What media hype and those selling mindfulness don’t tell you is that mindfulness is a process that can radically transform you, and it’s not always safe, nor is it easy or straightforward. We make it safer by being aware of the risks and learning to listen to our own bodies about when it is or isn’t okay for us. No one else actually knows.
What I just finished was, “The Sinner” (Netflix) …a deep and disturbing and profoundly beautiful filmed series about heinous ongoing trauma and how it played out for this particular woman. …
For the most part I remain on hiatus, but I wanted to share the below article because I’m learning about immune response right now and I think it’s important to share it. When I say I’m learning it I mean that my body is revealing the truth of it to me. Our bodies hold information to heal us. We all learn different things because we’re all aspects of the whole. I’m sharing what I am receiving through my healing experience. This information needs to get out there and every single one of us that understand (in whatever way it comes to us) can help it go society wide. I have personally found that my body goes into an immune response when it’s visited by a trauma trigger. The trauma remains foundational. The immune response is secondary to a trauma in the history of the person. It would be a mistake to consider the immunological aspects without also looking at trauma. This is why there is so much auto-immune illness in circles of folks who’ve been psychiatrized. … [click on title for the rest of the post]
Psychiatry Must Stop Ignoring Trauma, says Dr. Bessel van der Kolk, Yes, please, and thank you for saying so! Of course psychiatry must not just stop ignoring trauma, it must stop retraumatizing the already traumatized. It’s clients. The very vulnerable people who seek help and end up being harmed further. Not only are hospitals and a lot of standard treatment horribly abusive the medications have been found to be further agents of trauma. It’s also true that coercion, subtle or otherwise, is the rule in psychiatric care and that the United Nations has also declared forced treatment to be a form of torture. … [click on title to read the rest]
Five percent of Americans, or more than 13 million people, have PTSD. Complex or Developmental trauma (trauma that occurs during childhood) has been linked to a long list of chronic conditions including heart disease, COPD, chronic pain, addiction, depression and anxiety – and it makes people more susceptible to developing PTSD after a traumatic experience.
In this free, 45 minute teleclass, Subtle Yoga founder and director of the Subtle Yoga Training for Behavioral Health Professionals, Kristine Kaoverii Weber, will provide a compelling case for using yoga therapy as a powerful adjunct in the treatment of trauma. Kristine will help you understand how to discuss the powerful benefits of yoga for trauma with community health care providers and help you understand how to break through the barriers which keep yoga isolated in the fitness industry. Yoga is not just fitness, yoga is therapy – and yoga professionals need to learn how to talk about yoga as part of an integrative strategy – not just how to get referrals for privates or classes. … [click on title to read and view more]
I will be using the word trauma to mean any experience that causes the child unbearable psychic pain or anxiety. For an experience to be “unbearable” means that it overwhelms the usual defensive measures which Freud described as a “protective shield against stimuli.” Trauma of this magnitude varies from the acute, shattering experiences of child abuse so prominent in the literature today to the more “cumulative traumas” of unmet dependency-needs that mount up to devastating effect in some children’s development, including the more acute deprivations of infancy described by Winnicott as “primitive agonies,” the experience of which is “unthinkable.” The distinguishing feature of such trauma is what Heinz Kohut called “disintegration anxiety,” an unnameable dread associated with the threatened dissolution of a coherent self.” …
Trauma has relocated from an event to the nervous system itself, expanding the definition to include any event where our animal body is overwhelmed. This rethinking can be attributed to Somatic Experiencing (SE), a psychotherapeutic approach created by Peter Levine that conceptualizes trauma as occurring when survival responses (fight and flight) cannot be completed… … [click on title for the rest of the post]
Unfortunately the public policy part of the video I’m sharing below makes me squeamish because all to often children who are introduced to the system by any method are drugged and mistreated in a panoply of additional ways. That’s often what happens these days on the ground. It’s easy to look at the science and… Continue Reading →
Trauma is a fact of life. It does not, however, have to be a life sentence. Not only can trauma be healed, but with appropriate guidance and support, it can be transformative.Trauma has the potential to be one of the most significant forces for psychological, social,and spiritual awakening and evolution. How we handle trauma (as individuals,communities, and societies) greatly influences the quality of our lives. It ultimately affects how or even whether we will survive as a species.
The first half of this post is my own observations of experiencing what is essentially iatrogenic PTSD. The second half is a brilliant article on PTSD in general. My neuropsych doctor confirmed what was in this post about my own iatrogenic experience in another post. Granted I have other more bodily related issues too, but… Continue Reading →
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