Trauma Training Tip
It’s Summer! Time of the Fire Element – and all matters of the Heart!
There are four organs that support the Fire Element. All of the other elements have two – “matters of the heart” require a lot of attention! In the Summer we have more access to “matters of the heart” than we do at any other time of the year.
The Triple Heater is one of these organs. The Heart, the Small Intestine, and the Pericardium are the others. The Triple Heater is referred to as a “function without an organ” in Chinese medical classics – and it has so much to offer.
The Triple Heater supports our sense of relationship with ourselves and with others. It helps ensure the warmth of connection and the distinction of separation. Two critical capacities for trauma survivors.
The Triple Heater mirrors the function of our connective tissue. Connective tissue penetrates, surrounds and connects every organ, tissue and cell. It wraps every body structure – the surface of organs, muscles, bones, ligaments, veins, and cells. It penetrates every body structure. It connects structures to each other. Connective tissue contains every shape, crease, and fold. It goes everywhere, and separates everything. In fact, if we took everything away but our connective tissue, we would still be completely recognizable.
We can think of the Connective Tissue as the Yin or more substantial aspect of the Triple Heater and the Triple Heater as the Yang or more etheric aspect of the Connective Tissue.
Connective tissue can be very useful to work with if our client is either tight and rigid and needs to soften their energetic tone or if they are flaccid and flabby and want greater energetic tone. Working with connective tissue helps survivors experience inner connection, wholeness, and integrity. It has this information inherently.
Connective tissue can be profoundly impacted by high velocity injuries – like motor vehicle accidents, falls, or blast injuries. It has a global nature, and so has the capacity to carry global experiences of danger or life threat.
It can also give us access to very early developmental disruptions because bones, muscles, organs, nerves, tendons, fascia, blood, and lymph all emerge from connective tissue in fetal development. When we connect with connective tissue – we may access the vibration of disruptions in any of these tissues that arose very early in our development.
Choose when to make contact with connective tissue carefully. You will want to build kidney/adrenal capacity and cardiac coherency before you touch into the global nature of what the connective tissue may be carrying. It doesn’t serve trauma survivors to go “over” their threshold and touch into overwhelming states. We are not looking for big cathartic experiences.
Build capacity and enter this extraordinary tissue to facilitate whole-body coherence, transformation of pre- or peri-natal traumatic stress, and perhaps ancestral imprints of danger or life threat. It’s magical.
Alaine’s Two Cents
Inflammation, Public Health, and Morbidity and Mortality
In her groundbreaking new book, Weathering: The Extraordinary Stress of Ordinary Life in an Unjust Society, Dr. Arline Geronimus, a professor in the School of Public Health and Research Professor in the Institute for Social Research at the University of Michigan, argues that health and aging have more to do with how society treats us than how well we take care of ourselves. For too long, the public has believed in the concept of a universally uniform growth, health, and aging process in which making “healthy choices” will lead to a long, fruitful life. Yet hard-working and responsible people of color, working class, and poor whites are often propelled onto trajectories of deteriorated health, accelerated aging, and dying well before their time simply because they live in a rigged and exploitative system.
In this conversation with Dr. Doriane C. Miller, Professor of Medicine and Director of both the Center for Community Health and Vitality and Health Equity Integration for the Institute of Translational Medicine at the University of Chicago, Professor Geronimus outlines the impact of inflammatory responses that arise out of insults and other micro-aggressions, as part and parcel of racism, classism, anti-semitism and other marginalizing influences. These social phenomena actually have a greater impact on morbidity and mortality than diet, exercise, class, or education. Honest public health researchers can no longer blame marginalized people for making “poor choices” with regard to diet and exercise for the health disparities that plague communities of color.
Watch it here:
I recorded a lecture – “Inflammation in our Bodies, Inflammation in our World” for the TCM Academy. It was inspired by a book with related themes: Inflamed: Deep Medicine and the Anatomy of Injustice by Rupa Marya and Raj Patel.
My presentation describes the impact of inflammation in both our bodies and our world as the key feature in rising morbidity and mortality rates and the particular impact of inflammation on health disparities. Inflammatory responses that are logged in our autonomic nervous system and experienced as danger or life threat have a profound impact on our vulnerability to a whole host of public health concerns. Germs and genetics can no longer give a full understanding of chronic illness; we have to also understand the impact of inflammation as a root cause of illness and premature death.
You can access it via TCM Academy here.
Check This Out!
Are you thinking about joining the 2023-24 Tao of Trauma series, but still have some questions?
Join me at a “Meet ‘n Greet” opportunity. Ask your questions, get your answers, and hear some stories from the Tao of Trauma community.
- Sunday, July 16 – 4 pm Eastern, 1 pm Pacific
- Sunday, August 13 – 4 pm Eastern, 1 pm Pacific
- Sunday, September 17 – 4 pm Eastern, 1 pm Pacific
Acupuncturists, bodyworkers, medical providers, and somatic-psychotherapists welcome.
RSVP above to get the Zoom link.
Note that the early registration deadline is September 1, 2023. Space is limited.
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 mid-50’s. He was very athletic in high school, until he fell off a 30 foot cliff while rock climbing in his 20’s. He’s got a very tight muscular system. It’s so tight that he can’t turn around to look behind him or touch his shoulder with the fingers of that same hand. His main complaint currently is low back pain and urinary frequency and urgency. He has a Western diagnosis of benign prostate hypertrophy. I treat him in his Wood Element – in particular his Gall Bladder.
A.
I think you could be very helpful to him by working with his connective tissue.
You will first need to get his buy-in, his consent, and a baseline for his capacity for somatic awareness and embodied comfort. You can build this with an exploration of his somatic interoception – his felt sense over a few sessions. His Kidney/Adrenal System or his Liver Blood may be good places to begin.
This may be challenging for him. His braced tissues are there to help prevent him from feeling what was once upon a time overwhelming to his young body. You might describe the role and function of connective tissue (see Chapter 9 of The Tao of Trauma), and that it can sometimes be too slack and sometimes too braced. Neither supports the many functions of the body that are supported by its role to connect and support and also to differentiate. It could be playing a role in both his back pain and his pelvic floor function. Would he like support such as this? Make sure he understands and feels empowered in his request for this work.
Right now his body is so tight it is hard to be flexible. The bracing in his connective tissue is a big part of the pain in his back. The elasticity of his connective tissue is also influencing his emotional experience. His braced system may also be giving rise to strong, habitual emotions or physical postures that impact his pleasure and function.
It is easiest to find connective tissue in fleshy areas. You will find broad sheets on his low back. You will also find its wrapping quality on the upper arm, over the Triple Burner pathway. Find it in any fleshy area. Since you treat him on his Gall Bladder and there is a special relationship between Gall Bladder and the Triple Burner in Chinese medicine, I would put needles in distal points on the Gall Bladder, perhaps GB 40 and GB 37 and ask for permission to slide your hand under his back, in the area of Lumbar 1 and 2 – the Back Shu point of the Triple Burner.
Your orientation is that order creates order and coherence builds coherence. You will want to start superficially with the attention in your touch, and go slowly. Your touch does not require pressure, it requires presence, attunement, awareness. Let your attention go with direction of any movement that shows up under your hand. This movement may be influenced by surrounding muscles and by history, scars, and habits. Look for elasticity. Be curious about flexibility, intelligence, capacity to differentiate in the connective tissue. Stay away from content/story.
Help him track his sensations, his experience, his felt sense. See what wants to let go and where it wants to carry him. Titration will be an important concept. If he starts to feel overwhelmed, provide him with bumpers to keep him from going over threshold. “Let’s pause here,” or “come back to the table, find your points of contact with the table.” You may need to remove your hand, or shift its location and make use of the Kidney/Adrenal system if he gets too activated.
Help him track sensations, contain the rise and fall of his energy, and integrate his experience. You will be able to offer him what deep tissue, deep pressure never could.
So glad he has you.