Trauma & Art

The basement of the mind: suffering sinks deep (Edited)

In his book, Neurodharma, Rick Hanson writes that to understand suffering it is important to know that it is often buried deep down, embedded in younger layers of the psyche. He describes how as children we are vulnerable, especially, during the first years of our life, because the primary neural trigger for experiences of stress and fear, our amygdala, is formed before we are born, and also, because our hippocampus, which calms down the amygdala doesn’t become completely developed until around the third birthday. This part of the brain also helps us form episodic memories and its slow maturation is why we don’t remember our earliest years. Also, the right hemisphere of our brain, which tends to emphasize the perception of threats, painful emotions and behaviors such as withdrawing or freezing, develops first during the first eighteen months. As young children we all need soothing, comfort, and care from caregivers; however, many people have received less than good enough care during these early years when the nervous system is especially vulnerable and while the foundational layers of the psyche are being laid down. These early feelings, sensations, and experiences get internalized into implicit memory stores disconnected from explicit recollections of the situations in which they occurred. All this buried material lives on and can be reactivated by the type of cues that were also present back then. A similar process can occur during traumatic experiences in later years, during adolescence and in adulthood. Rick Hanson writes: “The painful residues of events can get caught in the nets of emotional memory, but without context and perspective. The conscious mind may forget, but as Babette Rothschild wrote, the body remembers.”

In The Body Never Lies Alice Miller investigates the long tern consequences of adversity in childhood on the adult body, and in The Truth Will Set You Free, she writes that our bodies retain memories of pain or humiliation, causing a panoply of physical ills and dangerous levels of denial. In her book, Trauma and the Body: A Sensorimotor Approach to Psychotherapy, Pat Ogden also writes that a cascade of strong emotions and physical sensations, triggered by reminders of the trauma, replays endlessly in the body and that “trauma has profound effects on the body and nervous system and that many symptoms of traumatized individuals are somatically driven” (Nijenhuis & Van der Hart, 1999; Van der Hart, Nijenhuis, Steele, & Brown, 2004; van der Kolk, 1994; van der Kolk, McFarlane, & Weisaeth, 1996). In his book, Brief: Reflections on Childhood, Trauma and Society, Bruce Perry also mentions that “we now know that these adverse and traumatic experiences change us in all ways – our bodies and minds, our hearts and souls are seared and then twist and change to help us survive.” According to Stephen Porges not only does the body remember a traumatic experience, but it can get stuck in the trauma response mode, and so even when the threat is gone, the body still perceives danger and its defenses stay engaged. In this short video at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iAqiiOy4IyQ, he briefly touches on this. In a longer podcast at: https://www.rickhanson.net/being-well-podcast-polyvagal-theory-with-stephen-porges/ he expands more on how our neurobiology has evolved to respond to trauma and he summarizes his polyvagal theory.

In his book, The Body Keeps the Score: Mind, Brain and Body in the Transformation of Trauma, Bessel van der Kolk, postulates that “If the memory of trauma is encoded in the viscera, in heartbreaking and gut-wrenching emotions, in autoimmune disorders and skeletal / muscular problems, and if mind / brain / visceral communication is the royal road to emotion regulation, this demands a radical shift in our therapeutic assumptions.” He goes on to explain how the body keeps the score, at even the deepest levels of the organism. He discusses how recent research has swept away the idea that a particular gene produces a particular result. It turns out that many genes work together to influence a single outcome, and also, that genes are not fixed and life events can trigger biochemical messages that turn them on or off by attaching a cluster of carbon and hydrogen atoms to the outside of the gene and this sensitizes it to messages from the body…… This process is called methylation. He writes: “Methylation patterns, however, can be passed on to offspring— a phenomenon known as epigenetics. Once again, the body keeps the score, at the deepest levels of the organism.”

Rick Hanson says that aspects of old experiences are embedded in physical memory systems designed to hold on to their contents and that healing and releasing pent up energy and old stories and beliefs necessitates skillful tools and modalities alongside mindfulness and self-compassion practices. He mentions that “There are good methods for bringing light down into the basement of the mind, and if we are to understand suffering fully, it is all right to use them.” One method he suggests in his book, which we can explore on our own if the material is not overwhelming to us, is linking positive experiences to negative material so as to soothe and / or replace it. The negative material can be emotions, sensations, thoughts, images and memories and it can come both from what’s been missing and from what’s been wounding for “the absence of the good can hurt as much as the presence of the bad.” (Rick Hanson) .

With linking, we are not asked to deny or resist the material, but to accept it as it is while also bringing comfort, perspective, encouragement, and other forms of support to the pain and to ourself. He writes that “In the brain, the positive will tend to associate with the negative, and those associations will go with the negative material when it gets stored back into memory networks. In fact, for at least an hour after the negative material leaves awareness, there is a window of reconsolidation during which it is neurologically unstable. In this window, you may be able to disrupt the “rewiring” of the negative into your brain by refocusing occasionally on only the positive material. Each time you use linking might take just a dozen seconds, but with repetition you can gradually replace weeds with flowers in the garden of your mind.”

For a more open minded and holistic approachToday I am sharing a painting I have been making this month and a post inspired by talks from a summit I have been engaging with over the last two weeks or so, on the connection between trauma and our overall health, the body and the mind connection and the many different routes available to approach trauma and health. Summarily, the perspectives presented in this summit on how to understand and approach individual and collective trauma and its lingering effects on our health and well being are: mind body approaches; functional medicine approaches; brain, nervous system and somatic approaches; energetic approaches; social and developmental approaches; and perspectives to understand the social root causes of mental health, physical health and complex chronic conditions.

The breadth of information, on the one hand, has felt daunting because ultimately for most people on this planet in this time in history adopting this type of integrative approach, which practically requires access to quality resources and possibly a team of diverse practitioners to deal with complex problems like PTSD, depression, chronic fatigue, fibromyalgia, cancer and many other health issues related or correlated to trauma is not feasible. Also, there is so much information circulating that it can hinder discernment and choice. On the other hand, the fact that information is becoming available to larger and larger numbers of people gives people back some of their power even if only at the level of their being aware that a compartmentalized or symptoms management approach alone does not deal with issues at a root level, and thus, does not bring about deep changes and growth. More often than not problems and issues are not the result of one variable alone. For instance, high levels of anxiety might simultaneously be the result of unaddressed traumas and stuck energy, current circumstances and mercury poisoning from silver tooth fillings or nutrient deficiencies. Several experts talked on the connection between mouth health, dental fillings and our overall physical and mental health. Also, dissemination of information opens up our understanding of the many toxic factors that may be contributing to disease or dis-ease and the various lifestyle changes, natural remedies and technologies and tools that one can use on their own to heal some, increase equilibrium in their system and tap into deeper levels of resilience.  It can also facilitate choice because one size does not fit all.

Furthermore, as the deleterious and lingering effects of trauma, both collective and personal, become more well-known, a shift can take place of our understanding of problems and of what is possible, and also, of the necessity of a more integrative approach and of structural changes in many areas of society. In this post I will refer to one example of the many discussed by various speakers. Dr David Brady, an expert on treating fibromyalgia talked about how research and work with people, interestingly mostly women, who suffer from this cluster of symptoms or condition suggest that it could be viewed as a ‘hypervigilant disorder’ like post traumatic stress and other anxiety related conditions, and that fibromyalgia and chronic pain  are correlated to PTSD and trauma, especially childhood adversity. It has been found that people who suffer from fibromyalgia, for instance are on guard even in their sleep, which practically means even when they don’t suffer from insomnia they block the cycling through deep levels of sleep, in other words their sleep is superficial and not adequately restorative. Another interesting point he made is that cortisol is the stress hormone that has been typically measured so far, but has more recently been found that chronic anxiety and stress can eventually lead to secretion of low levels of cortisol, and therefore, catecholamine levels should me measured as well.

I will also refer to a book written by one of the participants, Lissa Rankin (MD), on how fear is one basic factor leading to disease. In the book she walks us through the scientific data that proves that fear (stress, anxiety, hypervigilance) increases our risk of almost every disease, especially, heart disease, and decreases our longevity if left unchecked.  During her talk Dr Lissa Rankin referred to the high burden of developmental traumas and generational legacies and how clearing trauma can be the best preventive medicine and can even trigger remission of disease.  In her book The Fear Cure she explores the detrimental effects of chronic fear and anxiety on our health and longevity and explores how our fear can guide us to the places in our life that need healing. In the beginning of the book she describes an experience in her twenties when she and her friend were held at a gunpoint in a tunnel by two masked and armed men. She writes: “When someone has a gun to your head, fear is something to welcome. It’s there to protect you. …… the right kind of fear can benefit your health. It can even save your life.” However, many of our fears are the result of our potentiated amygdala, which can’t tell the difference between a past threat and what is happening in the moment. Our nervous system gets stuck in unnecessary stress responses and our warning mechanisms are chronically activated. Over time this has deleterious effects on our health and decision making. Data proves that fear isn’t just a painful emotion that causes psychological turmoil; but it can be a serious risk factor for disease when not processed and transformed. Every fearful thought we have triggers a stress response that puts our body at risk and causes suffering. Fear predisposes us to harmful biochemical influences.

She describes how after the robbery incident, mentioned above, she was afraid of everything until she became sick, but despite her medications her body was not responding, and because she had been brainwashed into the mind-body dissociation, it never occurred to her to question whether her high blood pressure, heart conditions and other issues might be related to her fears or post traumatic stress.  She writes: “My nervous system had been completely jacked up, and it was affecting every cell in my body through a complicated series of hormonal reactions that were making me sick. Had I not woken up to the many ways that a repeatedly triggered stress response was contributing not just to my high blood pressure and cardiac issues, but also to a whole host of other health conditions that plagued me, I’d probably still be taking the seven medications…… Fortunately, I did wake up. I began to understand how, if we’re out of touch with our Inner Pilot Light, false fear leads us to deny what is true for ourselves, and how this betrayal of our personal integrity predisposes the body to disease.”

So, what if instead of resisting and suppressing our fears we viewed them as guides pointing towards the things in our life that need our attention. Rankin says: “What if fear is the finger pointing toward everything that stands between you and true well-being? Most of us devote a great deal of energy to organizing our entire lives around avoiding what we fear most. But fear can be a messenger that wakes you up to everything in your life that’s still in need of healing.” However, she suggests that we need to discern between fear that points to real, present danger and unsafe situations and fear that is pointing to blind spots and past experiences. She writes that in the branch of psychotherapy called Acceptance and Commitment Therapy there is a differentiation between “clean pain” and “dirty pain.” Clean pain results from real-life events and dirty pain results from the stories we create and judgments we make about these events. Rankin believes feelings of fear divide along similar lines and she differentiates between true fear and false fear. She writes: “True fear is a natural survival mechanism, here to protect you, and false fear is an important teaching tool, here to enlighten you. Fear affects every one of us. It’s nothing to hide. On the contrary, it is worth examining so it can point you toward a better way to live, a way that aligns you with your natural courage and supports you in optimal health……..  Courage is not about being fearless; it’s about letting fear transform you so you come into right relationship with uncertainty, make peace with impermanence, and wake up to who you really are. This kind of courage helps you make choices that strengthen rather than diminish you.”