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Finding balance can be an exhausting challenge for anyone with trauma-altered ...
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“Drugs and alcohol are not my problem,” he wrote. “Reality is my problem, drugs and alcohol are my solution.”
Cameron😔
The spiritual teacher Gary Zukav has said, “When you find an addiction, do not be ashamed. Be joyful. You have found something that you have come to this Earth to heal. When you confront and heal an addiction, you are doing the deepest spiritual work that you can do on this Earth.”
Wow!
It’s not about self-indulgence and pleasure-seeking, or even a method to escape life in general, as much as it is about avoiding the pain and distress of dysregulation.
And also remember that humans are emotionally “contagious”; we sense the distress of others.
This parent’s internal storm becomes the home’s storm.
His chaos becomes the home’s chaos.
Remember: Relief of distress gives pleasure. They are relaxed for the first time in their lives.
So each day we are pulled to refill our reward bucket. The healthiest way to do this is through relationships.
Disconnection, marginalization, demonizing, and punishing only make the problems of substance abuse worse.
I completely get this, but as a parent it was hard to not react that way!
Addiction is complex. But I believe that many people who struggle with drug and alcohol abuse are actually trying to self-medicate due to their developmental histories of adversity and trauma.
Positive interactions with people are rewarding and regulating.
Connectedness counters the pull of addictive behaviors. It is the key.
Mama P realized that Gloria needed as much safe and stable nurturing as Tilly; she realized that Gloria was a young, unloved child in a woman’s body.
We came to understand that this was the primary way in which Gloria’s foster caregivers had managed her when she was young; getting candy was the closest Gloria got to being loved. Our brains develop as a reflection of the world we grow up with. You love others the way you’ve been loved. Gloria was merely showing love to her daughter the best way she knew.
“That poor mother is doing the best she can. Let
her give her daughter some candy. That is all she knows. You will not make her a better parent by punishing or shaming her. If we want her to be a more loving parent, we need to be more loving to her.”
A key principle of neuroplasticity is specificity.
All of us want to know that what we do, what we say, and who we are matters.
We are relational creatures.
A parent may truly love his child, but if he is sitting at a computer posting on social media about how much he loves his child while the infant is in another room, awake, hungry, and crying, the infant experiences no love.
This is hard to read!
The moderately stressed infant cries, the cries bring the responsive nurturing adult to regulate them, and because the adults are present, attentive, and responsive, their loving behaviors become predictable. When I feel hungry, I cry and they come and feed me.
Caring for the infant in this loving way also changes the brain of the caregiving adult. These interactions regulate and reward both child and caregiver.
The first is disruption that happens before birth,
The second is some form of disruption of the early interactions between infant and caregiver;
The third is any sensitizing pattern of stress.
Childhood experiences literally impact the biology of the brain.
With a house, if you do a bad job with the foundation, put in shoddy wiring and plumbing but decorate it with beautiful flooring and furniture, the core defects in the house may not be visible as you first walk through.
And the Cheerios girl is always one of the first to come to mind.
that the most powerful and enduring human interactions are often very brief.
HUGE for teachers!
For example, moderate, predictable, and controllable activation of our stress-response
systems leads to a more flexible, stronger stress-response capability (see Figure 3) that lets a person demonstrate resilience in the face of more extreme stressors.
This makes me think about the importance of productive struggle.
This is why stress is not something to be afraid of or avoided. It is the controllability, pattern, and intensity of stress that can cause problems.
the more threatened or stressed we are, the less access we have to the smart part of our brain, the cortex
When we daydream, when we allow our minds to wander, that’s a form of dissociation.
When I placed clothing from the foster father under his nose, he started to thrash and moan, and his heart rate rose from 90 bpm to 162; this profound arousal response was, I believe, due to a set of trauma-related memories from his abuse at the hands of his foster father.
Wtf??
The complex fingerprint of a traumatic experience will be unique for each person.
They are always in a state of fear. A person will think, learn, feel, and behave differently when they are afraid compared to when they feel safe.
The pervasive misunderstanding of trauma-related behavior has a profound effect on our educational, mental health, and juvenile justice systems.
They rationalize their behavior as “that’s just the way it is.” Or, in an effort to move quickly past any discomfort they encounter, they make light of it, find ways (both healthy and unhealthy)
In its essence, trauma is the lasting effects of emotional shock.
There is the science-based explanation of the effect early trauma has on the brain. And then there are the myriad daily actions each of us take throughout our lives that are the result of, and that reflect back on, such trauma. These are the actions that, on the surface, look like poor decisions, bad habits, self-sabotage, self-destruction—the actions that cause other people to judge.
Breaking Bad!
Even if you’ve accumulated a house full of nice things and the picture of your life fits inside a beautiful frame, if you have experienced trauma but haven’t excavated it, the wounded parts of you will affect everything you’ve managed to build.
Trauma-related mental health effects were known as the “irritable heart” after the American Civil War and “shell shock” following combat in World War I.
Part of the challenge is that “bad event” is subjective.
How does the individual experience the event? What is going on inside the person; is the stress response activated in extreme or prolonged ways?
So we have three people in the same event, each experiencing it differently. And because each experienced it differently, each had a different stress response. Based on her years of experience and practice, the firefighter had a moderate activation of her stress-response systems; the event felt predictable and controllable. For her, it was a resilience-building experience, not a trauma.
For her, it was a resilience-building experience, not a trauma.
They came up with the “three E’s” definition of trauma,
the event, the experience, and the effects.
