Trauma Training Tip
Russia has invaded Ukraine. War trauma, past, present, and future commands our attention. Here’s a look through the lens of the Tao of Trauma.
We are in the Northern Hemisphere’s Spring – the season of the Wood Element in Chinese Medicine. The Wood Element includes the Liver, known as the “General of the Armed Forces” and the Gall Bladder, known as the “Official of Wise Judgment.” The Wood Element, in terms of Western neuroscience is our Sympathetic Nervous System. It is responsible for crafting our mobilization response – it supports us to orient to the nature of a threat and to craft a response that is commensurate with the level of threat we face.
The Sympathetic Nervous System has no social intelligence. Without a brake coming from our Parasympathetic Nervous System, and in particular the Ventral Vagus Nerve, it knows nothing of the long-term impact of its actions, or any considerations beyond individual survival – nothing about “collateral damage” to children, the environment, domestic or world economic vitality, or civilians caught in the cross-fire.
If our Ventral Vagus Nerve was not cultivated well in our early years, our capacity to mitigate a sense of threat with a response that includes its long-term impact on innocent bystanders, the environment, our descendants, and the spirits of our ancestors is really compromised! We behave more like a rabid rat that’s been cornered. Our Wood is unable to craft flexible, comprehensive, fully evaluated responses that are commensurate with the level of threat we are actually experiencing.
If our sense of a need to protect and defend has been repeatedly thwarted, we will retain the biologic impulse to complete our “punch” – and can make tragic choices. Putin is such a person – and he is making tragic choices.
According to this article, Dead Soul, published in Vanity Fair Magazine, Putin had a pretty troubling childhood. His father was badly wounded in WWII, while stationed at the Russian front. His mother experienced the siege of Leningrad for 900 days. She was 41 when he was born. It seems likely that the capacity of their Ventral Vagus nerves to provide him with a relationally secure young life was compromised by their experience of war. He was bullied at school, unable to adequately defend himself; he longed to become a thug and a spy.
I think it is fair to say that his social engagement capacity, his Ventral Vagus Nerve, was not well developed in childhood.
As an adult, he has created a rigidly hierarchical, tightly controlled system that is closed to outsiders. Rumors of poisoning opposition forces surround him. He is known to be insecure and highly vulnerable to shame. In Chinese medicine, we look to the Metal element to “prune” over-active wood – Putin’s weakness in his Metal is demonstrated in his low self-esteem, shame, and insecurity. It makes it hard for him to manage his impulses when he feels threatened. Remember – unmitigated sympathetic arousal has no social intelligence.
This is what happens when our Ventral Vagus is not well cultivated in childhood – and then is not consciously nourished in adulthood. Our work as healers to cultivate Ventral Vagal capacity, restore balance and regulation in the energy body of our patients, and help children feel loved and experience safety is the foundation for future peace. It’s what we do. It’s why healers are so very important for the creation of a peaceful future.
Thank you for all you do.
Alaine’s Two Cents
Voices of Children, a charitable foundation based in Ukraine, has been serving the psychological needs of children affected by the war in the country’s east since 2015, according to its website.
The group’s psychologists specialize in art therapy and provide general psychosocial support. Many of its psychologists are based in the regions of Luhansk and Donetsk, areas that have long been controlled by Russian-backed separatists and are on the front lines of the current conflict. Now, Voices of Children is providing assistance to children and families all over Ukraine, even helping with evacuations. You can join me with a donation here.
Acupuncturists Without Borders is working with their international partners and European colleagues to establish on-the-ground, direct service refugee support in Poland and neighboring countries receiving refugees. They are organizing online training videos for civilians and healthcare workers in Ukraine – and are organizing supply reserves and screening interested volunteers who will join AWB relief effort on the ground in Europe. You can join me with a donation here.
Check This Out!
Racial Healing for Acupuncturists – a 10-session, combined synchronous and asynchronous course designed and led by acupuncturist and educator Jennifer Menda of AcuHerb Community Circle.
It promises to help acupuncturists (1) become more racially literate, and (2) to better understand the influence of transgenerational racial trauma on the body, mind, and spirit.
Jennifer has created a life-changing course that will leave you with the necessary tools to engage with your BIPOC patients and people in your life with compassion and understanding. She has gathered a comprehensive and forever growing library of books, articles, films, interviews, and other resources on the topics of racial trauma and traditional medicine that will keep you engaged and reflecting for months and years to come.
Check out Module 5: Awakening the Observer, SomaticSensing for a presentation by me on the Self-Protective Response, the Capacities of the 5 Elements – and some queries for how white supremacy can suppress those capacities in unconscious moments of stress.
I highly recommend this critically important course. CEU’s are pending. Register 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.
We all know so many friends, relatives, neighbors who believe “everything you see and hear is a lie” and they are full of activation and it looks as though their only safe social engagement is with others who feel exactly the same. This appears to be a kind of Water imbalance, where the rope is always a snake.
My community question is: in addressing this on a community level, are there community projects that can help this level of regulation?
My individual question is: Given that this Water energy is so dysregulated, would you start with Metal exercises to restore coherence in that element as Metal is the mother of Water?
A.
Such a timely and pertinent topic to explore!
Along with Water’s capacity to help us with distinguishing a rope from a snake, comes its capacity to help us distinguish discomfort from fear. We will always look for affirmation from those we resonate with to confirm our assessments of who and what to be afraid of. If we are easily confused by our chemistry – if we assume threat when our adrenalin flows, we will be likely to resonate with others who experience threat similarly.
I am inclined to say “all healing happens in community,” so I like how you think. We do look to our energetic “tribe” for affirmation and a sense of belonging. The bigger and broader we experience our sense of community and who is a member – the better able we will be to expand our hearts to include those who may look different, speak a different language, or explore the tangibly unknowable on a different path.
The more opportunities we have to experience “new or unfamiliar” people in safe environments – maybe in a community chorus or theatre group, in the PTA at our children’s school or in their sporting events, or in a “sister” church initiative – the more expansive our capacity will grow. Some communities are organizing “listening” sessions to facilitate people understanding each other. So good. I encourage all of us to “stretch” our sense of comfort to include people in your communities who come from “categories” that were previously unfamiliar to you.
Love to hear any suggestions from readers about how you are helping to build capacity in the Water Element of your community. Here we are, back at the building blocks for world peace.
As for where to start with such a person, with strong dysregulation in their signaling center for threat. I would start right there – with the Kidney/adrenal hold, brain stem, bones, or boundary work alongside some acupuncture on their Kidney and Bladder pathways. You may want to use acupuncture to “connect up” their Metal to their Water – Bl 67 and Ki 7 to help their more regulated Metal to nourish their Water – but I suspect that it doesn’t really need treatment. The wound is in the Water, so that’s where you will primarily want to treat.