If you or a person you care about has trauma, what then? Allegra Jordan shares some solutions.
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When we suffer, MRI scans can now show our brains are rewired in specific ways. Some tough situations fade quickly. Other setbacks stubbornly impact us for decades. How can we help restore brains that, as Freud famously said, “suffer from memories?”
U.S. top trauma therapist Dr. Bessel van der Kolk, author of The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma, has taken a lead researching role in major studies since the 1970s regarding how the brain is changed by trauma, and how it can be healed.
Consider a situation where you or another sane, smart, talented person you know says the following:
- I’m speechless!
- In certain circumstances, my thoughts get disorganized in ways they don’t usually do. It impacts my life more than I’d like it to.
- I keep coming back to that unpleasant moment, though it was a long time ago. It’s as if time has not passed.
- I can’t visualize myself being happy in that normal human activity, though other people I like and value have no problem with it.
- I have never felt so alive as when I was in that awful situation.
- My mind and body feel numb. I’ll do almost anything to feel alive.
- When a certain subject comes up, my stress levels go through the roof.
- It doesn’t matter how many times people tell me I’m doing well in that area, I keep going back to using inaccurate language that casts me in a bad light.
- I keep two sets of books about this issue. One is for how I really think about an issue and the other is a story I tell the world.
- When I try to sleep, my body relaxes and I get nightmares. So I don’t sleep that much.
These may be signs of complex trauma – a complicated but often quite curable situation. Dr. Kolk’s decades of studies at Harvard’s top medical hospitals and with the US Veteran’s Administration shows how these behaviors are the results of depressed brain functioning in these areas:
- The timekeeper in the brain
- The speech center
- The “cook” center, which takes information in, organizes it and makes it part of our regular memories
- The “smoke detector,” which alerts us to emergencies
- In cases where there has been a lot of trauma, many more of the brain’s functions may be diminished, leading to the inability to feel much emotion.
If you or a person you care about has trauma, what then?
1. Know the signs of trauma. Even if the person denies they have trauma, you might stop telling a person with reduced brain functioning to do something they cannot do in their present state.
2. Be curious about the latest solutions. Did you know some effective trauma solutions do not involve chemicals, touching or even talking? No one size fits all! Some may need to feel safe. That could mean joining a theater group and acting in a role where you play another person and begin to feel safe and confident as someone else, but you then transfer that feeling to your own self. Others may need to “fill in the hole” left by trauma. They may benefit from “write the letter of apology that you deserve but will never receive.” Others might need the wonderful feeling of kicking a fake assailant really hard in a self-defense class.
The field has advanced quite a bit in the past few years! Be curious, but also be humble. What is right for one person may be harmful for the next. Trauma is complex. Resource links to reputable programs are available at the bottom of this article.
3. Exercise. Feeling like “I can’t do anything about my situation” contributes to trauma. When you exercise on a regular basis, you send the powerful signal to yourself, “I am not immobile.” Even better, incorporate exercise into an experience that heals, such as the program Model Mugging where people feel skilled and competent when they are under physical attack. That experience can help the emotional brain re-set its alarm system.
4. If your trauma does not involve your breath, then notice your breath as you breathe in and out very slowly for a period of time each day. Think only about your breath during that time. Breathing out calms the body by stimulating the part of the nervous system designed to calm.
5. Have self-compassion. Trauma overwhelms our intent to breathe calmly in an emergency. Some days we are strong and other days we are not. Self-compassion means we stand with ourselves even on those bad days. We do not send our must vulnerable sense of self into exile when that part of us most needs compassion.
I have always been curious about the nature of suffering. I witnessed my father suffering after he fought in Vietnam. I grew up in Selma, Alabama and saw both suffering and healing in the aftermath of the Voting Rights movement. I experienced crime.
But I have also had a front row seat to many places in the world where people, businesses and communities have renewed after devastating business losses, wars, famine and plagues. Humans help heal each other even more often than we hurt each other. With new science and more tools, we can do even better. Bad things do happen, but trauma does not have the last word. New therapies mean the best really is yet to come.
Resources:
The National Child Traumatic Stress Network provides excellent trauma resources.
Bessel van der Kolk’s best-selling book THE BODY KEEPS THE SCORE is available where books are sold. For more information about his research visit his website at The Trauma Center.
For programs that focus on a particular treatment method consider the EMDR International Association, Dr. Pat Ogden’s Sensorimotor Institute, Peter Levine’s somatic experience, Pesso Boyden’s system psychomotor therapy and Internal family systems therapy.
Check your local listings for theater programs for people with trauma, yoga and mindfulness programs.
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About the author
Allegra Jordan is an author and innovator focused on human flourishing at the edges of life. She led marketing at USAToday.com, handled crisis communications for the Enron investigation, co-developed a Google Glass app and has taught innovation in 16 countries on five continents. Her articles, cases and book reviews have appeared in USA Today, TEDx and in publications by Duke, Harvard and UT-Austin. She curates a top-ranked reconciliation poetry website. A graduate with honors of Harvard Business School, she has been named a top executive under 40 in Austin, Texas and Birmingham, Alabama. The End of Innocence (Sourcebooks, August 26, 2014) is her debut novel.
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This article originally appeared MariaShriver.com. Reprinted with permission.
Photo credit: Getty Images