When some people remember horrendous accidents that they were in, two key areas of the brain go blank: the area that provides a sense of time and perspective, which makes it possible to know that was then, but I am safe now, and another area that integrates the images, sounds, and sensations of trauma into a coherent story. When those parts of the brain are knocked out, you experience something not as an event with a beginning, a middle, and an end but in fragments of sensations, images, and emotions. A trauma can be successfully processed only if all those brain structures are kept online. Eye movement desensitization and reprocessing (EMDR) allow some to access their memories of an accident without being overwhelmed by them. When the brain areas whose absence is responsible for flashbacks can be kept online while remembering what has happened, people can integrate their traumatic memories as belonging to the past. #RandolphHarris 1 of 7

In some, dissociation (shutting down completely) can complicate recovery in a different way. None the brain structures necessary to engage in the present were online, so that dealing with the trauma is simply impossible. Without a brain that is alert and present there can be no integration and resolution. These type of people need to be helped to increase their window of tolerance before they can deal with their posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) symptoms. Hypnosis was the most widely practiced treatment for trauma from the late 1800s. However, hypnosis fell out of favor in the early 1990s and there have been no recent studies of its effectiveness for treating PTSD. Still, hypnosis can induce a state of relative calm from which people can observe their traumatic experiences without being overwhelmed by them. Since that capacity to quietly observe oneself is a critical factor in the integration of traumatic memories, it is likely that hypnosis, in some form, will make a comeback. #RandolphHarris 2 of 7

Still, many people turn to spirituality to calm their minds down and heal their bodies, as spirituality arises from an authentic longing to know God. For us to evolve and maintain a vital, mature personal self out of our inborn potentials, we require caregivers who facilitate our individuation by meeting certain developmental requirements. We have a holding requirement, a requirement for caregivers who suspend the expression of their own subjectivity and are present simply as loving onlookers who give us room to discover our own subjective reality. This imagine of God helps to heal people because they are able to fill in holes in their psyche that formed as a result of childhood needs inconsistently met due to the lack of guidance or abandonment. Many of us want to experience ourselves as part of a calm, wise, loving authority who possess qualities we admire and are latent with us. We require relationships with others who are very much like ourselves. #RandolphHarris 3 of 7

Our caregivers facilitate the emergence of our authentic individual selfhood when they optimally respond to these requirements of forming a loving and protective bond with us. People who feel safe and loved are usually happy and want to make others in their presence feel comfortable and at peace also. I see ahead of me the City of God, all golden and shimmering in the distance. I am so excited. I want it so much. When we feel a connection we God and His house, we experience so many wonderful feelings of love and joy. If you feel empty, keep going, far beyond this emptiness until you melt into God’s love and feel a blissful union with him. Some people feel that the World is so painful, and humiliating. They may feel rejected, abandoned, and alone. Well, these feeling pop up, turn them off and think about how that beautiful tree in the park appears to be alone, but has a root system blow it that helps it thrive and develop. Just like we may not be able to see the roots, we know they are there, much like God is here feeding and protecting us, but we may not be able to see him. Yet our faith tells us God is here with us. #RandolphHarris 4 of 7

Some of us try to prove our value through some activity of earning it. Perhaps we try to earn it by being kind and accommodating toward others—whatever fits our concept of having value. However, the more that we try to earn our value, the more that that very project reinforces the underlying premise that we do not intrinsically have it—it forever remains something extrinsic to who we are. And then that premise propels us to keep trying to earn it, and we are caught in a loop. This phenomenon manifests in relationship dynamics all the time. Perhaps we are drawn to someone, and so we try to get them to love us. The problem is, who we become in that attempt usually is not very appealing. We are trying to make something happen rather than allowing it to happen naturally, so we are constantly manipulating ourselves, or the other person or both. #RandolphHarris 5 of 7

In the process of trying to manipulate love, we may present ourselves in a way that is not open nor authentic, or we may try to pressure or control the other—none of which is likely to evoke feelings of love. Our attempt to get the other to love us actually makes them less likely to love us, and then we feel even more desperate for love, even more convinced that love will not arise unless we make it arise—and the cycle continues. Or perhaps we are trying to maintain our sense of space in our relationship. Perhaps we see our space as something that could be easily consumed or usurped by the other. So we assert our requirement for space in a way that is hard-edged or hostile, that has a quality of pushing the other away. The very way that we go about promoting our requirement for space makes it hard for the other to welcome giving us our space. And then we feel even more convinced that the other does not want us to have our space, and we all the more antagonistically go about asserting our requirement for space. #RandolphHarris 6 of 7

We keep going around in circle doing the same. Insanity is believing that we can keep doing the same thing and get different results. We keep doing the same thing in order to avoid feeling some experience of emptiness, and when it does not work, rather than recognizing that it does not work, we keep doing it harder. We think that is we try harder at the thing that does not work, we can make it into something that works. This is the way that the conditioned mind works and we find ourselves in an environment that does not support our full openness, and this leads to us being lost and confused. Perhaps our environment remains stable as long as we are happy, confident, and doing well, but begins to unravel if we are having a hard time and do not get over it quickly. #RandolphHarris 7 of 7