Trauma Training Tip
Feeling overwhelmed by the suffering in our world?
When we are habituated to either a braced or a collapsed state in response to feeling threatened, we lose access to our brain’s frontal cortex. We lose access to the more thoughtful, creative, problem-solving – and compassionate, empathetic, and understanding parts of ourselves. We become impulsively reactive. We are unable to pause . . . . and we may be unable to sleep, digest our food easily, and become prone to however our body responds to stress – headaches, belly aches, auto-immune flare-ups, etc.
This is true for us as individuals – and it is true for nations.
We may feel very strongly about the “right”ness of our point of view – but in this state we can’t be very helpful to solving the conflict. We don’t have access to our thoughtful, complex nuanced and dynamic frontal cortex. Rightness isn’t enough right now. Nobody is right. Nobody is wrong. Everybody is right. Everybody is wrong. And, we are all suffering.
The braced or collapsed state we find ourselves – and perhaps our nations in – was once upon a time a way our body helped us manage an overwhelming event or a pattern of overwhelming events. Now it has turned into its opposite and it’s not serving us. It’s not serving to help us to make a contribution to resolving the suffering in the world either.
I wonder – is there some small thing that you could do to create a bit more space, a bit more tone, a new way of being in your body and in your mind that would alleviate just a small element of your suffering? If you did that thing daily, or even multiple times a day – would it help you contribute to solutions for what may feel like an intractable problem?
Would cultivating a capacity to “let it be so” as my teacher Kathy Kain says help you not just tolerate, but live with some compassion about what you can’t control? Would it help you make a contribution to tolerance, peace, justice, integrity in our world?
Alaine’s Two Cents
I recorded this video, Our Nation Needs Its Healers, in 2016 after the federal election that year. While our time in history has moved forward – the message of the critical importance healers can play in the dynamics both within and between the nations of the world is still critical.
Check This Out!
HERE IS A VIDEO recorded by Kathy Kain that describes a practice she sometimes calls “Bearing the Unbearable,” sometimes “Letting It Be So” and sometimes “Objecting Without Contracting.” It is a long-term practice that can help us develop capacity for inner regulation in the face of overwhelming, painful, unbearable, and catastrophic events. I hope it helps you. I hope it helps our world.
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 suffers in multiple ways – Crohn’s disease, migraine headaches and she doesn’t sleep well either. Her mom died when she was a toddler and she had several stepmothers as well as a wonderful Dad. I’m a bodyworker, and I’d love to help her.
A.
So glad she has you!
One of the primary elements of the Adverse Childhood Experiences study was “loss of a parent.” Even with a great Dad, the loss of her mother, and it sounds like the loss of a stepmother or two are major experiences of life threat for a young person. As a toddler, she may not even have been able to distinguish what belonged to her Mom and what belonged to her in the circumstances that led to her death.
I’m wondering if she may have tucked some of her overwhelm into her diaphragm system. She almost certainly “lost her breath” when she lost her Mom.
The respiratory diaphragm is the central organization for the diaphragm system – and its regular rhythm influences the flexible wave that moves through all 7 diaphragms – the crown, tentorium, cranial base, shoulder, respiratory, pelvic, and plantar diaphragms. She may have organized the collapse or alarm she experienced way back then in the capacity of one or more of these diaphragms. The lack of a regulated wave moving between these tissues disturbs the function of the organs that lie between them.
A receptive, curious hand, beginning on the respiratory diaphragm, may wake it up – and help it to begin communication with its proximal diaphragms – the pelvic and the shoulder. Help her track and embody her sensations as tissues wake up and assume more regulated function.
Take a look at “Restoring Regulation In The Diaphragm System”, page 131 in The Tao of Trauma for more background.
All good wishes to her – and to you in your work.