all of us who care for life and long for peace is getting heavier and heavier.
Traumatic stress is vibrational. It requires vibrational medicine. When clinicians help survivors move “implicit” memories out of tissues and into consciousness – new worlds open up for survivors. Instead of being bound by rage, terror, and reflexive impulses to use violence to protect and defend, a capacity to access frontal cortex/Ventral Vagal capacities for compassion, nuanced thought, and relationship-based solutions to conflict emerge.
What would be different if we both deplored the violence and understood its roots? What would be different if we embodied a pause for peace?
Could we create a different vibration that would allow individuals and our world to access frontal cortex capacity to discern nuanced, relational, solutions to complicated problems?
It’s the only solution I can think of.
Alaine’s Two Cents
Glimmers are essentially the opposite of “triggers.”
They are the micro-moments in your day that leave you feeling joy, happiness, peace or gratitude – even for just a moment. Once you train your brain to be on the lookout for glimmers, the more these tiny moments will appear.
Looking for them, and cultivating attention to them, can help you find more capacity in your nervous system to access the part of your brain that is relational, empathic, nuanced, and thoughtful – your Ventral Vagus or “soul” nerve.
Here’s a short video about glimmers:
Check This Out!
This article by historian and journalist Heather Cox Richardson quotes Chuck Schumer extensively. It outlines the historic contributions American Jews have made to the civil rights movement in the United States and the primal need of Jews to feel safe.
The video below looks at how America influenced the rise of Nazism in Germany. Hitler sent researchers to America to study Jim Crow to help him establish his Nurenburg laws.
Vibrational medicine in the United States today can help transform the roots of racism, anti-semitism, and impulsive violence in both the United States and the Middle East. Can we create vibrations of connection, respect, understanding and safety (especially for children) in our own country that might transform some of the ideological foundations that undergird conflict in the Middle East?
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 6 year-old boy. He is small for his age and his parents report that he rarely recognizes his own hunger and has low blood sugar angry meltdowns. He often wants “junk” food – sugary, processed snacks which his parents allow just to get some calories into him and hope to avert a meltdown. He is often oppositional. His outbursts have a big effect on their family life. He spends several hours a day on his tablet. How can I help him? I’m a somatic psychotherapist.
A.
So glad he has you! He is a fortunate boy to have parents seeking help for him.
There are two things I hear from you. First and perhaps most important is that he doesn’t recognize when he’s hungry.
Stephen Porges, developer of Polyvagal theory, says that a compromised capacity for interoception or “felt sense” is the most dangerous aspect of trauma physiology. If we don’t recognize when we are hungry, tired, cold, hot, or need to wear a rain coat – we won’t navigate life easily. We will be more prone to illness or injury and make less thoughtful decisions.
Helping him cultivate his interoception – the “felt sense” of his body sensations – would be an important place to begin. If he experienced overwhelm as an infant or small child, his body will not feel safe to reside in – and so his awareness of his inner states was not culltivated. His Qi left his body back then. Help him notice sensations that come with different attention states. Qi follows awareness and will return to his tissues with embodied awareness. The functions of Qi to warm, protect, nourish, and move will return with his embodied awareness. (See page 285 in The Tao of Trauma).
Second, he is acting out his implicit expression of opposition and defensiveness as if it was based in facts – he gets angry and demanding when he doesn’t get his way – and thinks he is absolutely right to make what he has determined to be legitimate demands. His is a great example of implicit “truth” being interpreted as explicit “fact” in his mind.
He may benefit from the “no” game – where he gets to answer no to your requests (will you scratch your ear, will you sing Twinkle Twinkle, will you go look out the window) and then notice his embodied/felt-sense experience of his “no.” This may help him find the root of his “no’s” and release it from where it’s buried in his tissues and running his life.
As he enjoys life more, and becomes more embodied, he may find his tablet to be less captivating. Hope so!
All good wishes to him and to you!