Healing Trauma (chapter 4)

In chapter 4 he starts to get into some of the exercises that he talks you through in the CD. None of the exercises are anything unusual. They seem to be all about just grounding you and reconnecting you with your body. He talks about how trauma causes us to disconnect with our bodies and we can feel very uncomfortable in our own skin. He says that we need to reestablish the connection with our bodies and befriend our bodies again.

He tells us that we need to focus on the sensations in the body an not on intense emotions. He says that we need to be aware of any emotional reaction that we may have as we are doing the exercises, but we need to pay attention to how we experience the emotions in our bodies sensations. He says that before trauma you are not overwhelmed by your feelings, but after trauma, feelings can be completely overwhelming.

He reinforces again that these exercises are all about rebuilding the connection with our bodies because trauma is all about a loss of connection. The main idea in practicing these exercises is for you to begin to feel your skin and your muscles as boundaries holding and containing your sensations and feelings. I am not going to go into too much detail with the exercises because I can't do them justice and I have really been to busy to give them the time and attention that I need to while I am in school so I'll just recommend the book and CD to everyone. Some of the exercises may seem a little cheesy and silly but I can see how they can be helpful.

He goes into quite a bit of detail about the "felt sense". He says that even if we are not consciously aware of it, the felt sense is telling you how you feel at any given moment. It is relaying the overall experience of the organism, rather than interpreting what is happening from the individual parts. Perhaps the best way to describe the felt sense is to say that it is the experience of being in a living body that understands the nuances of its environment by way of its responses to that environment.  

The physical (external) senses of sight, sound, smell, touch and taste are elements that contribute only a portion of the information that builds a foundation for the felt sense. Other important data are derived from our bodies internal awareness - the positions it takes, the tensions it has, the movements it makes, its temperature, etc. Our felt sense can be influenced and changed by our thoughts, but it is not a thought. Emotions contribute to the felt sense, but they play a less important role than most people believe.

The feelings we experience are typically much more subtle than we can convey in language. The felt sense is so integral to our nature that we can take it for granted to the point of not even realizing that it exists until we attend to it. To the degree that we experience the felt sense as ever shifting and are able to embrace this constant flow, we will move out of trauma to life.

When people enter a new situation they focus their attention on the new event. Traumatized people tend to be riveted on their past traumas; new situations are connected to and constricted by that past event. The key to changing is staying with the sensation until it changes. That is the nature of all sensation.

Traumatized people, generally, have become fearful of their own aggression. They begin to emerge from immobility and suppress this life saving response which then can throw them back into paralysis. This keeps them from reengaging in life. Often traumatized people feel nothing or they feel rage, and this is often expressed in inappropriate ways. By experiencing aggression in healthy ways a person can begin to give way to a healthier middle ground between numbness and rage.

That is all I am going to share about chapter 4. It is really packed with a lot of information and I feel like I just need to tell people to get their own copies of this book. As valuable as I can see that it can be, I feel bad that I haven't given the exercises more time and attention. If nothing else it has just been good to be aware of the reactions my body has when it feels threatened or overwhelmed and it also helps me to understand other people's reactions to me. I am finishing up my accounting degree and I am in a really tough class that is taking up every second of my free time. I keep saying that I am going to focus on this more when I finish up. I hope that is the case.