Trauma Training Tip
Each of the 5 Elements has a sense organ that is called forward during its season.
For the Water Element, it is our ears and our capacity to hear. Why are the ears and our capacity to hear resonant with the Water? On perhaps the most superficial level, the outer ear is shaped like the kidney, the yin organ of the Water Element. On a deeper level, the emotion associated with the Water Element is fear. When we are afraid, we may be challenged to listen with curiosity – we may find ourselves orienting our listening to hearing threat.
Winter is a quiet season – many animals are hibernating and we too are more inclined to stay inside and quiet in the Winter than we might in the Spring or Summer. It’s a great season for practicing receptive listening.
The spirit of the Water invites us to cultivate our capacity to hear even what we are afraid to hear. To hear even what we may not want to hear. Notice what happens if you sit quietly and simply allow sounds to come to you. Don’t reach out to find them, simply allow them to arrive. This attention will invite you into a state of “exploratory” orienting. Reaching out for sounds tends to invite awareness of potential dangers or threats and a state of greater internal activation – a state of “defensive” orienting. Being receptive to sounds invites curiosity, a parasympathetic function.
As an exercise, try moving between simply receiving sounds and reaching out for them. As you exercise these two functions – one receptive, one active – what do you notice in the rest of you? In your tissues, heartbeat, spine, sacrum, how you locate yourself in space, or your sense of relationship or connection with the source of various sounds? Where is your attention called inside of you? How fast are you moving on the inside – does that change?
Noticing whether we are listening in a receptive or an active mode will tell us something about our listening. Are we hearing each other in a way that seeks to understand – or only to be understood? Does the nature of our listening help us walk towards each other? Understand each other? Come into respectful relationship with each other? Our world would do well to cultivate our capacity to hear with curiosity instead of threat.
Alaine’s Two Cents
The Northern hemisphere has transitioned through the nadir of darkness towards the time of light. We have welcomed a new year. In the cosmology of Chinese medicine, Yin has met its depth and has turned into Yang. It’s a potent time.
I turned to Listening With Your Heart: Lessons from Native America by Iroquois physician Wayne Peate, M.D., for inspiration and found these quotes.
I turn the corner with the patient and then we are in the light.
– Yakima healer
Breathe in the light of the new day, the dawn.
Give thanks for the new day, for those around you, for life, for everything.
Then you will become whole again.
– Navajo Healer
Check This Out!
A Somatic Healing Space for BIPOC Folks
with Tao of Trauma Clinical Assistant Avdeep Bahra from Ontario, Canada.
This monthly, virtual group starts Sat. February 4th, 2023 (10 am-12 noon ET). It is based on somatic principles, the cycles of nature, and the Tao of Trauma.
The intention of this group is to build relationships, community, and healing. In this space, you get to be more like yourself and touch into your true nature.
What might emerge from within you if you were held in a space that feels safer, more respectful, joyful, and inspiring?
Oppression can elicit feelings of fear, anger, panic, and more. It can make you feel small.
What if you stopped feeling this smallness?
What wisdom and gifts would emerge out of your greatness?
Each session will highlight the season, the related element, emotions, and organs. Intention setting, experiential practices, journaling, self-reflection and sharing will be weaved in through each session.
- Feb 4: A Felt Sense of Being Together
- March 4: Feeling Protected & Safer (Winter Season/Element Water)
- April 1: Feeling Connection: A Ventral Vagus Nerve State (Water/Fire connection)
- May 13: Feeling Encouraged. Welcoming your Feelings (Spring/Element Wood)
- June 24: Feeling Loved. Deepening Connection with Yourself & Others. (Summer/Element Fire)
- Sept 16: Feeling Cared For (Season Late Summer/Element Earth)
- Oct (tbd): Feeling Respected (Season Fall/Element Metal)
It is recommended to join the sessions in sequence. However, you’re welcome to join one or some sessions only, too.
More info here. Or email avdeep.bahra @ gmail.com
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 34 year old female with two children aged 3 and 6. She has concerns about the 3 year old who, though delightful and curious about the world, is also highly volatile and sometimes violent. She had to pull him out of a play group because he would kick and bite and fight his playmates and teacher when it was time to shift to circle time or if it was time to end an activity that he didn’t want to end. He flips from playing vigorously to explosive rage and then collapses in tears.
He has some trauma markers – he was born via C-section and required antibiotics at birth, spent a day in the NICU, and then was circumcised – so a lot happened in his first 24-48 hours! What advice can I offer her?
A.
So glad she has you! Her regulation will be so very important for helping her son cultivate more inner regulation.
When we are born, we don’t have much capacity to self-soothe in our physiology – only enough to suckle. We need our caregivers to respond in attuned ways to help us settle experiences where we feel threatened in order to cultivate our ability to do this for ourselves. This wee one had a lot of early alarming experiences that sound like they left an imprint on his little body. He didn’t have access to his Mom and Dad when he was in the NICU – to help him soothe his birth experience. He didn’t get his gut biome “seeded” by going through her birth canal – and then his gut biome took a hit from the antibiotics. The gut biome is so incredibly important not just for digestion – but also for production of neuro-transmitters like serotonin and dopamine that are so important for emotional regulation and also immune function and production of T-cells. Being born is hard enough – and circumcision outside of a religious ritual can be alarming for a wee lad. She has probably been a wonderful Mom – but he came into the world with some challenges that have left an imprint of alarm in his physiology and he needs some special support.
She will need to cultivate awareness of the level of activity that his system can manage before he gets so aroused that he moves through frustration and anger to rage. He got habituated to high arousal and collapse in those first experiences. Once we’re over our threshold of tolerable activation, there are just 3 ways we can move back into our zone of resiliency – we either experience success – we escape the saber-toothed tiger; or we have enough capacity for relationship cultivated in our Ventral Vagus nerve that connection and compassion override competition and violence; or we collapse and shut down.
We continue to develop our Ventral Vagus nerve well into our 20’s. It is cultivated in experiences of safe and loving co-regulation with others. The more that his parents can keep him inside his zone of resiliency, the more capacity for arousal he will be able to manage without going over his threshold.
I suggest activities that include physical engagement between parent and child that stay within his zone of resiliency – like patty-cake with an orientation for connection rather than speeding up to trick your partner; playing catch with a real or an “air” ball – also with an orientation towards making connection; or songs that include mirroring movements – like “eensy weensy spider.” This will reinforce the connection and co-regulation that can be so healing to his nervous system. They should also limit his screen time – it is highly neurologically stimulating. I wonder if they eat as a family – our bodies learn to digest food in loving co-regulation with others while we eat.
His behavior is not so far outside of the norm for a 3 year old – so I imagine that some of these approaches will be very helpful. Your role with supporting the Mom’s inner regulation is important too. Chinese medicine’s “Law of Mother-Child” is very clear that the health and regulation of the parent has a profound influence on the child. Every time we treat a parent, we are also treating their children.