complex post traumatic stress disorder

Today the School of Social Work at NC State held a powerpacked workshop on Complex Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. Experts from State, Carolina and Duke spoke. Four other professionals working with vets and enlisted men also spoke: one from the Raleigh Vet Center and three who are providing alternative and holistic services on military bases! You read that right, "on military bases"! The managing director from The Healing Place moderated the panel. Over a hundred people attended, about ten percent African American and about ten percent men.

Next to me at the table was a woman whose job it is to review the life histories of people on death row looking for trauma. As we now know, from personal experience or from all the television shows about crime, many many people who commit violent crimes experienced repeated traumas growing up. (Not everyone, but many; and this isn't to justify it, but merely to understand it.)

Singular traumas, especially if there is support from the caregiver, respond well to treatment on the whole. But multiple traumas, especially when at the core of it is a break in the infant - caregiver bond, do not respond quickly, and require a host of modalities to treat. Several of the speakers indicated - give it all you've got and then some, because that's what it takes.

The studies point to how critical it is for an infant to have a healthy supportive bond with its caregiver in order to grow up feeling the world is safe and supports them. Without that primary experience, people take that primitive experience of rejection through life.

The amazing part of the afternoon was hearing that three women were bringing in their own ways - mind training (using meditative techniques), yoga, martial arts, art and music therapies to military men with excellent results. Warrior Mind Training was especially interesting because it brings the ancient practices of Asian warriors to American military men.

The quality of understanding about the stigma that veterans and others with PTSD experience was remarkable. Speaker after speaker spoke about destigmatizing the traumatic responses, recognizing that they are natural responses to extraordinary situations. One speaker compared the re-immersion into normal American life like surfacing from scuba diving: you have to come up slowly and rest, several times before reaching the surface, or it could kill you.

One can only leave a gathering like that with a feeling of hope. That there are such innovators as the speakers, each articulate and passionate about their work; that there is so much interest in the topic that it packed the room; that the understanding of complex PTSD is evolving so well that increasingly effective methods are helping reduce the tremendous suffering. I left there filled with hope, and further affirmed in both the fragility and the resilience of human life.

Somatic Meditative Inquiry

As a student of the body, of the inner sensations of being human, I have taken so many courses, classes, workshops and trainings. So many that I mostly do not seek anymore. I have been taught so much, that my challenge is practicing what I have been taught, not needing to learn new techniques.

Yet, when I read about a workshop by Chapel Hill therapists and teachers, Cynthia and Mike Flowers, there was no resistance, and instead an opening, the sense that their work could be the continuation of a profound life long inquiry of mine, into the nature of sensation, emotion and experience. That, and the challenge of not wanting to, or having a hard time feeling some of the sensations.

So today, with three other women, I experienced the practice of Somatic Meditative Inquiry. Very simple, but not necessarily easy. I'm excited and hopeful and delighted to have the chance to learn with the Flowers. They have the answers to some of my most important questions about experiencing being.

For more information about their work, visit their site at A Wider Intelligence.

Being and Bodywork

Being can sound like a contrived thing. Something fancy, intellectual, esoteric.

But I use it to refer to the wholeness of a human, our human beingness.

Frustrated by the dissection of being into different fields: biology, anatomy, psychology, pathology to name a few. Frustrated by the dissection of being into different systems: circulatory, endocrine, skeletal, muscular, nervous, lymph, to name most. Frustrated by the split of body, mind, spirit; by the lack of clarity of what mind and intelligence are; by the extraction of experience, or beingness, that is named "emotions".

As I've written previously, isolating the experience of being that we call "emotions" from the whole person, their whole beingness, has, in my opinion a detrimental effect. We need to reintegrate what I call, our "felt" experience into our whole being.

When I am angry - that is considered an emotion. But calling that state an emotion seems to isolate it, separate it, dissociate it from the situation that triggered the anger response. Anger really needs to less understood as an isolated state, and more understood in terms of an interaction between a being and something else.

Ever been criticized as being too emotional? I think that usually refers to when a person is too expressive - demonstrating, showing to others, with noise, or behaviors, that they don't want to hear or see. 

In business especially there seems to be something about not showing emotion. 

That's all I can say this evening. More when I get more clarity.

Connectivity

Today I was thinking about how my body has always felt like a black box to me. I can't see what's there on the inside. I mostly feel I can't control it. And if something hurts, it just hurts, and all I can do is ignore it, or apply something from the outside.

But today, I was reminded, as I sometimes am, and mostly am not, that I could see about adjusting from the inside out. So today as the muscle padding below my thumb, on the palm of my hand, had a pain that felt like nerve pain (is there any other kind you ask?), and I wondered if I could imagine (and maybe imagining is more than just imagining, maybe it is the way we contact our insides at first... and then later we learn a more precise way, with a different, more credible name for it) loosening the tissue that might be aggravated and thus sending pain signals.

My dog stepped in my thumb when we were rough-housing and it hurt a lot - pushed my thumb back, over-stretching it. So the pain was acting up again. And wouldn't you know, after I 'imagined' expanding, or opening, the tissue in the area of the pain, the signal disappeared. How about that?

Similar, I occasionally remember - especially when I meditate or do the quiet stretches we've come to know as yoga - that inside I can feel I am wired from the inside, that my mind can access the 'physical' tissue of my bodybeing. So years and years ago when I was getting wisdom teeth removed I was aware of my body's response to this very aggressive attack, so I prepared myself to quietly lay down afterwards and be with the very strong pain signals, inviting the tissue to release its warnings, inviting it to relax and rest, since I had assessed and accepted the threat as good for my being. You'd be surprised, I think, and maybe I was surprised too, that such a quiet connective effort on my part helped enormously.

But how different such an approach is to the normal approach of distracting ourselves, or numbing the signals.

It's like we have this utterly unfathomably complex and mysterious being that is fully wired to our "thinking" brain, but we don't know we have much control over it at all, except as an object to be directed and controlled. We don't really know that we are wired from the inside out, and can affect ourselves subtly and deeply that way.

We do know about yogi's that were shown on TV, maybe by national geographic, but if not them, some equally honorable and trustworthy organization, to be able to control their body temperature sitting naked (or close to it) in the snow. So we know some people can do it, but mostly I think we think of them as the exceptions, kind of like the Mozarts and Beethoven's of the body. We don't see ourselves in that continuum, as being able to begin to exercise such powers.

Emotions

I'm having the hardest time with this word, this concept, this idea: "emotions".

I am also having the hardest time articulating why. I don't have the language for it yet.

So let me just bookmark this topic again, and when I can, figure out how to express what I feel is missing, how the very use of the word is somehow disembodying.

Can't figure out how to express it just now. Maybe next time.

Charting the Frontier of Inner Sensation

It's like when humans began exploring the depths of the oceans, opening up a world totally invisible from the surface, totally unknown previously.

The world of inner sensation is a new frontier for western science and thinkers. Since there was no way to prove or test for an individual's inner sensations, it's been ignored and dismissed.

Yet, in this inner sensation is the whole world of our being. We are a vast ecosystem of waters, skys, lands and weather, storms and peaceful times.

It was during my second rolfing series, in the Fall of 2006, that I came to understand that world within. The quality of contact from my rolfer crystalized inner sensations that would change sometimes moment by moment, like the ever changing New England weather (if you don't like it now, wait a minute, it'll change). One moment I felt a clearing and opening in my awareness, much like the clearing of a sky after fog or storm clouds. Another moment I felt light and air. Yet another heavy and immobile.

Instead of dismissing my experience as being irrelevant or contrived, the vivid sensations stimulated by the rolfing techniques, suddenly burst forth into a clear metaphor of the earth's own ecosystem.

The sky is my sense of awareness, mental clarity.

The ocean is the fluid within the container of my skin, not just blood and lymph, but interstitial fluid that permeates just about everything.

The earth is my bones

The plants are the fiber of my being - the fibers that make up fascia in wide swathes about all my body contents (for lack of a better word, parts surely is no better), and the fibers that float in the interstitial fluid.

The weather is the changing sense of well-being or not, of clarity or not, of energy or lack.

Still developing the languaging for this, and researching what else has been written on it.

Black and White Thinking and Ignorance

Today I had a conversation with an acquaintance whose sister has a disability. When she was little (she's now in her forties), you were either "normal" or "retarded". She wasn't "normal" so she was considered retarded. But she wasn't - she was very intelligent, it was just her expression that was hampered.

She had a hard time hearing, so the family took her to the doctor for that. Back then, if you responded to the standard hearing test - a clap behind your back - then it was determined you could hear. If you didn't respond then you were deaf. But she couldn't hear well - she couldn't hear voices well, but she jumped when the Doctor clapped his hand behind her back.

These two stories illustrated for me how clearly we can simplify the world into little boxes, and set up rules about the world that are patently wrong. Experts can get away with this, because we tend to rely on their knowledge. Doctors can get away with this.

This is especially true with the more subtle experiences of inner sensations of discomfort. If the doctor's can't find anything "physical", like a tumor or broken bone or bacterial infection, then whatever you feel is considered psychological - ie "made up", a figment of your thoughts and imagination. While some people may be inventing things in their mind, many people are actually feeling sensations that the doctors just have no way to measure.

How much damage has been done when a doctor has dismissed a patient's actual report of their experience because the doctor couldn't test for it. The damage to an individuals self-understanding and self-belief can be huge.

About Being

I think it's like this about being. I think we have a universe within and including our skin that we only know in certain terms:

Skin
Bones
Muscle
Organs
Blood
Nerves
Hormones

So any sensations, "feelings", we have, are actually mapped to some physical - existant/existing aspect of our interior anatomy.

But, there are other structures - entities within us. These, the ones that I'm educated about, surfaced like UNDERWATER TOPOGRAPHY to me, through Tom Myers' KMI lectures in Part 1 of the Kineses Myofascial Integration Professional Training Program.

These include:

Fascia, discarded until the late twentieth century, now being considered an energetic as well as fibral structure of the body

Interstitial fluid

Intercellular fibers

As well as a host of subtler entities discovered by Candance Pert.

My experience? (What else!) First I had the lectures in Part 1 of the KMI Training. Extensive slide based lectures, with experiential exercises demonstrating sensory aspects of the knowledge.

Second I began receiving Rolfing from Cathy Riggs, in Durham, North Carolina. Although this was my second ten series, I'd had another one ten years before while in Maryland, the impact was resoundingly more profound. It was like I had gone from swimming with a mask and snorkel looking at the deep, to actually scuba diving with oxygen into the depths.

While in my treatments I began having an experience I'd never named before, though I'd probably felt it before. I was experiencing a pain, excruciating subtle extensive pain throughout my being, that brought cries from my chest and tears streaming down my face.

"It hurts so much," I kept saying, "but it's OK. It's not in the skin, not in the bones, not in my organs, not in my muscles, not in my nerves, not in my blood vessels. Where is it? Where is the pain? What is hurting?"

When I heard the lectures from Tom about interstitial fluid, and about fibers that exist within cells, and through cellular walls, something began to brew. It took a little time, days or weeks, I don't recall now, but then I had a theory. Was this excruciating sensation I felt during parts of my rolfing perhaps the feeling of stretching/realigning the fibers, not only the fascial swathes around my muscles and organs and across stretches of my body, but ALSO, the fibers that transcend the cell walls.

Something in the image of the fibers hanging through cell walls resonated with the otherwise unexplicable, ungrounded, sensation of pain.

Maybe I can locate the image.

More to come.