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August 15th, 2017

An expansive blue

Back in 2005 – ’06 when I first decided to process trauma and try to understand the deeper reasons of recurring violations and injustices I initially began reading articles on the internet and buying my first trauma related books. It was mostly a trial and error procedure and the material varied in terms of usefulness, but what came up in most books was the need to heal spirituality or deal with spiritual traumas. It took me quite a while to fully grasp the significance of this. Today I firmly believe that deep release of trauma, fear, angst or awakening cannot occur without healing this aspect of experience, for in some sense it is one of the deepest and most debilitating wounds of all. This type of wounding keeps helplessness, hopelessness, a sense of aloneness and fear in place and it impacts our inherent sense of belonging. Soul wounding or spiritual abuse / conditioning is a powerful closed gate that prevents us from living wholeheartedly and moving beyond survival mode. It blurs our vision – we kind of go through life like a horse with blinkers -and prevents us from tapping into our own healing potential and protecting ourselves from toxicity. I have mentioned elsewhere that one powerful tool to disempower children is to deprive them of their sense of inherent worth and connectedness, not only with their immediate environment, but with the whole universe, and to dampen their natural curiosity. Severing their sense of interconnectedness with others and Source, whether that is called God or something else, and stamping out their curiosity, uniqueness and authenticity, creates a lot of room for fear and helplessness. Neither parents nor teachers or religious institutes have the right to interfere in ways that deprive children of their sense of belonging, worthiness and deserving a place in the world. This type of early conditioning or soul trauma contributes to our feeling boxed in, disconnected both from our authenticity and others, but also from all the knowledge and wisdom available in the world. We get locked in our fears, ignorance, prejudices, racist attitudes, superiority and inferiority traps; all mostly fear based and the result of conditioning and unhealthy learning. We further compromise our health and potential; view the world through distorted lens and we remain in our designated place or boxes. We experience reality through the chains of this early soul wounding as well as our emotional traumas and other experiences. So, processing trauma should ideally be a holistic experience, as expansive and multi-layered as our expansive being. Perhaps tackling the distorted lens and demolishing conditioning and learning early on could facilitate or accelerate overall healing and change.

You may like to read or listen to Niki Gratrix’s interview. It is packed with so much information: the link between trauma and chronic fatigue; how ACEs can increase the risk of early death and how trauma is inherited through generations; the silent ACEs; the impact of attachment trauma on health and the prevalence of compromised early attachment (50% of the population!); how our interaction with others impacts the development of our brain; the contradictory parenting advice out there; the link between narcissism and attachment trauma; how childhood biography can become adult biology; adaptations to trauma; how limbic kindling is affected by emotional trauma and how it reaks havoc on the body; first basic steps to healing trauma; the ACE questionnaire; self-awareness; reset rituals and self care; how early relational trauma impacts future relationships; the importance of surrounding oneself with the right people and ridding oneself of energy vampires; the inevitable changes that healing will bring; an integral approach to healing trauma and the importance of addressing biochemical issues, etc, at: https://www.theenergyblueprint.com/heal-trauma

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Synchronicities

I returned to journaling in 2005 as part of my intention to explore and process trauma. At the time I also read articles and chapters in various books on the power of journaling as both a therapeutic tool, but also a means of self knowing. I engaged in a variety of exercises, used free-association, wrote with the less dominant hand and also sketched. I wrote from a child and adult perspective. One exercise I sometimes did was to first write from a younger age perspective first and then write a letter to that younger state from the adult perspective as a form of reparenting, soothing and integrating experience. Currently there are many more books on the benefits of writng and more research to support the benefits and effectiveness of this process. There are hundreds of guided writing exercises and activities available. Also, journaling and writing complement yoga, meditation / mindfulness practices, and so on. It is really good to see that more and more people not only engage and consider writing and journaling important, but also see its value as a therapeutic tool, because not that long ago in a Master’s Programme in Clinical Psychology I was doing, these processes and ideas were seriously frowned upon, but this story could be the theme of another post.

 

These last few weeks I have been looking at some old journals from a somewhat different perspective. Stories and adaptations, the whole curriculum of conditioning, injunctions and psychological defenses, the layered nature of experience and understanding, emotions and intentions, the gaps in the stories or the lack of data, all populate these pages. Yesterday, I listened to Elena Brower talk about Practice You, a workbook she has created based on her own experience. She includes a letter writing exercise in each chapter and talks about how this process was illuminatibng for her. Specifically, she invites readers to write a letter to themselves at a certain age. For instance, in one of her book chapters she asks readers to:

 

“Consider a moment when you felt challenged, afraid, or sad at the age of nine. See yourself hugging that child you were. Now, from your perspective today, write a song, a poem, a letter, or a story that gives that child insight into the ways in which you will soon learn to know yourself, believe in yourself, and to bestow dignity upon yourself by trusting yourself.”(Sounds True: Insights at the Edge)

So, in some sense through this process we acknowledge and validate the pain or confusion or fear, but we also reassure that young part that things will turn out fine. To say this differently, we can potentially, unfreeze and defuse landmines of fear, injunctions and unhealthy learning, reframe experience, increase continuity and integration, release outdated beliefs, broaden perspective and understanding of traumas or events, modulate emotions and practise self-compassion. It’s like going back in time and shedding light on events and emotional experiences, and also, paying our respects to the young parts that have held this difficult material. Elena Brower says ‘you can handle that person, you can heal that person, and you can help that person bring forth into right this moment more solace and more confidence’ and that it’s like going back and holding that person’s hand.

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What we can feel, we can heal…

You may like to listen to Chris Germer, clinical psychologist and lecturer on psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and founding faculty member at the Institute for Meditation and Psychotherapy, talking to Tami Simon about the power of self compassion at Soundstrue.com. Many voices, one journey

The discussion is about how to practice mindful self-compassion, which requires three things—to be aware, to know that we’re not alone, and to act with self-kindness. Chris Germer also talked about how people with chronic back pain can use the practice of mindful self-compassion, and how working with key principles such as “what we resist persists” and “what we can feel, we can heal” is leading to impressive results in the new research that’s being done in this area. He further talked about how he and Krisitn Neff found that mindfulness, which is a kind of balanced spacious awareness, adds a quality of equanimity to compassion training. Chris Germer referred how he worked with the underlying early shame to overcome anxiety with public speaking anxiety instead of targeting the anxiety. Finally, he discussed working with men and research findings done on self-compassion and veterans, which show that self-compassion is a very powerful factor on whether or not people develop post-traumatic stress disorder when they return home.

Extracts

‘When we practice mindfulness, it’s like holding a camera but you have to hold it steady. Sometimes the camera is just shaking. What does it take to stabilize a camera? What does it take to stabilize our hearts? That’s where compassion comes in. Compassion is more relational; it’s about sentient beings’.

‘…. there’s a cultural element to this. I’ve been teaching self-compassion all over the world and it seems to me that in countries, or parts of the country, where there’s a lot of competition where the sense of self is highly contingent on where you stand in the social hierarchy, in the pecking order. Then a person’s sense of self becomes unstable. It depends on how we’re doing. Self-compassion is more about having a quality of a secure base inside oneself and I believe that in cultures that are more collectivist and also stable, that people have a more stable sense of self’.

‘I think our sense about personal secure base is eroding and as a result, I think we just need more self-compassion. Mindfulness appears to be a perfect response to the fast pace of society and the fragmented attention spans that we have with electronic media. Compassion, in my view, is a healthy response to the ways our sense of self is eroding in this environment and also in increasingly competitive circumstances’.

‘One pathway is through physical touch. Another pathway is through language like I described but some people just don’t have that kind of language. Another pathway is behavioral… Self-compassion activates the mammalian care giving system. We all know what this is like. For example, if you have pain and somebody puts their arm around you and really loves you then inside you have a feeling like, “Ah.” They didn’t just do surgery on your lower back but your whole relationship to yourself and to your back changes. In other words, there’s a relaxing, there’s a letting go. This is what’s called regulating emotion through affiliation, through a sense of connection, through a sense of care’.