Trauma Training Tip
Nature is transitioning from Spring to Summer in fits and starts. Blossoms are giving rise to fruit. In spite of the chaos created by CoVid, the sun still rises and sets, day turns into night, spring into summer, inhale becomes exhale. There is a rhythm and predictable movement in nature. Bringing our attention to what is in fact predictable can help us find a sense of manageability and comfort in uncertain times.
In “normal” times, summer – as the time of the Heart – calls forward a vibrational demand to connect with others and to find and express love. Our physiology finds neurological regulation in experiences of co-regulation with other mammals.
Today, we find ourselves challenged! Nature is calling for connection – and is running into public health experts necessary call for distancing. Our safety requires distancing. Our bodies long for connection. We find ourselves balancing fulfilling our need for connection on video-platforms with the need our eyes have for rest from their bright and intrusive lights!
It has and will become even more important that we find ways to experience connection, love and touch with other humans and animals as we move further into summer.
Especially for those who live alone, maybe it’s time to consider a cat or a dog as a way to experience our universal human need for relationship?
All of us can take some time to tap our body – with whatever pressure or duration that feels good on arms, legs, torso. Notice if something changes – do you feel more “in” your body? Do you feel more settled in your flesh?
We can also take a scarf or shawl and wrap it around our shoulders, our respiratory diaphragm or our kidneys and “hug” ourselves. See what feels different? Is there a feeling of being held? Does it bring comfort? Just play.
Look for comfort. Look for pleasure. Look for ease. Just looking will help. Promise.
Alaine’s Two Cents
Hope is the gift of the Spring. The beans in my garden are “up” and holding a vibration of hope for their – and my growing season. Hope may be hard to find in these days. I take inspiration from the wisdom in this poem:
Hope
by Vaclav Havel, a Czechoslovakian writer, dramatist and politician
Either we have hope within us or we don’t;
it is a dimension of the soul, and it’s not essentially
dependent on some particular observation of the world
or estimate of the situation. Hope is not prognostication.
It is an orientation of the spirit, an orientation of the heart;
it transcends the world that is immediately experienced,
and is anchored somewhere beyond its horizons.
Hope, in this deep and powerful sense, is not the same as joy
that things are going well, or willingness to invest in enterprises
that are obviously heading for success, but, rather, an ability
to work for something because it is good, not just because it stands
a chance to succeed. The more propitious the situation in which
we demonstrate hope, the deeper the hope is. Hope is
definitely not the same thing as optimism.
It is not the conviction that something will turn
out well, but the certainty that something
makes sense, regardless of how it turns out.
Let me repeat:
It is not the conviction that something will turn
out well, but the certainty that something
makes sense, regardless of how it turns out.
Check This Out!
I’ve had several opportunities to explore the impact of CoVid through an integrative, East-meets-West lens. Maybe you’d like to watch/listen?
My colleague and friend Andrea Smith-Gage followed her good impulse to gather some Somatic Experiencing Practitioners for this chat about working with clients who have been on ventilators. I joined psychotherapist and former intensive care unit nurse Barbara Collier, and Alexander Technique Teacher Michaela Hauser-Wagner in a rich conversation about ventilators, breathing, grief, and healing. So much information and so much heart! I think you will enjoy listening.
Qiological Founder Michael Max and LhasaOMS teamed up to produce this panel discussion, Social Connection and Knowing Our Essence. I joined Daniel Shulman and Amy Mager in a rich conversation about the role acupuncture can play in the important healing that comes from social connection and being in and coming from our essential integrity. Of course, the conversation drifted to universal principles of healing, and the nature of CoVid 19 as an experience of traumatic stress that has both the risks and the healing opportunities inherent in our experiences getting coupled with previous experiences of life-threatening “inescapable attack.” I enjoyed our rich dialogue.
Clinical Curiosity
Q. We are experiencing a pandemic. I’m making plans to come back to work in the next month or so. What are some principles that can help both me and my clients make the transition back to “in the same room” sessions?
A. Terrific question! CoVid 19 is an insidious, invisible, and pervasive threat. We can’t “fight or flee” from it. We long for a sense of “manageability” and “predictability.”
Our physiology is at risk of falling into “collapse” or a freeze response when a threat is perceived as bigger than our social engagement or mobilization responses can manage. Many of us will need to call on our Dorsal Vagus parasympathetic system to mitigate the arousal that arises from “inescapable attack.” We find ourselves in an immobility response, frozen, collapsed.
What brings us out of this deep withdrawal is a sense of safety. Our Kidney/Adrenal system needs to feel a sense of safety in order to send a message of manageability and predictability to our Heart and settle our whole system. Behaviors that support the creation of experiences of safety will help.
Make sure your client takes time to choose how close to you, or in the case of video sessions, the camera, they feel most comfortable. Invite them to find themselves in a sensate way in the present moment. Fear tends to have its most commanding and overwhelming expression when we allow our attention to go out into the future. Right now is safe – unless we are in the presence of a saber toothed tiger! Help them find their weight in this chair, let their eyes go where they would like to go – open, closed, looking at you or not. Invite them to tap their own body – or give themselves a hug to help their Qi return to embodied awareness. The more embodied awareness, the more Qi is present – and the greater the opportunity for our own inner healer to guide us towards more regulation.
Put the sun in the sky, the ground under your feet and know that there are forces even greater than CoVid that are moving life forward.