A video blurt….
For me, it was about healing the problem that was derailing self-worth, and/or self-esteem, and that book turned out to be Dr. Berceli's first book, "The (R)evolutionary Trauma Release Method."
It points to the process in the body that evolution built in us, and what makes it revolutionary is it can heal trauma without the need to talk about it. It reduces the time for therapy significantly, in my experience.
What I experienced was that the root of self-development is stifled by trauma, especially childhood developmental trauma. It mucks up attachment, attunement, trust, self-regulation, and introduces shame. By the time we get around to love and sex as human experiences, well, I'm sure you can see where that goes.
It put to rest the need for affirmations, which is essentially telling yourself propaganda until you believe it, and for way too many, does't work for that reason. It put to rest "fake it until you make it," "no pain, no gain," "my trauma made me stronger," and several other myths.
It made authenticity and agency real. It re-establishes the attachment and attunement that was missing, and the rest falls into place with choices that are now possibly and healthy because of the neurophysiological capacity and resilience that develop.
However, that does not happen in the context of "self." Humans from inception are obviously meant to be interdependent - co-regulating is the psychological term. We need someone else for attachment and attunement, and in the therapeutic setting, even a somatic one like Berceli created, the client/provider relationship is the context of the starting point. What makes that possible is a provider who has truly done their own work, not bypassed it.
If you want to heal the body, emotions, cognition, relationships, and belief systems, start with Berceli. Then become your own Thunderbolt Kid.
I allowed grief to be with me. Sometimes I think it was a lot of the grief of the past that I cried out in April, May, and June of 2019. Maybe not so strangely, I've had little reason to be angry since then.
As I was lying on the conference room floor in a hotel in Canada in late October of 2013, I was not thinking about somatic intelligence. I had no idea of personal intelligences at all. There I was, feeling my body shake most amazingly, knowing that I had self-induced it, and there was nothing woo woo about it. I can say that I was starting my life over.
I started learning somatic intelligence without any idea of what it was. That came in retrospect to reading and study, and the practice of using autonomic tremoring to heal trauma. Somatic intelligence is one of six personal intelligences I came to define relative to healing trauma, and for me (and imo), where any trauma healing is most beneficially started.
There were stages of progression as it were, and so in this definition. The process starts with feeling the external body, then the internal body, and then moving into an integrated body, in which I move and have my being, directly experiencing the world around me.
When an infant is born, we know it won’t speak for roughly 18 months. When it does, it doesn’t recite the Gettysburg Address. It doesn’t suddenly say, “Whew. I’ve had all these thoughts and words and I was just waiting for that Broca Area to come on line.” The reality is that the child has no words, no particular thoughts. What it has are sensations. Physical sensations and some of those revolve around needs - mostly eating, sleeping, and going to the bathroom. If those needs are not met, how does the infant respond? That’s right - it cries, it fusses. Now imagine if they philosophy of the day was to put the child in the crib in the bedroom and close the door, and let it cry until it went to sleep, and stayed there until YOU decided it was time to get changed or fed again.
Welcome to my world.
An infant is not resilient, so they easily get overwhelmed by these physical sensation needs which can be neglected. Infants and children also want to be held. That doesn’t happen in the crib, either. The first disconnect then is from the infants own body because we are wired to protect from overwhelm. Just like a circuit breaker. As an infant, if we experienced neglect and/or abuse, disconnection (dissociation) from the body is to a large extent our only choice, so the healing path can start with the body. For infants, there are no words, no memories in words. In my experience of healing with tremoring, there were no words either. At least the “let’s talk about your trauma” kind. My story was still important, I own it, now I can talk about it freely, but I started here, with my body tremors, allowing them to do what they were evolved to accomplish - complete and discharge, and hence heal.
In healing then, this can become the first re-connect. This sort of foundation isn’t psychological at all, it’s all physiological. In the ideal world, a child gets to develop this secure attachment and attunement in a place of safety and pleasure with it’s own body because of the love of the caregivers, and the physical nurturing that goes along with love. Even if it doesn’t happen, those neural networks and attachment/attunement needs that usually happen in “ideal” development can be created and met after the fact, according to Dr. Seigel and Dr. Heller. That’s what healing can do.
My first experience on that conference room floor was feeling my body in space and time, what’s called proprioception. I become more aware of where my body is, and I felt parts of my body in tremoring that I’d never considered before. I was beginning to experience a re-embodiment, a “coming home.” That started with just being aware of my own hands, feet, legs, pelvis, back, chest and abdomen, and in tremoring I get to feel parts I can’t see. And when the tremor is really a vibration, as they are in my face mostly, I get to feel my face. Not as with my hands, because that’s touching my face. I get to FEEL my face, as a face. I feel the muscles underneath the skin as they move, not just the skin, and hair, and bony structure.
The second stage is interoception. That is being able to read the body’s signals to the brain. Which are quite numerous, and for the most part, under the radar. Until we reach a certain threshold and then we become hungry, or thirsty (often confused with hunger), or the need for sleep, or using the bathroom. The body is always trying to maintain idiodynamicy, and intake, nutrition and hydration, and waste output are all important parts of that. Between the in and out, is where production happens, so being at our best means we need to be aware of these signals and honor them. The body presents it’s own rewards for that. I can’t say I’ll ever feel my liver, or my spleen, or kidneys unless I get stones. But that would be way past earlier messages warning about this. For example, I eat a breakfast of some hash browns, eggs, and some rib eye steak. My stomach gets upset. I will repeat that a couple more times, and if the result is the same, as it was, I decide to try eating something else in the morning. That does the trick. Until I hear my body asking for the protein it wants, in what meat form, and how well done, and yes, it has been that precise for me. So some water first and if that feeling/taste combo sticks around, I do as it says. I have also consumed small heads of romaine lettuce exactly that way.
Unknowingly at first, but then certain words began popping into my consciousness, and chief among them was embodiment. The great discussion of mind/body connection, which can be expanded to mind-thoughts-emotions-spirituality/body connection. Those stages above start the integrated embodiment experience. What does that mean? That means for starters, that I first gain a new level of knowledge and experience being in my own body. Even if I start this adventure at 58 years of age. Then as the healing process continues, the other personal intelligences come on line and integrate into and with the somatic intelligence because there is less separation between them than we currently acknowledge. For a guy my age then, I went through the opening of the proprioception, and that still unfolds; the interoception came on line, and that is refining, and then I began to hear the signals of my body wanting better health. Simply put, it wants that idiodynamicy and if my nutrition and lack of movement are hindering that, I’ll get signals. Of course, I know that some of the eating habits I acquired and the fact my body wasn’t in motion much is partly cultural, and partly because of the trauma I experienced. So there is this movement in the organism that first starts with perceiving, and then as that unfolds it begins to take into account movement. Again, we are talking about idiodynamicy which has as it’s legacy the genetic expression of hundreds of thousands of years which was mostly spent moving as the hunter-gatherers we are.
One aspect of integrated embodiment is the beginnings of living in first person - direct experience. I spent most of my life living third person, as if I was watching a movie of myself. Integrating allowed for direct experience of first person living in this woefully neglected almost 60 year old body! What a delight though, as I now I felt I had the power to actually do something about it.
I was a volunteer firefighter/EMT/rescue operator for 16 years. And as such we had the availability of a little bit of exercise equipment in some of the stations in small workout rooms. Every once in a while I’d go in and hit the treadmill, or eliptical to do some cardio, and think I was getting in shape. Which was partly right, partly delusion. When it came to any kind of lifting though? Oh, the headaches. And because I didn’t have awareness of my own body, that process of starting and stopping happened two or three times a year for a few years. Once I decided I’d do all this stuff at home, and found a program called Insanity, which was an HIIT program using just the body. Perfect! Except it wasn’t. I wasn’t capable of the range of motion or the endurance of activity, and I injured myself. Start and stop yet again. Life shifted, and walking became the thing, and that was about the time I started to heal my trauma with tremoring. One fateful night, while I was out single handedly saving the world from evil in my civil servant hero role, I broke a foot. Okay, not really. What actually occurred was I was feeding the worms, which sounds far, far less inglorious. I slipped on a piece of metal, and torqued a small bone in my foot beyond it’s ability. I was on crutches with a boot. I was trying, and going backwards, well, actually movement had led to immobility. My body was still a tool, and I wasn’t hearing it all that well. I finally made a plea with the universe to just let me walk again. No more macho guy stuff. No more of this “my body is a tool” stuff. My body is me and I’m going to listen to it. What I didn’t know then was that somatic intelligence and coming into the place of functional fitness at 60 plus years of age requires the same sort of self-regulation as the experience with using the body tremors to heal trauma does. There is no gung-ho in either case.
Simply put, somatic intelligence is learning to know and live within your own body. It involves learning to breathe fully, and to move freely. As we focus on this emerging intelligence, and learn the breathing, and the moving, and the perceptions, we can move into full integrated living. Tremoring is the perfect process to experience somatic intelligence, because from the inside out, it can not only develop that intelligence if we pay attention, it will complete and discharge obstructions, and it will help restore idiodynamicy unlike anything that any motor control conscious activity ever will. Somatic intelligence is the foundation of all the others, it is the foundation of coming home.
Imagine that feeling, rolling down out of the Lolo Pass of the Cascade Mountains, and seeing the green Willamette Valley in front of you. This is why you loaded your wagon in Missouri and left for parts unknown in the first place. It’s why you decided to make the trip of almost 2200 miles, facing the elements, the equipment, the fellow travelers. You breathe a heavy sigh. This is now you’re home. You made it.
Wouldn’t it be great to say, “'I’m healed!” and know it’s a reality? If you’ve poked around here a bit, you might come to see that I believe such a thing is quite possible. I was convinced of that possibility by Dr. Peter Levine. Yet is also seems to me as I read the stories of others and interact with them, that the don’t know how to measure progress, or understanding what healing is. Some might say, “no symptoms.” The dead have no symptoms, is that what you mean? Facetiousness and exaggeration aside, that post is about what healing looks like, and how you can know it’s happening. Let me offer an illustration, and then I’ll get into the description.
Remember the old number lines from math classes? We all thought that 0 was the lowest you could go and one day, one hellish day, the teacher says there are negative numbers. Talk about alternative facts! OMG! Well, they draw out the number line, and so we worked with it, and learned that two negatives equal a positive, and so on. Let’s take that same number line and look at it like money. The negative side is trauma debt as it were. That’s what that life feels like, the constant strain of growing debt. Healing doesn’t mean we get out of debt and stop at zero.
Oh no.
I think for too many though, that’s what the mental image is. I was 58 years in debt, so I had no way of picturing even the zero! I may have moved from negative kajillion to - negative million, but I’m still on the debt side of the line. Not even at zero. To me that’s what a “survivor” is. That isn’t “healed.” Having a limiting perspective or vision keeps me in debt and not even moving toward, or at best, crawling toward zero. I wasn’t interested in that. Either my trauma was over, or I was gonna be.
The reality of healing from trauma is moving out of one neurological state into another. Industry leaders in trauma healing like Levine, van der Kolk, Berceli, Heller, Porges, Badenoch, Scaer, Lowen and others over the last half century which started with Selye in 1934, state that there are neurological states of 1) social engagement, 2) fight/flight (which has a lot of aliases), 3) freeze, and 4) fold (flop). There are also a few combination states, such as appeasement, play, and intimacy. What that means in real life regarding healing is in the image to the left.
At the bottom is the social engagement zone, and it has far more qualities than just the two listed there. I can enumerate six different intelligences that are innate to this area of experience and their many qualities. Likewise, fight/flight, which Porges calls mobilization, and freeze, have many other characteristics as well.
When we are traumatized, we have moved out of social engagement as a matter of living. It has become the new normal to live in a state of chronic fight/flight, which I refer to as a threat state. That is in reality what it is. You can imagine what that implies about how we then live. One has all the symptoms, again, far more than thoser listed here, all dressed up in day job attire.
The process of healing is in moving out of these states of chronic threat, back to social engagement. I was in functional freeze for many years. I was actually that wavy line on the right, moving between high fight/flight and low freeze. I had a job, a marriage that was dissolving, no close friendships, deteriorating health, not close to my own children, and dissociated quite a bit. I was also a firefighter/EMT/rescue operator! The point is, people can and do function in adaption to these states. The chronic functional state is how I, and many people live their daily lives. That was, until I had my personal Perfect Storm. Replete with all the symptoms, all dressed up in day job attire.
What we feel like at times.
So the changing of neurological states as a way of being is the actuality of what healing trauma means, and there are a lot of details in that. How then do we know if we’re healing? How do we “measure” it?
The stress bell curve image above? Let’s use that for a few moments. Imagine I’m in a state of trauma, it is complete and I’ve been here for years. The bottom segment in reality would be a little sliver, and the top one maybe a little smaller, and the middle one huge, and we can populate that area with all the of the physical, emotional, cognitive and social symptoms that accompany those states. I have a list of 37 of them and I’m sure it isn’t exhaustive. Okay, we living in a neurological ghetto. As we heal with effective tools, that line that separates social engagement from fight/flight, begins moving upward. Remember, the body has the drive to always return to balance as it were. What I call idiodynamicy. As we continue to heal, the symptoms of the arousal states begin to diminish and dissolve, and the symptoms of social engagement can emerge. One measurement then is that diminishing and dissolving of symptoms and behaviors related to states of fight/flight/freeze.. A second “measurement,” is that it takes a wee bit less to “get on my last nerve.” This is the difference between reactivity, and response-ability. That line between social engagement and the arousal states also represents our neurological,emotional,cognitive, and somatic resilience and capacity. We feel like the image of the glass of water, right? Just a little more is going to lead to a mess, because we lack capacity and resilience. In threat states, I am defensive. That’s a no-brainer, huh? How then will I behave? Reactively in many instances. I was accused many times of being defensive…because I was., and for many years I didn’t know why. As those states change, I am able to work on listening, and try and be in the other person’s shoes and thoughts and questions, and be response-able in my communication and relationships. I had an experience once where I dropped a glass. It was on a thinly carpeted kitchen floor, so I expected it to break all around my feet. And it didn’t. It bounced, and not just a little bit. I was able to bend over slightly, and caught that glass in my hand on the rebound. That ability to bounce back? THAT is literally resilience. Capacity means I empty the glass so it can be re-filled. In changing neurological states, the glass is stronger so bouncing back is easier, and capacity keeps getting larger. My somatic, emotional, cognitive and social intelligences keep expanding, as there is really nothing to limit them. The second measurement then is an increasing resilience and capacity. I can handle more.
A third way of measuring healing is the changes in our body, provided we use certain tools. If we use somatic processes, there is the ability to change myofascial constriction, vagal tone which is really a heart rhythm change, and the way we breathe at least. In my case it has dropped my blood pressure, my cholesterol is dropping, my posture is better, my weight is slowly coming down, and I am more active and flexible. And certainly not to be overlooked, is that feeling of being home in the body, and I feel that as being relaxed. I do have reasons for mentioning it though, because the issue with trauma isn’t just or primarily in our heads. It’s primarily in our bodies. It can be however, a significant way to measure real growth, which is different than change. And any good healing reconnects us with our bodies, as part of the integration process.
If we look at the header image, we see the Oregon Trail map. They could measure the progress at first, based on the city they left. First it gets smaller, then is no longer on the eastern horizon, or just beyond that ridge back there. It is way back there over several rivers and even more ridges. Then one day, we see on the western horizon something we’ve never seen before: the Rocky Mountains. Some decided to stop and not cross the mountains, and set down roots where they were in Idaho, or Colorado. Pretty places, not where they were, and they still know the way home. The goal was Oregon. The Promised Land of freedom. In healing, if we persevere through potential trials as if in a Joseph Campbell Hero’s Journey, the innate somatic, emotional, cognitive, spiritual, and environmental intelligences, can blossom into a whole new life, and we can complete the S/Hero Journey.
To sum up, healing is the changing of survival states (fight/flight/freeze) and their associated maladaptive behaviors, thoughts, and physical conditions to the “rest and digest” social engagement state of responsibility. The changing of the neurological states, the dissolving of the symptoms of arousal as well as the ways we thought, and behaved, are how we measure our healing. The end is when we put our feet up on the porch rail at the end of the day, looking at what we actually own, what our work has achieved, and we know that we’re free, and we’re home.
It’s hard to fix a problem you don’t identify correctly. Years ago a car repair company ran an ad where people made the sound their car was making and the mechanic had to figure out what that meant. “Whippety whippety whippety fzzzzzz, brrrt brrt pop pop pop.” “Ah yes,” say the mechanic. “It’s the regulator. We can fix that.” When it comes to healing trauma, that might be more the case than we suspect, and part of the reason we gain so little traction in this field. This study points to some of the issues, and if we aren’t diagnosed properly, how do we expect outcomes in the right direction? It wasn’t long ago I watched a webinar, and the host asked most of the presenters what trauma was. I was and wasn’t surprised that no two had the same definition. Some hemmed and hawed, as if they had no definition. How then can we expect to get better?
Let me offer then, my definitions. These are amalgamations of what I’ve read from Drs. Scaer, Levine, Berceli, van der Kolk, Heller, Badenoch, and others over the last seven years.
What is stress? Why am I starting here you might ask? Because the stress response is the root of trauma. The T&S of PTSD. The stress response has many names - mobilization, sympathetic nervous system, activation, arousal, fight/flight. I prefer the to use “threat response,” because that was it’s actual primary acute use for millenia. You’ll see as we put the two halves together how this works. I want to point out just a few things from this rather full definition, and if you have questions or comments for discussion, please ask.
To start with, stress is a cycle. It has a clear beginning, and ending. It’s hard wired in us. However, I have heard a medically trained professional say there is no off switch. Give that a thought for a second, and the possibility of a species to survive as long as we have with no off switch? That’s kinda what I thought, too. Stress is a cycle. The start of that is when the brain perceives something as a threat. In other words, the brain’s smoke alarm goes off, and mobilizes the body for fight/flight. All well and good. However, what happens when the event is over? Do we demobilize, or are we still at the ready? The body has a process for demobilizing, and that is by and large forgotten in our species. Or suppressed. Either way, the consequences have been serious.
Second facet I’ll mention is that stress is autonomic. Once the smoke alarm goes off, a whole bunch of things happen that you have no control over with the exception of your breathing. There are cerebral, cardio, digestive, endocrine, hematological, hearing, immune, myofascial, reproductive, respiratory, and vision changes. All starting at once and occurring in seconds. Ninety nine percent of which we have no control over. Because it’s autonomic. It’s meant to make you go from standing still to Usain Bolt in a heartbeat, or from Clark Kent to Superman without time consuming thinking. Time in which we end up being dead. That is a good reason to cut cognition out of the process!
Lastly I’ll mention (I have to think you noticed), that this experience is by and large, physiological, not psychological. The body shunts blood to the muscles, so hearing is effected a little bit, and one of the places it’s shunted from is the frontal cortexes of the brain. That’s called hypofrontality. That means more or less that the cortexes are on a dimmer switch once the threat state is activated, and the more intense it gets, the dimmer the cortexes are. Emotions get narrowed, and the organism is now prepared for life saving flight or threat termination fight. All automatically. Of course we know that in the millisecond of history that the last 1000 years represents at the very least, the things we perceive as a threat have changed quite dramatically. It’s no longer sporadic lions and tigers and bears, oh my. It’s chronic worry about pink slips, student debt and a health crisis, oh my. Yet the response by the human organism is exactly the same. What was once acute, has now become chronic, yet it is still for the most part, physiological.
What then is trauma? Let’s look back at stress, and ask what happens when a stress cycle is not completed? As Peter Levine (PhD in psychology and biophysics) explains in his book In an Unspoken Voice, it accumulates in the body. It’s like pulling on a spring, and then holding it rather than letting it go. The next stress activation, we pull a little more, and again, don’t let go. Keep adding the cycles up and I think you’ll see what happens to the tension of the spring, and, what would happen if you let it go all at once. This happens over time of course, and I want to draw your attention to a couple aspects here.
One is that these accumulated, incomplete threat cycles (trauma) become rupturing. These ruptures happen to our sense of safety, they happen to our relationships, and as they go unrepaired, they rupture the very physical process of the organism. First in the body, and then as the chronic state of rupture remains, into the psyche. The imbalance of hormones and myofascial constriction and cardiovascular changes and glucose/insulin reactions over time leaves little choice of the organism’s normal functioning to be ruptured, as Robert Sapolsky points this out in his book, Why Zebra’s Don’t Get Ulcers. Secondly, a chronic threat state will become what the brain re-wires around since it’s firing there. What then of beliefs, and thoughts, and emotions? Living in a chronic threat state means we come to see the world is a dangerous place and that people are threats, and the circle of safety gets mighty small indeed. Even close relationships become threatening as our calm turns into irritability, our irritability into annoyed, and then into anger and our tone matches our mood and we isolate and those are the ruptures of relationships because the chronic threat state is the new normal. Is it any wonder the divorce rate is near 50%, the “little blue pill” is a huge seller, and “I’m better off alone” is a common refrain and even though I might not like living with myself all that much, it beats the static of a constant state of anger and conflict in a relationship. My cynicism increases, my sarcasm, my shortness, how can people be so damned stupid, and my thoughts are the same as my tone and words because the threat state in-forms the emotions that in-forms the beliefs that in-forms my actions and words. That is what it means to be traumatized. And because I don’t like being with my own craziness that has no label on it, no diagnosed description, I choose maladaptive behaviors to get the love I want and/or to kill the pain. I attempt many times to change, to put this on, to take that off, to transform myself. Yet in the end, again and again, my emotions, my cognition, my beliefs, my social life are all one big dumpster fire that seemingly gets bigger all the time. That’s also what it means to be traumatized. So on top of the physiological disordering and potential issues that arise there, I now have a psyche effected as well because the stress cycles I’ve experienced for 60 years were by and large never completed. Where I couldn’t fight/flight or maladapt, I dissociated. It gets labeled as all kinds of things like personality traits, which become family traits, which become culture and political systems, and the reality is, this is what it means to be traumatized. Supersized.
The upside is that ruptures can be repaired, which means that if we complete the stress cycles, we can heal. And the body contains the process to do that very thing. And that is another post….
It’s always nice to know there is a hope, right? A possibility of accomplishing something that seemed impossible once? Even more when you head out on an adventure like taking the Oregon Trail to a new place to live, or in the case being on the ocean, having an ability to anchor the ship. Anchors can be used to stay in port and not be the whim of every ebb and tide that grounds the vessel and damages it. An anchor is important, and in trauma healing no less so. And an anchor with 4 arms offers balance as well as twice as many capabilities of doing it’s job as a two arm. Most anchor images I found were either two or four, and it wasn’t until I mused on the image that I realized this anchor has four. And so does the image I created that is a collection of quotes from leaders in the trauma healing field. Let me describe my anchor, okay?
Arm #1 - Trauma is curable. This is a quote from Peter Levine, in this little book titled Healing Trauma. This is a controversial statement for many. They have the opinion it is not. And nothing to support that statement other than other opinions, but they are fiercely held. Almost like they want it to be incurable, but that’s hard to believe. The basic issue with believing trauma is curable in any of a million different ways, or that it isn’t; underlies the misunderstanding of what trauma is by nature. I’ve seen denial, and bypassing as the primary practices that fail to take into account what the nature of what we’re dealing with is. Rest assured though, trauma is curable. A PhD in Psychology with 40 years experience in the field saw fit to print such words. I took his word for it. It’s true! But it doesn’t happen in just three sessions.
Arm #2 - Trauma isn’t a life sentence. Another Levine quote from Healing Trauma, one with a slight twist in a different location: ““it doesn’t have to be a life sentence. In this post I reveal when my personal unraveling was, which sounds gentle but wasn’t. It was more like getting tossed around in a boat before being slammed upside down and having to find a way out while the thrashing continues. Up is down, then sideways, forward is now cattywampus, all while being banged around and I’m suddenly adrift, by myself, in this vastly huge ocean, with no idea of help coming. I was 56 years old. How was trauma not a life sentence? I’d never even heard the word trauma relative to what I’ve learned since.
For me it became about not letting it remain a life sentence. The past was behind me, though still in me. No sense in moping, so get on with getting healed. I didn’t know however, how to do that.
Arm #3 - Trauma can be healed without talking about it, remembering it, or a diagnosis. This arm is a collection of Levine and Berceli. Dr. Berceli, PhD, did his social work in places where people didn’t have a word or concept for the new fangled invention called talk therapy. Even if they did, according to him they would need to walk for days to get to it, and since they couldn’t set an appointment from where they lived, they’d have to walk to where it possible, make that appointmemt, then they’d have to wait. How did their ancestors heal? How did our Sapien and Neanderthal kin that had the same nervous system we have, but no such thing as meds or therapy not become traumatized? How do wild animals not have PTSD? If remembering it was required, all developmental trauma is just about incurable. If I don’t need to remember it, do I even need to talk about what I can’t remember? As for a diagnosis, those simply exist to control and collect insurance dollars. Again, a new invention, and not exactly dependable. However, the body remembers, as Babette Rothschild tells us, and Dr. van der Kolk tweaks that a little with his book, The Body Keeps the Score.
Arm #4 - The body is capable of and equipped for this healing. We now move from the belief part (trauma is curable) to the experience of making it so. Levine, Heller, Badenoch, Berceli, van der Kolk all point to this, some say it directly. As do I. The Jill Bolte Taylor Ted Talk vividly reveals how powerfully self-healing the human body is. Or for example take a cut on your finger. What do we do for it to heal? We require no fine surgeon to stitch it all back together. The fascia, muscle, nerves and blood vessels take care of all that, as does the skin. All the body needs is an environment in which to accomplish this healing.
I remember first learning how to canoe in Canada. We were taught about the canoe first, what it could and could not do, before we could touch one. Then we learned how to lift and carry it, and then we could get into it to get a feel for how it sat in the water. The we added gear, to get a feel for the wieght change. Finally, we were ready to head out, and the guide that went with us showed us what to watch out for on various bodies of water. Year after year we got more confident, and we finally were capable of adventuring out into the part of the park where the Rangers said, “no one goes.”
The body is capable, and equipped to do this healing. The process is built right in, and it’s autonomic, just like the stress response is. It’s part of that system, and designed to do exactly that - complete and discharge the stress that creates trauma.
There we have it. Four arms with flukes and peas that dig into the earth that make up a solid anchor that will serve us well in the event a storm comes along. In trauma healing, re-visiting trauma isn’t healing. That’s re-traumatizing. If a storm shows up on the horizon, we skirt around it. There is an art to that in trauma healing, and being well anchored will allow us to navigate the waters of trauma healing without the fear and upheaval of storms.
It wouldn’t be advised by any park ranger. It would be a great way to encounter death. Wandering in the unknown without a map, or ability to read a map, or skills, equipment or food, leads to wandering in circles until the food is gone, or you become food. It’s being in a place you’re physically, cognitively and emotionally incapable of existing in, for any length of time.
That is why you need a guide, so you can learn how to navigate this beautiful and dangerous wilderness, until you learn to live within it as a companion. That’s what healing trauma is like.
I hear from a lot of people who have a trauma issues, and how they want to approach them. Some want whatever DIY cheapest way to go is, and they scour YouTube looking for solutions, and not really vetting them as to whether they will do harm or good. Some are a little more circumspect than that, but still want it to be “affordable,” without realizing in full what they’re dealing with or what the value of what they are paying for is. They want the microwave answer, for which they are willing to pay microwave prices. You get what you pay for.
These kinds of people are like those that traipse off into the woods and get lost, and don’t realize that the human tendency is to walk in circles, and they don’t have the right equipment to be where they are. It’s a “sunny mountain” so let’s take a hike! They fail to bring water or fuel, they are dressed in shorts and tee shirts, and the trail ascends 3000 feet into the cool clouds because they’re at the base of a glacier and mountain weather can change that fast. They get tired and careless, and walk through nettles. They see water springing from a rock, and drink it. And pay for that mistake for months.
This is what it’s like to try and heal trauma without a guide. Someone who will be able to look at your equipment, and skills, and be able to move out into the wild with confidence, rather than being the ones who have to organize a search party.
There are several good reasons to consider a somatic therapist as a guide in healing your trauma. The first is that trauma is primarily in the body. I cover that elsewhere, so won’t go into that here in detail. Suffice it to say, your body’s autonomic processes include one to heal and prevent trauma. Secondly, a guide can see what is going on with you that you might not notice (Your tent is falling over). That can be quite important, as one of the benefits of the presence of another is the moving into co-regulating. That is what we are evolved to do, and one of the developmental movements of childhood is moving from co-regulating as an infant, to self regulating with one’s own wants and needs, back to co-regulating as we move into relationships where what we want and/or need isn’t always the priority. First the guide shows us how to do things, then let’s us try nine/teen/ty times to do something, patiently watching and not willing to take over, and then after some time, one of you sets up the tents and gets water while the other gets firewood and starts a fire. Lastly, I’ll mention that the guide has been in these parts before. In fact, don’t work with a guide that hasn’t. They can show you where the scree field is, that ends in a 200 foot drop. Don’t walk on loose stones on a descending face! They can also take you to that magical waterfall that has a pool you can sit in that was seemingly made just for you, and feel the weight of the water as you sit in it as it pounds the tightness out of your shoulders. Then later you can look at a map, and see just where that was, so you can return to it another time. See? You’re learning how to read the map of the terrain! That’s what you need to be able to survive in this awesomely beautiful world, that can have it’s brutal side if we don’t pay attention or think it’s just a post card picture.
And, you pay for a guide. You learn, and not in one two week jaunt, or a 3000 foot ascent, and then back down while you’re drenched and cold; thirsty, and without water. The guide goes with you, and teaches you where to pitch the tent when you’re on rock, how to bear proof your food supply, how to start a fire, how to make the coffee that staves off hunger. And how to possibly catch fish in the event you need to. See that plant? Yea, despite it’s huge leaf, not good toilet paper. It’s called Devils Claw. For a reason. See the blueberries along the track up there? Let’s feast, but watch for bear. They happen to like them, too. A little one is cute, and likely means a big one is close behind. All of that experience and knowledge is worth the investment if you want to be able to navigate this world on your own in as short a time as possible. It’s the difference between living and dying. The movie Jeremiah Johnson had this as a sub theme.
And you won’t learn it in a fortnight either. Take a year. Work with that guide every week. Learn, and most importantly, practice. You want that practical muscle bound memory knowledge more than anything. Marry that brain stuff with body stuff. Then perhaps the next year, you’ll be able to go out on your own. Of course you’ll be nervous! Maybe even take an easy trip. Up to the waterfall and back. You’ll be able to find that waterfall, and maybe you’ll see the magic wore off a little. But something on the other side catches your eye, and you find a way to cross over, and navigate the landscape to what you saw, and you find a little glade that for whatever reason, is completely devoid of rock. When you get back to civilization, and run into your guide, you ask about this glade, and he says he hasn’t been there. Never seen it. That’s your discovery.
Aldo Leopold wrote an essay titled, Think Like a Mountain. Life can be like that - a mountain. If we’re traumatized, it seems insurmountable, even though we want to ascend the heights. A guide is what helps you match the mountains. They can bring you those first steps, so you realize the mountain isn’t going to shrug you off, or start chucking rocks at you, despite what we saw in The Hobbit. The mountain will welcome those who respect it, learn it’s ways, who learn to live with it. And that is what a good guide can show you: how to live on the peaks and in the valleys of the mountains.
Ask one hundred people, and you’ll get close to 100 answers. Many will have similar threads, some will start, but not finish the question. It will be like a trauma webinar I watched with credentialed professionals, and guess what? No two of them had the same answer. How then are we supposed to be able to deal with what could arguably be the worst health issue on the planet? If you don’t diagnose accurately, you certainly can’t treat accurately.
When I started my healing journey back in 2013, I started with reading Robert Scaer’s book, The Trauma Spectrum. I had one of those moments when reading the description of stress and it’s effects, that I saw how all these disparate dots of my life suddenly made a coherent, yet ugly, picture. Since then I have been studying books and studies, and applying what I can to my own experience of healing.
That being said, here is my definition of stress:
a cyclical, physiological strain on body resources in response to a perceived threat that demands physical engagement.
Let’s break this down, shall we? First, and a very important point, is that stress in our human history, is meant to be acute, and a cycle. That means it gets occasionally “turned on,” and then, “turned off.” To use more clinical terms, we are hard-wired to move from social engagement (safety), into fight/flight, or freeze, and fold if death is imminent, and then back into fight/flight, and finally returning to social engagement by discharge and reset. That is the complete stress response cycle.
The second point is that stress is primarily physiological, not psychological. Here’s a simplification of how the stress response operates in the body:
One of the sensory organs receives a signal:
Sight (knife or gun, or predator with sharp claws and teeth, fire in the popcorn pot),
smell (smoke, petroleum product),
sensation on skin (hot, cold, numb, an edge),
taste (we spit it out),
sound (car backfire, handgun “pop,” explosion, crashing of glass, rumbling as in earthquake).
That signal is sent to the hippocampi to check against memory. Memory says the smoke is a BBQ. That changes the response immediately. Same with the preceding sputtering of a starting engine that puts the backfire in context. If the hippocampi say’s “It’s cool,” we return to social engagement and invite ourselves to the BBQ. If however the memory says this is unknow, we are on alert until it’s clarified. If not good, then the amygdala reacts with the “threat” signal, and that activates a waterfall of responses in the body the moves to the brainstem, and the rest is autonomic:
The jaw muscles tighten
Hearing is diminished because blood flow is shunted to large muscles
The eyes get tunnel vision to focus on the threat, and the pupils dilate to allow more light into the tunnel
The breathing gets shallow, and fast
The heart rate goes up immediately
The myofascia system (muscles and fascia) braces for fight or flight.
The adrenals begin releasing adrenaline and cortisol
The glucose in the body is suddenly in demand, and the insulin response ready for it’s call to action.
Fine motor skills diminish
The body shuts off immune, reproductive and digestive system functioning.
The PFC goes on a dimmer switch
And that is where we usually leave it. All that build up of glucose, the re-directing of energy in the body (the brain takes 20% of that energy, and the PFC most of that), means there is a strain on those resources. Okay if it’s acute and a completed cycle. Not so okay if we go from one stressor to the next. To quote Robert Sapolsky, “sustained psychological stress is a recent invention...for a vast majority of beasts on this planet, stress is about a short term crisis, after which, it’s either over with, or you’re over with...unlike less cognitively sophisticated species, we can turn on the stress response (threat) by thinking about potential stressors...thus, the stress response can be mobilized in response to physical or psychological insults, but also in expectation of them.”
As we can see, a lot of the human organism goes into this threat response, and we haven’t even touched on belief systems, or the emotional aspects, and social implications. This is just to show how physiological the stress response is. And what happens to all that energy put into the system when we perceive a threat, and don’t engage physically? It can become the diseases that Sapolsky wrote about in his book. As Peter Levine says, “It works by understanding that trauma is primarily physiological. Trauma is something that happens initially to our bodies and our instincts. Only then do its effects spread to our minds, emotions, and spirits.”
Lastly, the threat response (which has many names, thus helping the confusion) is looking for an actual physical engagement of some kind. You either physically flee by running and climbing and jumping to escape a much faster predator, or we actually engage in fighting. Typically, we do neither. For example, “Honey, we need to talk.” Assuredly, the stress response is activated, and if you fight, well, not so good. If you flee, likewise. So the response is to freeze, and the stress response has the dubious action of shutting down not just the communication center called the Broca Area, it also inhibits memory to some degree, until and unless the cycle is completed. Another example is the boss saying, “Come into my office.” Again, threat response is activated, we don’t flee or fight, the memory is inhibited and Broca goes silent. Not the best combo. We start a lot of cycles, and never complete them. They accumulate in the body.
The body however, is equipped and capable of completing the stress cycle. Otherwise as a species, we would not have survived. The discharge and reset is, “the particular type of spontaneous shaking, trembling and breathing (they do).” Levine teaches that this is the particular ending of the threat response in animals in the wild, and as he says elsewhere, we have that same mammalian response. I have seen this in my time emergency responding, mostly with accident patients. I had one call that involved three different examples of it.
I was cruising down highway 525 and at the top of the a valley, down at the intersection, I could see trouble. Two people were in the middle of the highway, helping what was obviously an animal. I could see traffic coming in the opposite direction having to slow down to avoid the people, and I saw potential disaster written all over. I hit the lights and pulled into the intersection, providing protection at least from my direction. Sure enough, two ladies were “helping” what appeared to be a dead deer. I asked who hit it, and one woman said, the lady up the hill, who I hadn’t noticed.
Sure enough, there was a white compact half way up the hill on this two lane highway with narrow shoulders and guard rails, blocking half the lane. I told the two, to remove the deer from the road please (one of them had a small red pickup), and proceeded to the woman up the hill. And now I had to block that lane to protect the two of us. It was getting congested, but I didn’t think I needed back-up. I got out and walked over to her car, which didn’t register any damage at all, which is good. She was in the driver seat, shaking, and crying. I did my usual protocol to orient, rule out injury, and assess for cognition. Everything in that regard was okay. So I told her to stay where she was until what she was going through ended, which I figured would soon enough, and I stepped to the back of the car to listen, and not invade her privacy. Sure enough, I heard the diaphragmatic release, the sigh, and she told me it was done. I asked if she was okay to drive, she said yes, and I sent her on.
At this point in time, the red pick-up drove by, and one woman was walking up the hill towards my rig. When she gets to me, her hands are bloody and I asked if the pick-up driver was going to take the carcass somewhere. “Funny thing,” she says. “We were putting it in the bed, and it started these kicking spasms, so we backed off, and it started shaking and suddenly popped up, jumped out of the bed and over the guard rail and ran into the woods. I just want something to clean my hands with.” I was mid word with “I have just what you need,” when she, while standing there, started crying and shaking. I stopped and said, “Let this happen, it’ll go away soon.” I went to the rig and got wipes and towels, then we stood there for a few minutes, I watched the same reaction in her with her tremoring and diaphragmatic reset and a sigh, and then it was over.
I surmised that the deer was in freeze, meaning the threat is perceived as so great, the body shuts down either in anticipation of imminent death, or, to present an unpleasant meal to a predator. Once it perceived the relative safety of the straw lined truck bed, it’s brain stem and midbrain decided death wasn’t so imminent, came back into fight/flight, and fled. The two women had perceptions (high traffic congestion and potential accidents with injury) that proved unfounded, and their systems completed, as did the deer, that stress response cycle. That event was over, and none of them were. This part one post leaves out what the chronic response without cyclical completion does to the human organism. What we call trauma. To recap then, stress is a cyclical, physiological strain on body resources in response to a perceived threat that demands physical engagement. The next post will reference this as we look at what trauma is. Stay tuned!
References (in bold):
1. Robert Sapolsky, Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers, pgs 5-7
2. Peter Levine, Healing Trauma, pg 30
3. Mobilization, activation, threat response, fight/flight, the four Fs, sympathetic nervous system arousal, arousal, to name some off the top of my head
4. . Peter Levine, Healing Trauma, pg 39
We just aren’t fast enough. In terms of evolution, we’re far more like a tortoise—one of those really old ones—than a cheetah.
In his book The Perfect Health Diet (pages 5-6), Paul Jannet, PhD, says it would take approximately 200,000 years in the modern era for a genetic mutation to reach “fixation.” In other words, universal presence. As the population grows, the time it takes for a fixation to occur grows longer.
The brain we have now is a throwback. Let’s say a throwback of two million years. Somewhere before then, the genus homo evolved, and it existed in several different species, such as erectus, rudolfensis, neanderthalis, and the sapiens. As a species, we’ve had our current nervous system, including brain, spinal cord, and nerve pathways for hundreds of thousands of years, if not far longer.
In those hundreds of thousands of years, humans changed very little, except as needed when they moved to different parts of the globe. For example, the Neanderthal had a bigger body and eyes, due to living in mountainous regions. There is a species that existed in the Pacific islands that was dwarfish. All of those changes happened over millennia. Then sapiens came along, and things changed.
Man invented agriculture.
For hundreds of thousands of years, we hunted and gathered. That was the way our nervous system wired and fired, and that was the reality that was encoded in our genes and passed to our progeny along with the attendant emotional and physical behaviors. About 10 to 12 thousand years ago, man started to use agriculture as a means to stabilize the food source. That meant several things. One was settling down around the food. That altered gathering behaviors and physiology. A second was the need to protect the food and themselves. For hundreds of thousands of years, threats took the form of a tiger or abear, or an angry Neanderthal who wanted something we had. Back then, we fled if we needed to, or fought. For hundreds of thousands of years, we acted on our nervous system response to fight or flee. We burned up the survival energy our bodies produced and we went on with life.
With agriculture, our threats changed. We had to worry about crops being sufficient. We had to contend with waste management, food storage, weather, and plain old getting along with each other. Life changed, but we didn’t. Remember that 200,000 years? Since the advent of agriculture, we invented the compass. The wheel. Writing. The steam engine, cars, airplanes, computers, smartphones…..
All of that change from agriculture to today took place in a little over one percent of the time we’ve existed as humans. Most of it in about a quarter of one percent.
What happened to the bears? The tigers? The other Neanderthals? What really changed? Us, or the world around us?
That’s what I mean when I say we have ancient nervous systems in a modern world.
Look at it this way. Imagine that we played baseball for millennia, the same way. The kids grew up playing it, generation after generation after generation. Then one year they decided to change a rule. After a lot of blank stares, players adapted to that rule. Then another rule changed a few generations later. More blank stares, but they adapted, too. Every couple generations, they began to expect a rule change. Then two rule changes took place in a single generation. After that, changes started taking place every year, then at the beginning of each month, then at the beginning of each game, and then just about every time a player swung a bat. That’s the speed at which things are changing in the world today. We’re still the same old batter, with our paleo brains and nervous systems, and we just can’t keep up with all the changes taking place in the world around us.
Understanding all this can make it easier to function in the world. The gift TRE gives us is the ability to help our ancient nervous systems adapt to the constant changes that take place in the modern world. Let me use an image.
Imagine, if you will, that you have a glass in your hand. It represents your capacity for stress. Along comes a stressor -- say your alarm going off in the morning, and it pours water into the glass. Then comes another stressor (you’re late because you hit the snooze button), and more water goes into the glass. You skip breakfast (more water), traffic is snarled (the water level is getting higher), you’re late to work (higher still), then the boss calls you into his office (it’s getting closer to the top, now), and there is a problem directly affecting you (the glass overflows). It’s only 9:30 a.m.
What TRE® does is empower you to dump “water” out of your glass. Most of what we interpret as threats to our survival actually aren’t, so we need a means of getting rid of the survival energy we’re constantly being flooded with. TRE enables us to maintain the capacity to deal with modern life’s issues without our ancient brain getting overwhelmed.
To learn more about how TRE can help, visit our website at www.raiseyourresilience.com. While you’re there, sign up for our newsletter!
Our community was already reeling from the November deaths of three young men, who were killed by a drunk driver when, on Christmas Day, part of a tree fell on a passing vehicle, killing a 9-year-old girl. “Zippy” was the daughter of a well-known and loved family in the community. As an EMT on duty, I responded to that call, and it was my perfect storm.
My life essentially came undone after that. I had lost my job a few months before, was homeless for a while, lost my marriage,and had a whopping case of PTSD, which I couldn’t name at the time. I just felt it — as did everyone around me. Because of that call, I experienced my first and only single phase critical incident stress debriefing (CISD) in the 15 years I spent serving as a volunteer firefighter/EMT.
For weeks after the call, I would break down crying anywhere and everywhere. One day, while in a local coffee shop, I could feel it coming on. I never recognized the triggers, I just felt the unstoppable flood approaching. I sought out the back room, which was usually empty, sat down and cried. Eventually, Petra, who I’d met there a few months earlier, walked in. Knowing that I’d responded to that call, she asked, “Who takes care of you guys?”
“No one,” I replied. I told her about the CISD, and yet, here I still was, crying. I have since learned that the efficacy of single session CISDs can be as harmful as helpful, if not more so. She felt something was wrong with that picture. She orchestrated a grief counseling event for the entire community, but was unsatisfied with the results. Someone needed to help these emergency responders. But who? She was just an English major, what could she do? Then she realized that she could ask healers to help and built a website that listed those who were willing to offer free care to emergency responders. It was a safety net for our community’s safety net. And the nonprofit organization Whidbey CareNet was born.
Used by permission of Paul Combs
I was asked to serve as co-director, and we soon discovered how hard it is for helpers to ask for help. Providers were eager to serve emergency responders, but were disappointed when they failed to take them up on the offer of free care. Petra and I became more and more interested in empowering responders to help themselves and began looking for tools that could prevent stress and trauma rather than relieve it after the fact.
One day, a retired firefighter from Canada told us we needed to check out what Dr. David Berceli was teaching about healing trauma. Within weeks, we were in Canada with Dr. Berceli, learning TRE®.
It was Dr. Berceli who first suggested that I take a test to determine whether I had PTSD. A year later, I took it and could finally name the affliction that haunted me. Fortunately, I also had a new tool with which to cure it.
I entered into a period of full-blown PTSD anxiety symptoms, and I had to learn how to use my new tool to deal with it. I was able to dial TRE in and found that doing just enough of it kept me relaxed and feeling safe enough to function. As the trauma released, my symptoms dissipated, and I was able to adjust my use to accommodate the greater capacity that my system developed. In the process, we also learned about other tools that are effective in helping to mitigate stress and trauma symptoms. Tools like mindfulness, writing, emotional intelligence, breathing techniques, and yawning.
From all that experience, a new business was born, one we named because of what we experienced and wanted others to experience: Raise Your Resilience, LLC. I discovered that I could heal the PTSD I had, I could heal the neglect and trauma of my childhood, the later addiction, the passive aggressive behavior, the disconnection, the dissociation, the anxiety, the hypervigilance, the flashbacks. I learned I could address the backlog of stress responses I had stifled from my past, and live more fully in the present moment.
Our research led us to understand how stress and trauma affects neurological development, psychological integration, relationships, and physical health. We also learned how the tools we use can heal us, restore our organism’s balance, and can return us to health.
I survived my perfect storm. I cured my PTSD, and I don’t spend my time having to control my symptoms or take meds to mask them. I am spending my time living my life. I want to help others live theirs, so they can get onto the trajectory of embodied wholeness. This is why we do what we do.
I know life is tough. But I also know from personal experience that you can grow through it.
I was one of eight TRE providers who volunteered to join Dr. Berceli in Manheim, Pennsylvania, for an event organized specifically for veterans. I enjoy being present any time Dr. Berceli teaches, even if it is just for two hours, like this event was. There’s always something to learn.