Trauma Training Tip
Photo by Riccardo via Pexels
[This is a re-print from my December 2023 News ‘n Views. Sadly – it remains an important discussion.]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.
Photo by Orfeas Tim via Pexels
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
Are you thinking about year-end donations? This could be a very important year to support the LGBTQ+ and BIPOC communities. The Princeton Foundation for Elevating Equality was founded by ToT Clinical Assistant, Tracey Post. I highly recommend their work!
The Princeton Foundation for Elevating Equality is organized exclusively for charitable purposes to remove barriers and advocate for access and equity in mental health for people whose access to quality mental health services is limited; specifically people from the BIPOC, LGBTQI and other underserved communities. We do this through funding therapy, providing education, offering advocacy, and rendering ancillary services.
We provide direct funding to individuals to access culturally competent mental health services, provide case management, provide grassroots advocacy for marginalized populations, provide continuing education and funding to serve marginalized populations in healthcare settings, and increase representation of professionals with lived experience as members of marginalized communities.
All contributions go towards helping clients obtain the compassionate and culturally competent care they deserve. Any level of contribution is welcome! You can click here to make a donation.
Check This Out!
I want a word that means
okay and not okay,
more than that: a word that means
devastated and stunned with joy.
I want the word that says
I feel it all all at once.
The heart is not like a songbird
singing only one note at a time,
more like a Tuvan throat singer
able to sing both a drone
and simultaneously
two or three harmonics high above it—
a sound, the Tuvans say,
that gives the impression
of wind swirling among rocks.
The heart understands swirl,
how the churning of opposite feelings
weaves through us like an insistent breeze
leads us wordlessly deeper into ourselves,
blesses us with paradox
so we might walk more openly
into this world so rife with devastation,
this world so ripe with joy.
Rosemary Wahtola Trommer – Read more about her 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.
My patient is in his 70’s and is having open heart surgery. I am a body worker and want to be as helpful as I can be post-surgically. I believe he is a Fire Survivor Type.
A.
So glad he has you!
Whenever we have a surgery, our sense of threat is heightened. We signed a consent form, but our hind or “reptilian” brain doesn’t read rational information. It thinks we have been mauled by a saber-toothed tiger! The anesthesia we were given (thankfully!) put us in a bio-chemically induced freeze response – we were immobilized and free from pain. However, our more primitive brain wanted to protect and defend ourselves – to fight the surgeon or to flee from the insult of the scapula.
Helping your patient find the “I survived” and “it’s over” experience in the “here and now” is really important for their recovery. The longer he stays in his high-threat state, the harder his inner physician will have to work to help with recovery to both tissue and function.
There is a special wound in cardiac surgery – which is the incision in the pericardium. The pericardium’s job is to protect the heart. It opens and closes according to circumstances and needs to be able to be flexible. When it’s wounded in surgery, it has to heal to help us regain capacity to support joy, connection, and laughter. Many cardiac surgery patients find themselves anxious, depressed, or sad for a period of time after.
The Pericardium and the Heart in Chinese medicine are essentially representatives of the Ventral Vagus Nerve in Western neurophysiology.
I recommend you use the Kidney/Adrenal hold to help settle his “Signal Threat” response. When the Kidney is regulated, it recognizes the difference between discomfort and fear – and it sends appropriate messages of safety or threat to the Heart. Supporting appropriate relationship between the Kidney and Heart, the Water and Fire, will support him to return to his Zone of Resiliency, where healing can happen most efficiently. It will support tissue healing as well as the energetic imprint of surgery and especially surgery to the heart.
All good wishes to him! You will be offering significant support to his recovery.