Trauma Training Tip
February 1st is Chinese New Year’s – the first day of Spring. It’s a time of great celebration – we have survived the long cold winter. The sap is starting to run in the trees and hope emerges for the new growing season.
Spring is represented by the Wood Element in Chinese medicine. Its organs are the Liver and the Gall Bladder and its emotion is Anger. It parallels the function of the Sympathetic branch of the Autonomic Nervous System (SNS).
The SNS is always “on.” It is always available to protect and defend us. Even in the middle of the night, it will come on immediately for us should the need arise. I believe this is part of the basis for the virtue of “Benevolence” to be ascribed to the Wood Element in Chinese Medicine. We are always protected.
The SNS gives us the power to mobilize a fight or flight response. What if it is thwarted – not allowed to flow through to successful completion in the middle of being called on? What if this happens repeatedly? What if our ancestors’ impulse to protect and defend was thwarted – and through epigenetic impact, has now left us with a hair-trigger for anger? What happens in the tendons and ligaments – the tissues associated with the Wood element? How does this affect our unconscious impulse to protect and defend when we feel threatened?
We will retain these incomplete, imploded impulses. Too often, instead of respecting the need in our history to move into and complete a necessary act of self-defense, we may be named as a person who has “anger management issues.”
We may need some help for finding where that imploded impulse resides on the inside – and some support to create an opportunity for it to be expressed and move on out. Inviting the expression of these impulses actually makes it less likely that our patient with “anger management issues” will become violent. It makes both them and their loved ones safer.
As we move into Spring, our experiences of thwarted arousal will become more available to us – and with the right help, we can process and move them out of our tissues.
We so desperately need to move out of an inner reality of SNS dominance and into social engagement with each other and our respective tribes!
Alaine’s Two Cents
Life experience continues to be my best teacher.
I got to experience my sympathetic nervous system (SNS) come to my aid at 2 am last Sunday morning when the smoke detector went off. There was a bonfire on our front porch – the result of an error in judgment about where to put a smoking log from our fireplace. In pajamas and bare feet and without any awareness of the temperature, before too long we and some amazingly generous and kind neighbors had the fire under control using a bucket brigade of pots from the kitchen sink. Outside spigot and hose were frozen.
No thinking. No feeling. Pure and unadulterated mobilization to save our lives and our home. We didn’t even think to call the Fire Department to check our work until we had it out.
And now – my heart is full with all the messages of friendship and connection and history and care we have received. Once we knew the threat was over – after the Fire Department tore a hole in the front of our house to reassure us – then we knew it was over. We could take in the outpouring of support and care we have received from our beautiful tribe of friends and neighbors, “I’m so glad you are safe” is a beautiful thing to hear from so many people who Iove us and whom we love. An amazing experience.
So – Metal awakened arousal, Water signaled threat – and then overwhelmed Fire – which commanded a whole-body response. Wood ensured a mobilization response commensurate with the level of threat. Fire told us when the threat was over, and Earth has helped us to harvest at least one critical lesson that will protect us in the future – never again will a smoldering log be placed on a wood pile on our front porch.
Check This Out!
2022 is the year of the Yang Water Tiger in Chinese Astrology.
The earth shakes as seeds break through the soil and new life begins. The tiger wakes up, stretches, and growls, calling out over the emerging naturescape. The call of the tiger reverberates, shaking thunderous energy over the land as hibernating animals awaken. The new year begins on February 1st and the tiger emerges on February 4th.
CT Holman has taken on the role of providing a prediction for the coming year, based on the science of Chinese Astrology, after the passing of Lillian Pearl Bridges. Read more 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 comes to me with a complaint of “having trouble with my anger.”
He describes having busy and unavailable parents, including his Dad who was stationed overseas with the Army on and off for much of his childhood.
He remembers getting angry as a child and being shamed or punished for it – even when there was good reason for his anger – such as when he pushed another boy down the stairs at school because he was being so badly bullied. He is full of shame of his anger and wishes he had better control of it.
A.
Such a common story.
Underneath his anger is an early attachment wound – and a need for his childhood anger to be respected, honored, and given voice. Supporting him to sink below his cognition and into his body will help him access the “there and then” impulses that live under the surface of the angry outbursts that arise today in relationship to “here and now” experiences of threat.
This is a very hard inner reality to manage. We all desperately need a sense of relationship and belonging in a community. If our inner reality is rigid, brittle, angry, and frustrated, it becomes hard to be welcomed into community with others.
The Sympathetic Nervous System (SNS) does not have social intelligence. When it is dominant, we can have a hard time making friends or fitting into our tribe. We can become increasingly isolated.
Help him use his interoceptive awareness to locate his sense of anger or threat. Help him stay with it long enough for it to be recognized and to move. Help him track his new-found regulation.
You are changing the neurologic platform he is operating from to a more regulated one – one that has space for flexibility and relationship.
You are helping him cultivate his “here and now” reality, unencumbered by the challenges he encountered “there and then.”
A fresh start!