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July 9 - July 25, 2019
To review, human beings have been designed over millennia, through natural selection and social evolution, to live with and to move through extreme events and loss, and to process feelings of helplessness and terror without becoming stuck or traumatized. When we experience difficult and particularly horrible sensations and feelings, our tendency, however, is to recoil and avoid them. Mentally, we split off or “dissociate” from these feelings. Physically, our bodies tighten and brace against them. Our minds go into overdrive trying to explain and make sense of these alien and “bad” sensations.
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If you ask several anxious people what they are feeling, they may all say that they are feeling “anxiety.” However, you are likely to get several different responses if they are then queried with the epistemological question, “How do you know that you are feeling anxiety?”
With a little practice we can actually start to separate out emotions, thoughts and beliefs from the underlying sensations. We are then astounded by our capacity to tolerate and pass through difficult emotional states, such as terror, rage and helplessness, without being swept away and drowned. If we go underneath the overwhelming emotions and touch into physical sensations, something quite profound occurs in our organism—there is a sense of flow, of “coming home.”
These survival energies are organized in the brain and specifically expressed as patterned states of muscular tension in readiness for action. However, when we are activated to this level and, like Sharon, are prevented from completing that course of action—as in fighting or fleeing—then the system moves into freeze or collapse, and the energized tension actually remains stuck in the muscles. In turn, these unused, or partially used, muscular tensions set up a stream of nerve impulses ascending the spinal cord to the thalamus (a central relay station for sensations) and then to other parts of
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Other examples are people who fear driving a car after they have been involved in an accident or people who fear even leaving the house because they do not know where these danger signals are originating from.
These bodily reactions are not metaphors; they are literal postures that inform our emotional experience. For example, tightness in the
neck, shoulders and chest and knots in the gut or throat are central to states of fear. Helplessness is signaled by a literal collapsing of the chest and shoulders, along with a folding at the diaphragm and weakness in the knees and legs.
Tension in the neck, shoulders and back will likely evolve over time to the syndrome of fibromyalgia. Migraines are also common somatic expressions of unresolved stress. The knots in the gut may mutate to common conditions like irritable bowel syndrome, severe PMS or other gastrointestinal problems such as spastic colon. These conditions deplete the energy resources of the sufferer and may take the form of chronic fatigue syndrome.
It can perhaps be conjectured that unresolved trauma is responsible for a majority of the illnesses of modern mankind.
The concept of renegotiation is completely different from cathartic “traumatic reliving,” or flooding, a common form of trauma therapy still used after “critical events” like rapes, natural disasters and horror,
Recent studies suggest that these therapies often do little to help and can
actually be retrau...
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These cathartic approaches fall short as they often reinforce sensations of collapse and feelings of helplessness.
In summary, the motor expression of two intense instinctual responses creates a conflict and results in frozen states, such as the stasis in Vince’s shoulder. Normally, muscles that extend operate reciprocally with those that flex. In the traumatic state, however, agonist and antagonist operate against each other, creating frozen (immobility) states. This may lead to debilitating symptoms in almost any part of the body. The energy bound in inhibited (thwarted) responses is so powerful that it can cause an extreme bracing that often has profound effects. For example, when people jump from
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I was frequently astonished by how, with the briefest of interventions, children rebounded from what would otherwise have been a devastating lifelong debilitation. These children, unshackled from the yoke of trauma, were free to develop with confidence, resilience and joy.
You can discover more about a person in an hour of play than in a year of conversation. —Plato
Five Principles to Guide Children’s Play toward Resolution
Perhaps the most difficult and important aspect of renegotiating a traumatic event with a child is maintaining your own belief that things will turn out OK. This feeling comes from inside you and is projected out to the child. It becomes a container that surrounds the child with a feeling of confidence. This may be particularly difficult if the child resists your attempts to renegotiate the trauma. If the child resists, be patient and reassuring. The instinctive part of your child wants to rework this experience. All you have to do is wait for that part to feel confident and safe enough to
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A sense of triumph and heroism almost always signals the successful conclusion of a renegotiated traumatic event.
Shock in my case was literally about having the wind knocked out of me. All traumas leave us breathless in some way. In the moment of shock people don’t really know what happened to them; they are breathless with a loss of inner and outer orientation.)
I believe that to truly understand our body/mind, therapists must first learn about the animal body/mind because of the manner in which our nervous systems have evolved in an ever-changing and challenging environment.
The Darwinian emotions and behaviors of “love” have evolved, presumably, for the protection and care of the babies in a species bearing one offspring
For these underdeveloped creatures to survive, special, extended, and therefore highly motivated caregiving behaviors were required. Such an enduring task demanded nothing short of love, perhaps the same emotion that drives soldiers in the heat of battle to rescue fallen comrades, pulling them to safety even at the supreme risk to their own lives. And love, in the final analysis, may be our collective antidote—the salvation for a species with such a penchant for senseless killing and carnage. Love is the glue that holds family, tribes,
and—perhaps in times of need—even societies together. It is also the potion that binds the human animal to the divine through the highest religious and sp...
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Science is our new religion and its holy water is disinfectant. —George Bernard Shaw
the social sciences often appear to manifest their distaste for the human-as-animal supposition, most notably by sanitizing their terminology around the concepts of instinctual behavior. In fact, the word instinct is rarely found in modern psychological literature. Rather it is purged and replaced with terms such as drives, motivations and needs. While instincts are still routinely drawn upon to explain animal behaviors, we have somehow lost sight of how many human behavior patterns (though modifiable) are primal, automatic, universal and predictable.
