A note to past and present clients:

It has been an amazing privilege to walk with you through your past memories as you find answers to your questions about the traumas in your life, finding more peacefulness.  Your courage, commitment and trust in this difficult process while working with me has  “raised the bar” for my expectations of psychotherapy.  The insight you gain and the adult-decision making changes you create are life-changing milestones and astonishing to witness.  You are heroes and heroines, empowered and in charge of your  adult life, no longer stuck in “kid” distress.

Psyche means soul… Your soul becomes wholly adult with vision and success in it’s wake.  You know silver-linings exist and the true meaning of mental healing.   Thanks for the privilege of allowing me to witness the change.   In order to “to keep up” with you, I too have had to change…and I am forever grateful…

Happy New Year!!   Nancy

“They are Man’s and they cling to me, appealing from their fathers. This boy is Ignorance and this girl is Want. Beware them both, and all of their degree, but most of all beware this boy for on his brow I see that written which is Doom, unless the writing be erased.”
― Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol

Charles Dickens would, today, understand these attributes, Ignorance and Want, in life as the effects of trauma, especially childhood trauma. The wealthy Scrooge understood what Christmas Present was attempting to say.  This type of trauma creates poverty, “soul poverty”, depression, anxiety, ignorance and “want”.  The ability to learn through education and from Life’s successes are a “nearly impossible task” for the abused and neglected.  The economic and cultural/societal price tag of abuse and neglect on our society has never been quantified.  I wonder what it costs???  Like Scrooge learned, “may we never forget”.

Feeling is a continuous process involving varying degrees of pleasantness and unpleasantness. Feeling tones (based on physical sensations) are unique registrars of experience. They are the way that we become aware of our concerns and how we can go about satisfying them. These contours of feeling, however, are often unnoticed. This is in large part because of our lack of sensitivity to inner experiencing or because sensations are often hidden in the shadow of the more intense emotions. Most people are unaware of these nuances that are overshadowed by the periodic upheaval of discontinuous intense emotions that appear to come from nowhere. They may seem wholly irrational and even “dangerous,” leading to suppression. This only further deadens the subtlety of the continuous feeling tones … which in turn leads to the eruption of more overbearing emotional states punctuating those by increasing the flattening and deadness … and so”

 

In an Unspoken Voice: How the Body Releases Trauma and Restores Goodness by Levine PhD, Peter A.

http://www.amazon.com/dp  “

“People who lack solid early attachment bonding to a primary caregiver, and therefore lack a foundation of safety, are much more vulnerable to being victimized and traumatized and are more likely to develop the entrenched symptoms of shame, dissociation and depression”
In an Unspoken Voice: How the Body Releases Trauma and Restores Goodness by Levine PhD, Peter A.

This sad lack of safety and sense of calmness impedes the ability to “toggle” between anxiety and fear with the sense of calmness and peacefulness.  This distressing symptom is most profound in folks with early childhood neglect and abuse.

Levine

“While traumatized humans don’t actually remain physically paralyzed, they do get lost in a kind of anxious fog, a chronic partial shutdown, dissociation, lingering depression, and numbness.”

In an Unspoken Voice: How the Body Releases Trauma and Restores Goodness by Levine PhD, Peter A.

Awesome explanation of traumatized humanity…..a very troublesome reality.

Do you have “weird” but transforming spiritual experiences, especially when life gets rough and when we have insight into a troubling problem?  EMDR Therapy tends to add to this type of experience.  It’s not uncommon for this to happen during reprocessing of traumatic experiences.  Spirituality has been with us since the beginning of human time.  We are to understand these experiences and make use them, giving them purpose and meaning.  They are positive and usually life changing.  Unfortunately, some religious tradition does not make positive use of these experiences; minimize them and/or condemn them.  This Spiritual information/support we receive cannot be classified as fact but can be understood as faith and divine intuition.  The information resonates as Truth and we follow this intuitiveness and wisdom until we understand…its’ purpose and meaning.

I believe this quote to be extremely hopeful.  We can begin to have peacefulness at any time in our lives!!!!!

“I believe that the people who are most resilient, and find the greatest peace in their lives, have learned to tolerate extreme (distressing physical) sensations while gaining the capacity for reflective self-awareness.  Although this capacity develops normally when we are very young, one can learn it at any time in life, thankfully.”

Peter A Levine, Ph, In An Unspoken Voice, How the Body Releases Trauma and Restores Goodness, page 137, North Atlantic Books, Berkley CA, 2010

“When we’re triggered into states of hyper or hypo arousal, we are pushed outside our “window of tolerance” the range of optimal functioning.  We become reactive and disorganize; our filters stop working, sounds and lights bother us, unwanted images from the past intrude on our minds, and we panic or fly into rages.  If we’re shut down, we feel numb in body and mind; our thinking becomes sluggish and we have trouble getting out of our chairs.”

 

Bessel van der Kolk, MD, The Body Keeps the Score, Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma, page 205, Penguin Group, NY, NY, (2014).

 

 

 

 

“The fundamental issue in resolving traumatic stress is to restore the proper balance between the rational and emotional (Limbic-my add) brain so that you can feel in charge of how you respond and how you conduct your life.”

Bessel van der Kolk, MD, The Body Keeps the Score, Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma, page 205, Penguin Group, NY, NY, (2014).

“In response to the trauma itself, and in coping with the dread that persisted long afterward, these patients had learned to shut down the brain areas that transmit the visceral feelings and emotions: In an effort to shut off terrifying sensations, they also deadened their capacity to feel fully alive. Yet in everyday life, those same brain areas are responsible for registering the entire range of emotions and sensations that form the foundation of our self-awareness, our sense of who we are. With we witnessed here was a tragic adaptation: In an effort to shut off terrifying sensations, they also deadened their capacity to feel fully alive.”

Bessel van der Kolk, MD, The Body Keeps the Score, Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma, page 92, Penguin Group, NY, NY, (2014).