Meditation, trauma and neuroplasticity

An article on meditation and the healing nature of it a while ago in Psychology Today:

Buddhism uses intelligence to control the emotions. Through meditative practices, awareness can be trained and focused on the contents of the mind to observe ongoing experience. Such techniques are of growing interest to Western psychologists, who increasingly see depression as a disorder of emotional mismanagement. In this view, attention is hijacked by negative events and then sets off a kind of chain reaction of negative feeling, thinking and behavior that has its own rapidity and inevitability.

Techniques of awareness permit the cultivation of self-control. They allow people to break the negative emotional chain reaction and head off the hopelessness and despair it leads to. By focusing attention, it is possible to monitor your environment, recognize a negative stimulus and act on it the instant it registers on awareness. While attention as traditional psychologists know it can be an exhausting mental activity, as Buddhists practice it it actually becomes a relaxing and effortless enterprise.

This once again is an explanation of brain neuroplasticity. We all have the ability to heal our brains.

Here is a recovery story of someone whose primary means of complete recovery from serious mental illness was meditaition.

Recovery through mind training —a journey of meditation in Buddhism—By Sally Clay

So this sort of dooming statement in the below link is crap and only serves to strip people of hope, it’s also the prevailing view about mental distress in general as demonstrated by how psychiatry is practiced. Yes, child abuse makes us ill, but it does not have to be life-long:

Child Abuse Causes Lifelong Changes To DNA Expression And Brain — From Medical News Today.

This article is terrible because they are finally admitting that trauma and child abuse is what causes mental distress something we all have to get on board with and the psychiatric establishment loves to jump around the issue because no one wants to blame families even though it’s just not that simple. Our society is traumatic. Even good people can inadvertently traumatize their children. We need to heal our whole society. And it’s not about blaming anyone per se.

But what is awful about this article, while finally giving credence to trauma theory, it again says it’s permanent and therefore now a disease that needs life-long medical intervention. I KNOW that is not true. And so do so many of us now.