Trauma & Art

Compassion, drawings and the bittersweet….

“Compassion is bittersweet: there is the bitter of the suffering and the sweet of the caring. If you get overwhelmed by the suffering, including your own, then it’s hard to sustain the caring. So try to help the sweet be larger than the bitter in your mind. You can do this by focusing on a sense of tender concern, warm-heartedness, loyalty, and support in the foreground of awareness, while having a sense of whatever is painful off to the side.” Rick Hanson

“Compassion, as both salve and salvation, is not limited to the realm of the individual. If we are to dream of a healthier, less fractured world, we will have to harness and amplify compassion’s healing power.” Gabor Maté

“The real weapons of mass destruction are the hardened hearts of humanity” Leonard Cohen

“Ring the bells that still can ring. Forget your perfect offering. There is a crack in everything. That’s how the light gets in.” Leonard Cohen

“You’ve got to keep the child alive; you can’t create without it.” Joni Mitchell

Today I’m posting more artwork. Musicians like Joni Mitchell, Leonard Cohen and others, whose bittersweet music and poetry have captivated me at times, are part of these drawings. Today’s post is also about compassion.

One of Cohen’s songs is titled The Days of Kindness and it is about his life on Hydra, a tiny Greek island [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GxyEN9ddQyw]

Greece is a good place / to look at the moon, isn’t it
You can read by moonlight / You can read on the terrace
You can see a face / as you saw it when you were young
There was good light then / oil lamps and candles / and those little flames /that floated on a cork in olive oil
What I loved in my old life / I haven’t forgotten  It lives in my spine
Marianne and the child / The days of kindness
It rises in my spine / and it manifests as tears
I pray that loving memory / exists for them too
the precious ones I overthrew / for an education in the world

The Circle Game, lyrics by Joni Mitchell about time…

Yesterday a child came out to wander
Caught a dragonfly inside a jar
Fearful when the sky was full of thunder
And tearful at the falling of a star

And the seasons, they go round and round
And the painted ponies go up and down
We’re captive on the carousel of time
We can’t return, we can only look
Behind, from where we came                                                                                                   And go round and round and round, in the circle game

Then the child moved ten times round the seasons
Skated over ten clear frozen streams
Words like, “When you’re older” must appease him
And promises of someday make his dreams…..

As I mentioned today’s post is also about compassion.

The Oxford dictionary defines compassion as a strong feeling of sympathy for people who are suffering and a desire to help them. So, compassion is more than the ability to understand another person’s feelings or experience, because it also includes the desire to alleviate their suffering. Rick Hanson suggests that “Compassion involves sensitivity to suffering, a caring response, and a desire to help if one can.”

I will begin with some ideas from Dr Gabor |Mate’s book, The Myth of Normal, which I’m still reading. As I’ve said I’ve recently been drawing with an urgency of sorts, which means drawing has been taking up a lot of time, and that means that I’m making very slow progress through the several books that I’ve started with the intention to finish.

Anyway, Mate distinguishes five kinds of compassion. He begins with what he terms as Ordinary Human Compassion, which refers to our ability to be with and feel another’s pain. Mate claims that whether or not we experience another’s pain vividly, entry-level compassion requires we have the ability to be with another person’s suffering, to be able to register and be moved by their pain. He writes: “Interpersonal compassion necessarily involves empathy, the ability to get and relate to the feelings of another.” He also distinguishes compassion from pity, because pity involves looking down on another’s misfortune from some imagined higher status and sense of worth. He adds that “even if there is an actual power gap between us in the world— say, one born of a racial or economic hierarchy— treating it as if it is a permanent, essential fact about us does neither one of us any favors.”

Then he discusses what he calls Compassion of Curiosity and Understanding, which he writes could also be called the compassion of context. This requires us to ask why any person or group of people would, for instance, live or suffer the way they do or end up being the way they are and acting the way they do. Trying to understand the deeper causes of people’s conditions and predicaments assists us in acting compassionately and in appropriate ways. Mate writes: “In today’s society we often default to easy explanations, quick judgments, and knee-jerk solutions. Questing with clear eyes to find the systemic roots of why things are the way they are takes patience, curiosity, and fortitude.”

The third compassion is called The Compassion of Recognition,  which allows us to understand that that “we are all in the same boat, roiled by similar tribulations and contradictions.” This aspect of compassion is about recognising our commonality as human beings and our connecting with our humanity.

The fourth is termed Compassion of Truth. Here Mate explores the value of truth and of being honest. He does however clarify that truth and compassion have to be reciprocal partners. We are not being compassionate by simply dumping difficult truths on others. He believes that there is nothing compassionate about “shielding people from the inevitable hurts, disappointments, and setbacks life doles out to all of us, from childhood onward”, because this is not only futile, but might prove harmful in the long run. Shielding others from the truth may be nothing more than a reflection of our own discomfort with our own wounds. In order for people to grow and heal their traumas there needs to be some reckoning with their traumas in safe contexts. Healing cannot occur without painful material surfacing and without our moving through the pain. Mate suggests that pain is inherently compassionate, as it alerts us to what is amiss. He writes “we all go into denial, suppression, repression, rationalization, justification, hazy memory, and varying grades of dissociation in the presence of hurt. …. Healing, in a sense, is about unlearning the notion that we need to protect ourselves from our own pain. In this way, compassion is a gateway to another essential quality: courage.”

And finally, the fifth compassion is The Compassion of Possibility, which refers to the fact that we are all more than our conditioned personalities that we present to the world, the unprocessed emotions we act out or project on others or the maladaptive at times behaviours we engage in. Mate writes “Staying open to possibility doesn’t require instant results. It means knowing that there is more to all of us, in the most positive sense, than meets the eye.”

“We are born to be good to each other.” Dacher Keltner

In his article The Compassionate Species at:https://greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/the_compassionate_species, Dacher Keltner, PhD, argues that the fact, that our babies are the most vulnerable offspring on Earth rearranged our social structures, building cooperative networks of caretaking, and it rearranged our nervous systems. Thus, we evolved into the super care-giving species, to the point where acts of care improve our physical health and lengthen our lives.

Keltner explains the neuroscience behind these experiences. For instance, when we feel pain the anterior cingulate region of our brain will light up. But interestingly, that very same part of the cortex is activated when we witness other people’s pain. He writes “We are wired to empathize, if you will.” He also refers to a very old region of the mammalian nervous system called the periaqueductal gray, way down in the center of the brain, that lights up, which in mammals is associated with nurturing behavior. He concludes: “We don’t just see suffering as a threat. We also instinctively want to alleviate that suffering through nurturance.”

He goes on to explain how the vagus nerve, which is a part of our autonomic nervous system that starts at the top of the spinal cord and wanders through our body, through muscles in the neck that help us nod our head, orient our gaze toward other people and vocalize, is also activated when we witness the suffering of others. The vagus nerve  moves down and helps coordinate the interaction between our breathing and your heart rate, moves into the spleen and liver, where it controls a lot of digestive processes. Keltner writes: “Recent studies suggest the vagus nerve is related to a stronger immune system response and regulates our inflammation response to disease and helps us calm down every time we take a deep breath.

Keltner notes that their research supports that there are people who have really strong vagus nerves—“vagal superstars,” as he likes to call them. He also talks about the data that suggest humans are wired to care, down to the neurochemical level (see research around oxytocin). He refers to Nikos Christakis’ work, which I’ve written about in an older post and other research findings. He ends the article with the following: “So forget what you’ve been told about compassion—that it’s unnatural, that it’s for suckers. Compassion is essential to our evolutionary history, it defines who we are as a species, and it serves our greatest needs as individuals—to survive, to connect, and to find our mates in life.”

Finally, I’d like to share some practices related to compassion for the self and others by Dr Rick Hanson and Dr Kristin Neff:

A collection of 3 meditations from Rick Hanson, Founder of the Global Compassion Coalition at: https://vimeo.com/showcase/9953907

A compassionate body scan by Kristin Neff, whose work centres around self compassion, for deepening our sense of self-compassion and body awareness at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FOm6dhob_tw

Art, the DSM, psychedelic assisted therapy, acting, psychodrama, and safety  

“Our sense of agency, how much we feel in control, is defined by our relationship with our bodies and its rhythms. In order to find our voice we have to be in our bodies – able to breathe fully and able to access our inner sensations. Acting is an experience of using your body to take your place in life.” Bessel van der Kolk

“The Buddha asks us to stop drifting thoughtlessly through our lives and instead to pay careful attention to simple truths that are everywhere available to us, clamoring for the sustained consideration they deserve.” Quote from the book  In the Buddha’s Words

“Accumulated knots in the fabric of our body, previously undetected, begin to reveal themselves as we open.”  Jack Kornfield

In today’s post I’m including some more drawings and some material and thoughts related to the therapy processes, mediation practices / exercises and two interesting articles.

1.In a recent BEING WELL podcast [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W_HJPYfukiY] Forrest and Rick Hanson had a conversation with Bessel van der Kolk, professor of Psychiatry at the Boston University School of Medicine and president of the Trauma Research Foundation in Massachusetts and author of The Body Keeps the Score, an influential book in the field of trauma and therapy. They discuss a lot of topics like the role that imagination, creativity and cultural context play in healing trauma and in moving beyond it. They talk about the need to confront trauma in pro-social movements and about how trauma and adverse experiences thwart agency, where agency begins and ways to reclaim it. They explore the reason we internalize abuse and abusive others, which is a natural and inevitable process of soaking up what others say or do to us, especially during our formative years. These messages become internalized limiting beliefs, and when the messaging is associated with trauma and fear, it becomes even more entrenched. We also get stuck in our coping responses during or after traumatic events. These get locked in our bodies. Bessel van der Kolk’s book title captures this experience.

Two other topics discussed are the many problematic issues with the DSM (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders), the need to integrate interpersonal processes and find new approaches to diagnosis and treatment, as well as, the current state of psychedelic assisted therapy research, the promise of this area and the many potential safety risks.

It’s not the first time I refer to this politically loaded topic of the DSM and the heavy criticism it has received and is receiving for the fact that the clusters of symptoms labeled as disorders are not scientifically proven, the fact that the majority of the people who have defined these health conditions and treatments are connected to pharmaceutical companies, the fact that childhood adverse experiences and social circumstances are not included. The most recent edition of the DSM surprisingly does not include Complex PTSD or Developmental Trauma Disorder. As a result in practice children and adolescents are given many other labels like: ADHD, conduct disorder, oppositional defiant disorder, anxiety and eating disorders, adjustment disorder, separation anxiety disorder, and so on. The focus is on the behaviours, on control of these adaptive and maladaptive behavioural responses and on symptoms that are often alternating but not on the root causes or the environment.

However, it is the first time I’m writing anything about psychedelic assisted therapy.  I’ve recently been engaging with material related to this type of therapy and the research conducted currently, the potential of this field and the many pitfalls. As with all things that have the potential to do great good, they also have the potential to cause great harm. Psychedelics break down our ego boundaries, they deconstruct the completely separate from others, fixed and sometimes rigid sense of self that we have. It is suggested that this can help us get new insights about ourselves, our past and the world and it can help us embrace all aspects of ourself and our history, and also help us access our innate healing capacity if we are supported and assisted in integrating the experience and the information that arises. An all embracing love for everyone and everything may wash over us and a sense of deep interconnectedness. However, because we are in a state of such emotional openness and “boundarylessness” the therapist or guide has the power to break us down and violate our boundaries.  In this very open state agency is lost, and therefore, severe violations can occur. Also, some people may have “bad trips”, encounter overwhelming buried experiences and / or fear based conditioning and other kinds of deep trauma that may be perceived or interpreted as spiritual experiences.

Therefore, a safe holding container with people who have the know-how that can help people integrate and understand their experience without imposing their views and interpretations is important. There is a need for screening who would potentially benefit from this process, for preparation in advance, and also integration of the experience after the psychedelic session, which might be a lengthy process. Above all it should take place in safe contexts with educated and / or experienced practitioners or guides. Integrity and self awareness as well as transparency, experience and knowledge are essential. An overall trauma informed and respectful environment could safeguard everyone involved.  In the podcast notes Forrest mentions a prominent documented instance of shocking  misuse of power perpetrated by Meaghan Buisson’s (an athlete and international medalist) therapists during a research trial session.

Also, as discussed in the podcast psychedelics might not be for everyone, and when it comes to therapeutic interventions one size does not fit all. It has been suggested that “letting go” of our ego might be a privilege and might not be appropriate for everyone or in all situations and contexts. The prospect of “ego death” or ego dissolution might not be for those whose cultural identity is threatened, for instance. And of course safety in all its different forms is not relevant only to psychedelic assisted therapy, regular bad psychotherapy can be harmful, and different levels of harm can be inflicted in all kinds of health, educational and training contexts.

In addition, the discussion includes exploration of the various therapeutic modalities that are available now, and specifically, they describe how movement, art and theatre can assist us in recovery and in reclaiming agency and power. In his book Bessel van der Kolk describes the use of psychodrama and acting in helping people move beyond trauma and also reclaim confidence. He talks about how he initially encountered Bryan Doerries’ project “The Theater of War” and how he came to understand that psychodrama and acting could be beneficial in healing trauma and in boosting confidence and faith in oneself. He writes “Greek drama may have served as a ritual reintegration for combat veterans” and “Acting is an experience of using your body to take your place in life.” He writes that he also became convinced of the therapeutic possibilities of theatre by witnessing his young son’s recovery from what we may call “chronic fatigue syndrome.”

In his book he talks about his observation and study of three different programs for treating traumatized, angry, frightened, and obstreperous teenagers or withdrawn, alcoholic, burned-out veterans through theater, that all share the common foundation, the confrontation of the painful realities of life and symbolic transformation through communal action. B van der Kolk notes: “Traumatized people are terrified to feel deeply. They are afraid to experience their emotions, because emotions lead to loss of control. In contrast, theater is about embodying emotions, giving voice to them, becoming rhythmically engaged, taking on and embodying different roles….. Theater gives trauma survivors a chance to connect with one another by deeply experiencing their common humanity.” Referring to children and adolescents he writes: “These kids are facing their own period of transition; many are barely articulate, and some struggle to read at all…. At the beginning of the process, many of these kids can barely get a line out. Progress is slow, as each actor slowly internalizes the words…. The idea is to inspire the actors to sense their reactions to the words— and so to discover the character….. ….”.  The aim of theatre programs is group building through establishing basic agreements: responsibility, accountability, respect, expressions of affection, to teach cause and effect and to help kids and adults get in tune with one another and learn to trust again. He writes that for children becoming embodied and “en-languaged” can be a life-changing process.

Bessel van der Kolk also dedicates a chapter in his book to psychodrama, in which a person in some sense dramatizes a relationship perhaps with an early attachment figure or a difficulty in their life. He tells us about his training with Pesso and the use of tableaus or “structures” of the protagonists’ past.  The director/ therapist and other group members ideally provide protagonists with the support they need to delve into whatever hurts. Group participants are asked to play the roles of significant people in the protagonists’ lives, such as parents, other family members, and so on. In this way one’s inner world takes form in a three-dimensional space. Then group members get to play the ideal, wished-for parents or other authority figure providing the support and witnessing what had been lacking, creating other possibilities and healing. Van der Kolk explains that projecting our inner world into the three-dimensional space of a structure enables you to see what’s happening in the theater of our mind and gives us a clearer perspective on our reactions to people and events in the past. As we position placeholders (people or objects like furniture) for the important people in our life, we may encounter past memories, thoughts, and emotions that come up, and then by moving the pieces around on the external chessboard that we’ve created we gain insights and create different endings. He writes: “Structures do not erase bad memories, or even neutralize them the way EMDR does. Instead, a structure offers fresh options— an alternative memory in which your basic human needs are met and your longings for love and protection are fulfilled.”

2.Two meditation practices I return to:

A more lengthy gentle, compassionate and gratitude infused body scan exercise from Chris Germer, PhD, who is a clinical psychologist, teacher of mindfulness and compassion, author and developer, along with Kristin Neff, of the Mindful Self-Compassion training program: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AmZdRE83tVU

The Wheel of Awareness meditation, which also includes a short body scan, from Dr Dan Siegel, One place you can listen to the guided practice is at his website at:  https://drdansiegel.com/wheel-of-awareness. There are longer and shorter versions at his website. I’ve written about this practice in the past posts if anyone wants to read about it. Dan Siegel writes that the wheel of awareness becomes a visual metaphor for the integration of consciousness as we differentiate rim-elements, which are the known, what we know and hub-awareness, which is our human capacity of knowing, from each other and link them with our focus of attention. Also, there is an interesting part (hub of awareness) in the longer practice during which we almost always experience a brief emotional opening, a sense of unconditional love, joy, freedom.

3. Finally, for those interested and in the mood of reading I’m sharing links to two articles about psychedelics, the socialization of hallucinations, Northern Renaissance painting, St Anthony’s fire or ergotism, a disease that resembles the bubonic plague, produced by eating food affected by ergot, a toxic fungus that infects rye, often with detrimental effects.

a) A research article: The socialization of hallucinations: Cultural priors, social interactions, and contextual factors in the use of psychedelics by David Dupuis by at: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/1363461521103638

Dupuis distinguishes two levels of socialization of hallucinations. He argues that cultural background and social interactions organize the relationship both to the hallucinogenic experience and its content. He accounts for the underpinnings of the socialization of hallucinations proposing such factors as the education of attention, the categorization of perceptions, and the shaping of emotions and expectations. Dupuis cites Claude Lévi-Strauss (1970, p. 13), who has proposed to consider hallucinogens as “triggers and amplifiers of a latent discourse that each culture holds in reserve and for which drugs can allow or facilitate the elaboration.”

b) For those interested in art an article on Northern Renaissance painting, St Anthony’s fire or ergotism and more at:https://hyperallergic.com/399385/how-renaissance-painting-smoldered-with-a-little-known-hallucinogen/

Extracts from the article:

“A fungal infection known as ergotism influenced Northern Renaissance painting to an extent that a majority of art institutions have yet to grapple with. During the Renaissance ergotism was colloquially known as St. Anthony’s Fire, named for the third-century desert Father who had hallucinatory bouts…..  During the time of the Renaissance, ergotism was a phantasmagoric event with an onset that was difficult to distinguish from the bubonic plague: it came on first as nausea and insomnia, then developed into sensations of being engulfed in flames while hallucinating over several days, and often ended with the amputation of one or more limbs due to gangrene, or ended in death. The illness is contracted by ingesting ergot fungus, which appears on cereal grains when the growing conditions are right ….. The last known severe outbreak occurred in the French village of Pont-Saint-Espirit in 1951….

Some art historians, such as Bosch scholar Laurinda S. Dixon, have proffered for decades that the symptoms of ergotism influenced painters like Jheronimus (aka Hieronymus) Bosch and Matthias Grünewald. In looking further at depictions of Saint Anthony — from medieval folk art, a plethora of Renaissance work, to a series of paintings by surrealist artists, such as Max Ernst’s 1945, “The Temptation of Saint Anthony” — a pattern begins to develop in which a mimesis of visual hallucinations associated with ergotism is clearly present. For instance, Gustave Flaubert’s novel The Temptation of Saint Anthony, contains not only hallucinatory imagery congruent with the effects of ergot alkaloids, but also contains in the opening passage of the novel a clear symbol of a known cause of ergot poisoning: a description of a loaf of black bread inside the hermit saint’s cabin….  Laurinda S. Dixon presents some of the most convincing evidence to date that Bosch’s imagery was directly influenced by Saint Anthony’s Fire. In a (1984) essay titled “Bosch’s St. Anthony Triptych — An Apothecary’s Apotheosis,” the author finds a common ingredient in medieval medicine used to treat ergot — mandrake root — and the distillation furnaces used to make that medicine. Examining the Bosch painting with the use of high resolution photos …. Dixon argues that the bulbous buildings, often depicted with a stream of smoke coming out of the top, are nearly identical to the shapes found in contemporaneous schematics of apothecary furnaces……”