Processing Trauma

From my chair I'm reaching out to try to organize everything in my reach, and I came across some notes I made when reading the books Waking the Tiger by Peter Levine and The Body Remembers by Babette Rothschild.

Goals of Trauma Therapy:

1. Unite implicit and explicit memories into a comprehensive narrative of the events and aftermath of the traumatic incident. This includes making sense of body sensations and behaviors within that context.

2. Eliminate symptoms of ANS hyperarousal in connection with those memories.

3. To relegate the traumatic event to the past: "It is over. That was a long time ago. I survived."

The key to moving through trauma: uncouple the fear from the immobility (frozen terror) [discharge it in RC terms]; immobility ends and fight/flight energy returns. Use the energy as escape and anger; don't go into helplessness.

Re-enactment serves to find new solutions. The key to transforming is to move slowly in the direction of flexibility and spontaneity.

I'm a survivor of childhood and young-adulthood trauma which wasn't processed and resulted in somewhat of a messy life as I took decades to find the tools to treat myself. There are so many more resources now, thank goodness. Finding a creative life and an all-inclusive spirituality in the hippie culture allowed me to explore what did and didn't work. Having a baby forced the issues and I got years of therapy and the framework of PTSD to make sense of the ways my body had learned to protect me. My son says he was never traumatized as a child (except maybe that time he fell out of the tree, which fortunately happened when a first responder was standing there with me and took charge.) Anyway creating safety was the driving force of my child-rearing years and that persists. I tend to keep myself safe. Except for once in awhile when I forget I am on a roof, etc.

People forget that the fight/flight impulse also includes a period of freezing. This provides prey like rabbits the response of surrender and going helpless, which sometimes serves to disarm their predator and make a space for them to escape. As a culture we have forgotten this because we don't respect helplessness, but it is sometimes the key to survival and children choose it instinctively since their power is small and their anger not very effective. It shows in humans as a shut-down, emotionally if not physically, and in me I just appear confident and in control, masking my fear and usually even forgetting myself that I am likely to have a trauma reaction to certain stimuli. Inside I freeze and it can take weeks to thaw, and apparently I thawed out in the corridor between the surgery and post-op. I started flailing and jabbering.

I have rarely hurt myself, but the occasions disturb me on so many levels I have studied them deeply. Often I go for long periods of being triggered without knowing I am in it; not so much these days, but still I didn't prepare myself emotionally for the surgery. I just concentrated on the physical details of my environment. I called silently for Lola Broomberg in post-op. She's not even my therapist, but I've wanted to go to her for some time. She shares an office with the therapist that led me through most of this in the past, and Lola offered her help on FB which is one reason I was thinking of her. That clued me in to the fact that my extreme distress was not physical but emotional. Unfortunately doctors and nurses are trained to treat the physical with physical means. I should have gotten the counselling before the surgery, but I "forgot."

Anyway, the hyperawareness of me inhabiting all of the corners of a room twice the size of my house was a clue to dissociation, though I have never sensed myself out of my body in a conventional sense. I need more skills to ground into my body. I just couldn't relax it. It was rigid with tension. A valium or something would have helped, or just someone to tell me what they were observing. The nurse did an excellent job but had other things to do, the usual physical things they are trained to do.

But as it turns out I am a brilliant, sensitive, educated and insightful woman, and I did a perfect job in processing my trauma despite my lack of preparation. I said and did all the right things. I'm very proud of myself. I'm very grateful to co-counselling and my former co-counsellors who helped me learn the language of distress and the ways of discharging it, subtle things like having to pee a lot even when you're a little dehydrated, laughing and joking when you are supposed to be serious, and gesturing and using your body to get rid of it.

In Re-evaluation counselling, or co-counselling, there is big encouragement to get close physically, to hold hands, cover up and get warm, feel safe however you need to do that. The warm blankets got piled on me. Nancy held my hands and got close to me. I got to cry and talk and tell the details over and over.

I talked a lot about Jell-O art to the nurses and doctors, to everyone, because that to me is the greatest physical representation of the deep joy and restoration of the soul through beauty and art, that I have found. It is vital to me and I was in a place where only what was vital was operating. Deep trauma and deep joy. Beauty and grief. Brilliant color and dark unconsciousness. The divine tension. That is where we dwell.