Embody Mental Health

Posts Tagged ‘PTSD’

“Fear makes the wolf bigger than he is.”
German Proverb

Bindu Wiles post yesterday was about fear.  Bindu has been a breath of complicity in my blogosphere and I am very glad to have stumbled upon her writing, her story, and her 21.5.800 Challenge of which I am partaking.  Bindu’s story is one of trauma, survival and a renewal of self through therapy, yoga, buddhism, writing and breath.  Her story is emblematic of what I spoke about yesterday at the National Association of Social Worker’s Florida Conference and what has resonated in my own life story and recovery from trauma and PTSD–a restoration of breath and renewal of self by way of writing, yoga, and contemplative practices (buddhist, christian and yogic alike).  The passion I bring to my work, my speaking about the work, and into my life is one of feeling dedication and onus to perpetuate the discourse on what, for me, has been profound healing in my own life story and the stories of the patients/clients I have treated implementing the very things that brought about change for myself and my life.

“Fear makes the wolf bigger than he is,” or so goes the German proverb above.  I think this statement gets to the hear of Post-traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD).  A primal fear, animal in nature, overcomes us when in a dangerous situation–our survival mechanism kicks in and tells us one of the following,  ”Run, hide, fight, stop where you are” which translates to the built in mechanisms for fight, flight, freeze, submit.  In danger we become like the deer in the wild, doing everything we can to survive.  When PTSD is activated that survival response is locked in, “stuck” inside our body and brain and is not let go of when danger disappears.  We are left a constant state of “danger” or “I am going to die.”  Fear.  We are in a constant state of danger/fear.  Bindu’s post resonates with me because the pervasive fear of PTSD is so overwhelming and all-encompassing; something that logic cannot dissolve easily.  The hair-trigger response to anything that resembles danger (often distorted by a high-alert PTSD brain) takes the traumatized person all the way to the feelings of “I am going to die” before the non-trauma brain could even assess the situation.  PTSD brain doesn’t go from 0-100 in one second because in that “stuck” place it is already starting at 50 before even getting out of bed in the morning–high-alert is status-quo.  And it is exhausting.  I can tell you that from experience.  Asleep is exhausting.  Awake is exhausting.  And every moment is living on the precipice of erupting with fear.

This is much of what I talked about yesterday at the conference as well as how yoga, creative arts, and animal-assisted therapies (equine, canine, and even dolphin) can have such profound healing properties for the PTSD brain and living experience.  To me the combination of these elements combines the essential ingredients for the neurobiological issues of trauma and general brain “stuckness”.  Yoga, mind/body practices, and breathwork help restore our self-regulating and self-soothing capacities, creative arts help to find an outlet for expression outside of talk, give empowerment, purpose, and competency in action to people often very broken by trauma, and animals, with their ability to be both intuitive and non-judgmental relationships for a trauma survivor who may not be able to bring themselves into interpersonal relationships due to trust, shame and fear.  It was so interesting to me, as as I am always intrigued by the synchronicity of writing and happenstance, that while I was speaking about trauma and healing, Bindu was writing about her own plight in the fear of post-trauma, her intimate connection with her dog (an innately therapeutic relationship), and breath as restoration from out of a fear-infused moment.  In two different contexts, but from the same origin, we were talking about the same things.

I thank Bindu, and other trauma survivors I have met, for her eloquent and open vocalization of her experience and her ability to bring her insight and her life practices in to play to combat trauma and PTSD.  I continue to believe in the neuroplasticity of our brains–the ability of our brains to CHANGE.  I believe in trauma survivors ability to heal.  I believe in yoga, creative arts, and animals as amazing conduits to that healing.  I believe in the power of speaking our own truths and how much vocalization can be a catalyst for change.  I thank Bindu for her story and her post.  As well as for her 21.5.800 Challenge which I think is an inspiration and a call for self-care and healing in itself.    I thank all the wonderful participants at my workshop yesterday for their passions, enthusiasm, and the inspiration they brought me in the work they are doing, the dedication to their clients, and their openness to the creative explorations in therapy I was presenting to them.

WORD COUNT FOR TODAY: 804

“The place where you made your stand never mattered. Only that you were there… and still on your feet.”

Stephen King

Since I returned from Sonoita I have been assessing my emotional state, feet first.  There is a very pointed reason for this.  A wise horsewoman and trauma survivor with a casual penchant for qualitative research pointed some really profound things about the nature of the foot and reading body language from the toes up.  In all my time focused on somatics I had never given much attention to the foot–almost none.  But I met someone who spent her life’s work noticing the nuances of human and equine body language from head to toe and with a very finite lense on the feet.  In traditional psychotherapy the feet are not a focal point but in horsmanship the foot, where it is, the angle, the flexing and all, are the language in movement between horse and rider.  So, of course, the well-versed horsewoman Shelley Rosenberg has been spending a career looking at feet in a way that I, as a therapist, never would have thought to–she can read the language of the body in a completely different way than I and, it seems, feet have been speaking especially loudly to her.

Even at a distance her acute vision notices things like toe curling in a boot and feet flexing on tippy toes.  She tells me this as she notices my toes curling in my own Mountaineer size 7′s as I sit with some dis-ease atop Max–an elderly white horse who is teaching me a lot about what my body is saying to him.  She tells me that she noticed her own toes doing this while standing, walking, or crossing her legs as a sort of last stopping point for trauma or tension trapped in the body.  She found that even the trauma survivor that had peeled back all the other layers and evaporated all the other clenching of muscles seemed to linger at the toes–hanging on to that one last muscle of control and space to prepare for danger.  A person’s whole body could be lax, she tells me, but she can read what they are really feeling with one glance at their feet.

Until she mentions it to me I don’t notice my own toes clenching, unfamiliar with the back of a horse and the gait of a trot, I had ,unknowingly, clenched my last bit of muscle and flesh–hanging on when I didn’t even realizing it.  But since she pointed this out to me all I can do is realize it; I am assessing my life in steps and flexes.  And finding it to be amazingly accurate on a personal case study level.  I am beginning to explore myself and my emotions…feet first.

I was discussing the other day the ripples and waves that are created in the self post-trauma and post-PTSD.  I have shed the PTSD of my self and have been lifted to a beautiful place where I can explore this life after Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.  In the process I am attuned and aware of my “self” at a new level of clarity.  In this awareness I am learning more about the ripples after PTSD.  I am exploring those things that linger in me that are nowhere near that of a DSM-IV version of any disorder but are, what I can only describe as, the ripples and aftershocks; the behaviors and responses in body and mind that have to be undone after years spent in a state of constant fearful survival, raw and empty all at once.

This exploration of my sensory responses and my emotional sensibilities through my feet is another layer of that onion of aftershocks.  Now that I am thinking feet first I have found my toes to be a very accurate barometer of how I am feeling, even below my own first glance interpretation of myself–at the layer below conscious or superficial self and down to the muscle and bone, “subtle self”, if you will.  I wonder what we all might discover about ourselves if we spent a little more time in our toes–also the place of grounding and centering and rooting into the earth.  In yoga I have spent much of my time for myself and for students exploring rooting into the earth with every toe, from heel forward, but in psychotherapy and daily life I have paid it less attention.  Now I find myself starting in myself, in my patients, and in general, eyeing the world feet first.

Take a look down at the ground and see what you find!

“It is impossible to be in a state of panic and to breath deeply, slowly, quietly and regularly.  It cannot coexist.

The subjective experience of anxiety is often of being out of control.  If you deal with this by giving a patient a drug you are reinforcing the notion that the locus of control is outside.  If patients can discover that they have within them access to controls over emotional states it is a revelation.  And when you try to deal with this with an outside suppressive measure the effectiveness of the measure decreases with frequency of use. Whereas when you rely on an innate measure like this the power of technique increases with repetition.  This is the single most effective anti-anxiety measure I have come across (breathing exercise).

When I tell colleagues about it it is TOO simple.  How did we get to this state where we think the only effective medical treatment is drugs? ”

BY DR. ANDREW WEIL,  BREATHWORK Workshop, INTEGRATIVE MENTAL HEALTH CONFERENCE 2010.

BREATHWORK:

I am a huge proponent of breath as a potent healing activity and so I was excited when I got my 2 disc CD recording of the first ever INTEGRATIVE MENTAL HEALTH CONFERENCE in the mail and found an entire workshop with Dr. Andrew Weil on a biological, neurological, scientific and psychological affirmation of the power of breath for healing!  His quote above only touches on the mastery of the workshop, the hopefulness of breathwork integration in the field of psychotherapy, and plenty of rich data from the anthropological to the biological as to why breath can alleviate many of the ills we, as a society, might presently over-medicate before looking for alternate solutions.  He perfectly synthesizes above the crux of the reason why internal resources can be more potent and long lasting than chemical and external solutions for issues of anxiety.

In Dr. Weil’s workshop “Breathwork for Optimum Health” he discusses breath as the “Master Key” and I could not think of a more apt description of this tool that I have imparted to every client I see–and so, apparently, does Dr. Weil.  I feel in good company.  He stated that his simple breath exercise, similar in structure to my own, is the one thing he teaches everyone he sees.  I take clients through a breathing exercise and ask them how they feel, when they say how relaxed they feel I remind them that THEY not I got themselves to that state of relaxation.  I may have said the words but the only thing that got their body and mind relaxed was their own body and mind.  Another thing I was excited to hear resonate with Dr. Weil’s description above of the internal resources versus the external crutches that over-medicating can produce.  We have such powers for change inside ourselves which I explored in the NEUROBIOLOGY & NEUROPLASTICITY post a short while ago–we just don’t tap into that power for change for the positive nearly enough.

If I can teach one client breath and they can sleep better, calm down faster, diminish their anger in one situation they would not have had the internal resources to deal with prior then, to me, it is a valuable tool.  When I hear a COMBAT MARINE VETERAN tell me he is practicing alternate nostril breathing at home for anger and sleep or another telling me that he presses his palms together at his chest and practices nostril breathing for anxiety, both with amazing anecdotal results, then I can say that if it works for them it could work for any of us–given the chance!

If you have not tried a basic breathing practice then maybe just try listening to a quick soundbite, mp3, cd of a simple breathing technique or maybe I can outline a simple one on the site if there is interest.

INTEGRATIVE MENTAL HEALTH CONFERENCE:

Am I a nerd because I checked my mail anxiously every day awaiting it’s arrival?  Answer is: yes!  But I was waiting all last week to receive the INTEGRATIVE MENTAL HEALTH CONFERENCE recordings as I could not make it to the conference but I wanted to imbibe every moment of the rich material with speakers like Jon Kabat–Zinn, Dr. Weil, Amy Weintraub and many other academics, researchers, and practitioners in the field of integrative practices for mental health and wellness.  The CDs, which contain 40 hours of material, are a rich and hopeful array of work in this field and an inspiration of what is possible within the field.

The conference was made up of social workers, nurses, doctors, psychologists and psychiatrists and was sold out weeks before the event.  If this doesn’t show the hunger in the health and mental health field for treatments outside of the scope of what western medicine is capable of then I don’t know what is.  It shows that this field is burgeoning and that more professionals than ever before are integrating holistic approaches into the course of traditional treatments they already provide.  The point of INTEGRATIVE is not to get rid of anything just to find the perfect complement of what is being done and what else can be added to the equation for more effective results for a whole person: mind, body, and spirit.

The recordings are phenomenal and I recommend them to any professional in the healthcare field or any person interested in a variety of treatment approaches for their own health–body and mind.  The conference sessions can be purchased as a complete set or a-la-carte per workshop for $15.00 per session.  Each one has a dense collection of material and each presentation gives a variety of resources where you can learn more about the practices discussed in the lecture–a lovely bonus.

A few of the amazing lectures included:

• The Psychoneuroimmunology of Resilience, Optimism, and Hope
• Mind-Body Medicine: Clinical Hypnosis for Medical and Mental Health Conditions
• Transforming Your Mind: Meditation and Neuroplasticity
• Spirituality and Mental Health: Paradigms and Evidence
• Deficiencies in Omega 3-EFAs & Substance Abuse Mechanisms
• Creating the Chemistry of Joy
• A Vision of the Future of Integrative Mental Health
• Lifeforce Yoga: Empower Your CLients to Manage Their Moods

Can you see why I was in love with these CDS?

For more information on the Conference & The hosting facility ARIZONA CENTER FOR INTEGRATIVE MEDICINE: http://integrativemedicine.arizona.edu/integrative_mental_health_conference.html

For more information on the recordings go to: http://www.conferencerecording.com/aaaListTapes.asp?CID=IMH10