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Focus on things that are Good
My feelings of sadness are bad—not in a conscious way, but implicitly. And because that experience is too painful for me to tolerate for very long, eventually a strategy will develop: I will try not to have feelings of sadness. During their training, most psychologists are taught cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT). CBT was first developed to treat phobias such as fear of spiders, airplane, or heights, to help people compare their irrational fears with harmless realities. Many are gradually desensitized from their irrational fears by bringing to mind what they are most afraid of, using their narratives and images (“imaginal exposure”), or they are placed in actual (but actually safe) anxiety-provoking situations (“in vivo exposure”), or they are exposed to virtual-reality, computer-simulated scenes, for example, in the case of combat-related posttraumatic stress disorder PTSD, fighting in the streets of Sacramento that broke out at the state Capitol a few weeks ago. #RyanPhillippe 1 of 6
The idea behind cognitive behavioral treatment is that when people are repeatedly exposed to the stimulus without bad things actually happening, they gradually will become less upset; the bad memories will have become associated with corrective information of being safe. Cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) also tries to help patients deal with their tendency to avoid, as in: I do not want to talk about it. It sounds simple, but, as we have seen, reliving trauma reactivates the brain’s alarm system and knocks out critical brain areas necessary for integrating the past, making it likely that people will relive rather than resolve the trauma. From this perspective, our wound is not what happened to us in the past; it is that we were unable to stay connected with our deeper nature in the face of what happened to us in the past, which is our disconnect from the truth of who we are. #RyanPhillippe 2 of 6
Prolonged exposure of flooding has been studied more thoroughly than any other posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) treatment. People are asked to focus their attention on the traumatic material and not distract themselves with others thoughts or activities. Looking more closely into the phenomenology of our loss of being, we can see that our conditioned identities always come in pairs: one that is more conscious, and underneath that, one that is less conscious. The more conscious identity—the one that we create to cover up our loss of being—could be called our compensatory identity, because its basic function is to compensate. The less conscious identity—where we have identified with our loss of being—could be called our deficient identity. The deficient identity that goes with no having pain would be something like: I am someone whose pain is too much; if I allow it, it overwhelms and alienates those I need and love. So underneath: I am someone who does not have pain is I am someone whose pain is too much. #RyanPhillippe 3 of 6
For every conditioned identity then, there are always two poles; the people of who we are hoping we are, and the deeper pole of who we are fearing we are. This is an intrinsically untenable situation, because what we are trying to be does not rest on any actual confidence that we really are that; we have to continually work against the deeper fear that in fact we are not that. That is why our intrapsychic loops—our dual conditioned identities—are inevitably self-undermining. There is nothing we can ever do to prove that we are something as long as our deeper belief is that we really are not that—especially when our activity to disprove that deeper belief only reinforces it. When we reject our pain as too much, for example, then when it finally does break through it probably will seem like too much—both to ourselves and to those around us. This is the self-undermining part of our loop. However, then because we cannot tolerate the experience of our pain as too much, we are thrust back into our strategy of repressing it. And the momentum created by this mind activity that both defeats and perpetuates itself is inexhaustible, until we begin to bring awareness to it. #RyanPhillippe 4 of 6
While our own personal loops can create tremendous suffering and bring us to the outer layers of uncomfortable darkness, to really go all the way this pit of darkness requires another human being. Nonetheless, research has shown that up to one hundred minutes of flooding (in which anxiety-provoking triggers are presented in an intense, sustained form) are required before decreases in anxiety are reported. Exposure sometimes helps to deal with fear and anxiety, but it has not been proven to help with guilt or other complex emotions. In contrast to its effectiveness for irrational fears (keep in mind every fear can be considered rational in some context) such as the first day of school, cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) has not done so well for traumatized individuals, particularly those histories of childhood disturbances. Only about 33 percent of those with PTSD showed some improvement. However, those who complete CBT treatment usually have fewer PTSD symptoms, but they rarely recover completely: Most continue to have substantial problems with their health, work, or mental well-being. #RyanPhillippe 5 of 6
So the thing to take away is that different methods of healing work for different people, and not everyone is going to react the same to treatment. Nonetheless, seeking help, regardless of if it is talk therapy (which I do not recommend because you have no idea what the agenda of the person treat you is or what notes they are putting in your files), finding a hobby like walking in a safe park with a friend during the day time, painting, or reading a book, or even watching funny movies that are for a general audience, find a way to relax and take your mind off of whatever is bothering you is a way to recover from trauma. However, if you are constantly focusing on your problems or around people who are mistreating you, it will take you outside of your character and cause you to do things that are not typical of you. So if people or situations are not bringing out the best in you, trying to find something safe and sane to focus on so you can heal. Remember, there is always someone who will care about you and wants to see you be successful. (www.thedeedle.com) #RyanPhillippe 6 of 6
All of the Brain Structures are Online
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
Our Social Medium
When people are forced to submit to overwhelming power, as is true for most abused children, and women and men trapped in domestic violence, and incarcerated men and women, they often survive with resigned compliance. The best way to overcome ingrained patterns of submission is to restore a physical capacity to engage and defend. Some people, however, become deskilled by fear and are vulnerable to attacks because their executive function—their frontal lobes go off-line, and they freeze. However, when you mind your own business and mentally have the message, “Do not mess with me,” in your mind, you are not likely to be bothered by people hiding in the bushes. Still, people cannot put traumatic events behind until they are able to acknowledge what has happened and start to recognize the issues they are struggling with. As a teenager from the middle of nowhere, you have limited prospects. You spend your free time watching reports about the war effort and imagine a life more exciting. We must also face the fact that, to most Americans, violence is fun. We watch in on television and in the movies regularly. The bar-room fight in Little Boy Blue, starring Ryan Phillippe, is a matter of comedy or semicomedy to many. Football players are armored and padded like medieval knights so that they can provide violence with the least damage to themselves. Wrestling, the acting out of violence, commands a wide audience. The roller derbies attract fanatic followers who look on, not to watch expert roller skating, but to exult in the fights and near-fights, the elbowing and the falls. Ice hockey is a game in which we simply concede that fights are a part of the sport.
Violence is actually a problem that faces not only psychologist, but every human being everywhere. It is one thing to proclaim, as psychologist do, that violence is not instinctive in human nature. It is another to demonstrate ways in which aggression can be controlled and eliminated, and replaced by cooperation. We are firmly committed to the idea that human nature is not instinctively violent—that we all start out neutral in this regard. It is in the learning that occurs in the house, the neighborhood, the classroom, the playground, the streets, shops, offices, military, institutions, and other places that we acquire the skills and attitudes needed to do violence. Cooperation, respect, appreciation, mutual interaction, and selflessness are often taught ineffectively, irrelevantly, or too late. It is organized violence on top which creates individual violence at the bottom. It is the accumulated indignation against organized wrong, organized crime, organized injustice, which drives the political offender to act. Talking peace is not enough Much violence is spawned by frustration. Frustration will always be found where people’s basic needs go unsatisfied. Where poverty is the frustrator, it is up to not only the government, but also to individual citizens and groups to pressure for the eradication of poverty, and treat mental illness. Individual responsibility is the key. If I get a head at the expense of another individual—or of whole groups of people—that inequality pollutes the society of which both he and I are a part of, and I cannot be surprised at the violence that result.
There are people who work in mental hospitals and admit to beating patients up for fun, and say “No one will believe them anyway because they are crazy. I mean, look where they are.” Some violence is created by mental and emotional disorders, for which successful treatment is sometimes available. However, society needs to create an improved climate of acceptance for these programs of help and therapy that are available. The stigma attached to mental illness must be eradicated, and so must the feeling of shame or weakness that keeps many people from seeking available professional help when they require it. The problem of wars between nations is similar to but similar from that of person fighting person. It seems perfectly clear to me that we can never make any real progress towards permanent peace so long as we recognize the institution of war as legitimate and clothe it with glory. I still believe that people are really good at heart. I simply cannot build up my hopes on a foundation consisting of confusion, misery, and death. I see the World gradually being turned into wilderness. I think that it will come right, that this cruelty too will end, and that peace and tranquility will return. Political corruption sometimes seems too big a problem for any individual or group to tackle. Fear of using our rights, as well as ignorance of the channels open to us, still keeps most ordinary citizens from acting to solve such problems. The better human qualities are: wisdom, and knowledge, courage, humanity, justice, temperance, and transcendence. So please do the right thing.
Young Love Has a Thousand Eyes
Influence through mass communication need not be blatant—it can be very subtle indeed. Even when communicators are not making a direct attempt to sell us something, they can succeed in influencing the way we look at the World. If my assumptions about you are incorrect, I will continue to perceive you in incorrect or incomplete ways. Through education, books, encounter sensitivity groups, and programs on television and other media, we are trying to bring about awareness of such problems. Racism, gender discrimination, elitism—all these are increasingly being brought to our collective attention. Love is that blessed wand which wins the waters from the hardness of the hearts. Emotions become volatile over time and officially prove to be the greatest weakness for many. We can also recognize messages from the collective unconscious when we experience synchronicity, making meaning out of sheer coincidence. Nothing happens by accident. There is a profound significance in what others may perceive as random, inconsequential coincidence. On the path to individuation, a person examines synchronistic events as meaningful expressions of the collective unconscious. We all have the innate capacity to walk a path that leads us to our true selves. We gather strength from a connection to God. This force has wisdom to share—wisdom that brings with it peace, balance, and wholeness, but to benefit from this wisdom, we must first learn to feel. The body responds to extreme experiences by secreting stress hormones. These are often blamed for subsequent illness and disease.
However, stress hormones are meant to give us the strength and endurance to respond to extraordinary conditions. People who actively do something to deal with a disaster—rescuing loved ones or strangers, transporting people to a hospital being part of a medical team, pitching tents or cooking meals—utilize their stress hormones for their proper purpose and therefore are at much lower risk of becoming traumatized. Nonetheless, everyone has his or her breaking point, and even the best-prepared person may become overwhelmed by the magnitude of the challenge. Helplessness and immobilization keep people from utilizing their stress hormones to defend themselves. When that happens, their hormones still are being pumped out, but the actions they are supposed to fuel are thwarted. Eventually, the activation patterns that were meant to promote coping are turned back against the organism and now keep fueling inappropriate stand your ground and freeze responses. In order to return to proper functioning, this persistent emergency response must come to an end. The body needs to be restored to a baseline state of safety and relaxation from which it can mobilize to take action in response to real danger. In the powerful body-based therapies called sensorimotor psychotherapy and somatic experiencing, individuals learn to deal with issues by taking the story of what happened and letting it rest. Instead, they explore physical sensations and discover the location and shape of the imprints of past trauma itself, which helps an individual to build up internal resources that foster safe access sensations and emotions that overwhelmed them at the time of the trauma. This process, which we have already discussed is called pendulation—gently moving in and out of accessing internal sensations and traumatic memories.
In the way, an individual is helped to gradually expand their window of tolerance. Once a person can tolerate being aware of their trauma-based physical experiences, they are likely to discover powerful physical impulses—like hitting, pushing, or running—that arose during the trauma but were suppressed in order to survive. These impulses manifest themselves in subtle body movements such as twisting, turning, or backing away. Amplifying these movements and experimenting with ways to modify them begins the process of bringing the incomplete, trauma-related action tendencies to completion and can eventually lead to resolution of the trauma. Somatic therapies can help individuals to relocate themselves in the present by experiencing that it is safe to move. Feeling the pleasure of taking effective action restores a sense of agency (agency is the technical term for the feeling of being in charge of your life: knowing where you stand, know that you have a say in what happens to you, knowing that you have some ability to shape your circumstances) being able to actively defend and protect themselves. When people can physically experience what it would have felt like to fight back or run away, they relax, smile, and express a sense of completion. Love is better than a pair of spectacles to make everything seem greater which is seen through it.
Helping People to Deal with their Sensory World
Love is a fervent fire. Meeting our shadow side can be a painful and frightening experience. Our shadow represents the unknown aspects of ourselves that are too reprehensible, incongruent, or forbidding to incorporate into our conscious personality. Mainstream trauma treatment has paid scant attention to helping terrified people to safely experience their sensations and emotions. Medications such as serotonin reuptake blockers, Respiridol and Seroquel (Sarah pills) increasingly have taken the place of helping people to deal with their sensory World. However, the most natural way that we humans calm down our distress is by being touched, hugged, and rocked. This helps with excessive arousal and makes us feel intact, safe, protected, and in charge. Touch, the more elementary tool that we have to calm down, is proscribed from the most therapeutic practices. Yet, one cannot fully recover if one does not feel safe in one’s skin. Therefore, I encourage all my patients to engage in some sort of bodywork, be it swimming, tennis, or a walk through the park. #RyanPhillippe 1 of 5
Before examining our own hidden qualities, we may be in complete denial of our shadow elements, yet what we deny in ourselves can often easily be spotted in others. A person may despise another’s quick temper while at the same time fervently suppressing a wish to respond with anger. The first step in making the acquaintance of a person’s own shadow is admitting that the scary, annoying, or irritating qualities found in others are often the qualities in that individual that evoke the very same responses. You have to meet their point of resistance—the place that has the most tension—and meet it with an equal amount of energy. That will release the frozen tensions. You cannot hesitate; hesitation communicates a lack of trust in yourself. Slow movement, careful attuning will provide one with a tremendous confidence and empathy, let the pressure of your touch meet the tension they are holding in their bodies. #RyanPhillippe 2 of 5
Some people think that isolation is good for people who are traumatized. However, just like you can thirst for water, you can thirst for the platonic human touch. It is a comfort to be met confidently, deeply, firmly, gently, responsively. Mindful touch and movement grounds people and allows them to discover tensions that they are no longer aware of. When you are touched, you wake up to the part of your body that is being touched. When emotions are bound up inside, they would do things like form knots in your stomach because they body is physically restricted. When people are stressed out and feel unloved, their shoulders will tighten, backs starts hurting, they get headaches, and their facial muscle tense. They spend enormous energy holding back their tears—or any sound of movement that might betray their inner state. It is hard when the body is trying to heal and people constantly require your assistance, and you do not even feel like you are getting what you need. The body wants to rest and is using up its energy assisting someone else. #RyanPhillippe 3 of 5
When the physical tension is released, the feelings can be released. Movement helps breathing to become deeper, and as the tensions are released, expressive sounds can be discharged. The body becomes freer—breathing freer, being in flow. Touch makes it possible to live in a body that can move in response to being moved. People who are terrified need to get a sense of where their bodies are in space and of their boundaries. Firm and reassuring touch lets them know where those boundaries are: what is outside them, where their bodies end. They discover that they do not constantly have to wonder who and where they are. They discover that their body is solid and that they do not have to be constantly on guard. Touch lets them know that they are safe. The inborn collective unconscious becomes known to us through dreams, myths, and synchronistic events. The dream is one of the most important means of accessing the collective unconscious. #RyanPhillippe 4 of 5
Instead of serving high moral principles, many people base their actions upon fear or loss and desire for recognition. To me, one of the most baffling aspects of the behavior of men and women in highly-responsible positions in some segments of our society, is the comparative lack of concern for—perhaps its lack of awareness of—the factor of communication, as such, in the problems and situations in which they have to deal. It is a communication that makes human society possible. For communication to take place, the receiver must also be receptive. That means more than just having his ears clean. He must also want or need to get the message and be willing to decode and fit it into his existing pattern of ideas and associations. If the student receiver is asleep in a classroom, even the professor’s most exciting and beautiful message will not get through to him. If I am angry at you I may not receive your message, no matter what or how you try to send it. If you are unwilling to hear me because you do not like respect people of my gender, race, or background, then I am casting my pearls before swine (spilling my message onto unreceptive ground). #RyanPhillippe 5 of 5
Working in a Diner on TV and Cooking up in Engagement!
It is natural to wish to be beloved by those we love. Being in love and engaged to be married is one of the most exciting times in your life. Knowing that you have found your soul mate is the greatest observation in your lifetime. Love is the master-key that opens the gates of happiness. To love and to live well is wished by many. Love is an instrument like any other thing, and we must play to it with considerate gentleness. The moment someone says they wish to spend the rest of their life with you is something many of us dream of. #BethBehrs 1 of 2
I would like to take a moment to congratulate Beth Behrs of the hit TV show 2 Broke Girls, in her engagement to longtime boyfriend Michael Gladis. The couple has been dating for six years, and they finally cooked their relationship into what the two soulmates wished for. Personally, I am so happy for the two of them because Beth has been a major influence in my life and a lifesaver. I could not be happier for her and wish her a lifetime of joy, happiness, prosperity, and pleasure. I hope we are all lucky enough to find true love in our lifetimes. Congratulations! You will always be special to me. #BethBehrs 2 of 2
The Light had Dawned on His Souls
To be both generally blamed and generally liked evinces a peculiar construction of mortal. After 911, some people do not remember anyone they felt safe with. For them, engaging with horses, dogs, or cats may be much safer than dealing with human beings. This principle is currently being applied in many therapeutic settings to great effect, including senior housing facilities, residential treatment programs, and veterans’ rehabilitation. For many people, coming to a treatment center and being allowed to care for a pet is the first step to recovery, as it makes them feel more human to be trusted with the responsibility of being trusted to care for another living being. Growing a bind with a horse or another animal will help one feel safe enough to care for another human being. #RyanPhillippe 1 of 5
From the moment of our birth, our relationships are embodied in responsive faces, gestures, and touch. These are the foundations of attachment. Trauma results in a breakdown of attuned physical synchrony: When you enter the waiting room of a Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) clinic, you can immediately tell the patients from the staff by their frozen faces and collapsed (but simultaneously agitated) bodies. Unfortunately, many therapists ignore those physical communications and focus only on the words with which their patients communicate. To know intense joy without a strong bodily frame, one must have an enthusiastic soul. His soul is a great deal too large for his frame. #RyanPhillippe 2 of 5
We must learn to accommodate ourselves to the discovery that some of these cunningly fashioned instruments called human souls have only a very limited range of music, and will not vibrate in the least under a touch that fills others with tremulous rapture or quivering agony. As a strong boy struggles against fumes with the more violence when they begin to be stifling, a strong soul struggles against phantasies with all the more alarmed energy when they threaten to govern in the place of thought. There is a species of intuition—either a spiritual lie, or the subtle recognition of a fact—which comes to us in a reduced state of the corporeal system. Your soul was in a hurry, and made a rush for a body. There are patient spirits that have waited from eternity, and never found parents fit to be born of. #RyanPhillippe 3 of 5
The soul, as you conceive it, is not a spiritual conception, but some kind of organization—a ghost, in short, having function, but the Devil himself cannot define its structure. If individuality has no play, society does not advance; if individuality breaks out of all bounds, society perishes. We learn much about how to deal with authority figures in general from our interactions with parents, who are the first authority figures most of us encounter. Not all parents are alike. This is one of the main reasons people react differently to authority figures. One child has parents who treat him as a small adult, a member of the family who has his own independence and sense of self. Another child’s parents treat him like a doll or a piece of furniture, to be shunted about as it is convenient to do so. Another4 child has only one parent, and this, too, may affect his interaction with authority figures. These three children are likely to have different attitudes towards parents. #RyanPhillippe 4 of 5
I find children, up to the time they are spoiled and flattened out by the culture, nicer, better, more attractive human beings than their elders. The taming and transforming that they undergo seems to hurt rather than help It was not for nothing that a famous psychologist once defined adults as deteriorated children. As a child grown, he encounters other authority figures: teachers, clergymen, police, and so on. He may find that the way he has learned to relate to his parents serves him very well in dealing with others. Or perhaps the same techniques do not work at all. Nothing, to the noble heart, is so afflicting as the consciousness of having done injustice. Time flies. The best of all good things for this special day the Lord has blessed us with, and all the many more to come. Many happiness return! (www.thedeedle.com) #RyanPhillippe 5 of 5
All is Not Forgotten—Souls will Not be Saved by Brute Force
When one is stuck experiencing an ongoing trauma, and no one to turn to for help, this poses a real challenge for recovery. Once you recognize that posttraumatic reactions start off as efforts to save your life, you may gather the courage to face your inner music, but you will require help to do so. You have to find someone you can trust enough to accompany you, someone who can safely hold your feelings and help you listen to the painful messages from your emotional brain. You need a guide who is not who is not afraid of your terror and who can safeguard the wholeness of you while you explore the fragmented experiences that you have to keep secret from yourself for so long. Most traumatized individuals require an anchor and a great deal of coaching to do this work. #RyanPhillippe 1 of 6
The training of competent trauma therapists involves learning about the impact of trauma, abuse, and neglect and mastering a variety of techniques that can help to stabilize and calm patients down, help to lay traumatic memories and reenactments to rest, and reconnect patients with their fellow men and women. Ideally, the therapist will also have been on the receiving end of whatever therapy he practices. While it is inappropriate and unethical for therapists to tell you the details of their personal struggles, it is perfectly reasonable to ask what particular forms of therapy they have been trained in, where they learned their skills, and whether they have personally benefited from the therapy they propose for you. #RyanPhillippe 2 of 6
There is no one treatment of choice for trauma, and any therapist who believes that his particular method is the only answer to your problem is suspect of being an ideologue rather than somebody who is interested in making sure that you will get well. No therapist can possibly be familiar with every effective treatment, and he must be open to exploring options other than the ones he offers. He must also be open to learning from you. Gender, culture, and personal background are relevant only if they interfere with helping the patient feel safe and understood. Feeling safe is a necessary condition for you to confront your fears and anxieties. Someone who is stern, judgmental, agitated, or harsh is likely to leave you feeling scared, abandoned, and humiliated, and that will not help you resolve your traumatic stress. #RyanPhillippe 3 of 6
There may be times as old feelings from the past are stirred up, when you become suspicious that the therapist resembles someone who once hurt or abused you. Hopefully, this is something you can work through together, because in my experience patients get better only if they develop deep beneficial feelings for their therapists. I also do not think that you can grow and change unless you feel that you have some impact on the person who is treating you. The critical question is this: Do you feel that your therapist is curious to find out who you are and what you, not some generic Post Traumatic Stress Disorder patient needs? Man is no poor drifting seaweed of the Universe. Man has a soul; which, if he will, puts him beyond fortune’s finger and the future’s spite. #RyanPhillippe 4 of 6
Waves know the last secret of many a stout albatross, never heard of days the days he left the port and drifted into the White Squall. Every wave in my eyes seems a soul. There is no house for the soul where dwells a shadow of untruth. Are you just a list of symptoms on some diagnostic questionnaire, or does your therapist take the time to find out why you do what you do and think that you think? Therapy is a collaborative process—a mutual exploration of yourself. People who have been brutalized by their caregivers often do not feel safe with anyone. I often ask people if they can think of any person they felt safe with. Many of them hold tight to the memory of that one teacher, neighbor, shopkeeper, coach, or minister who showed that he or she cared, and that memory is often the seed of learning to reengage. #RyanPhillippe 5 of 6
We are a hopeful species. Working with trauma is as much about remembering how we survived as it is about what is broken. Imagine what you were like as a newborn—you were lovable and filled with spunk. Imagine what you were like before you were hurt. People joyously welcomed you into existence, recognized the uniqueness of your subjective life, and affirmed your special talents. Your song expresses my fantastic ideal. I will never forget you and please think of me and come to see me often. May you be satisfactory and happy. Let the Sun and blue Sky wake up the hidden memories that are good. The soul requires air; a wide sweep and frequent change of it. Morbid influences, in a thousand-fold variety, gather about hearths, and pollute the life of households. #RyanPhillippe 6 of 6
Reading his Story is Enough to make me Cry—this is a Fun Game?
Life, the time a story ends is the time another story begins. Here is a joyful story and a sad story. Story is still on regardless of joy or sadness. You are in my dream for years. You with my hope take a long walk. I hope I can walk with you forever. Traumatized human beings recover in the context of relationships: with families, loved ones, clubs, veterans’ organizations, religious communities, or professional therapists. The role of those relationships is to provide physical and emotional safety, including safety from feeling shamed, admonished, or judged, and to bolster the courage to tolerate, face, and process the reality of what has happened. As we have seen, much of the wiring of our brain circuits is devoted to being in tune with others. The human soul is finite and not in the least under its own command. #RyanPhillippe 1 of 7
Recovery from trauma involves reconnecting with our fellow human beings. This is why trauma resulting from relationships is generally more difficult to treat than trauma resulting from traffic accidents or natural disasters. When traumas occur at the hands of people you love, that knocks out the most important protection against being traumatized: being sheltered by the people you love. If the people whom you naturally turn to for care and protection terrify or reject you, you learn to shut down and to ignore what you feel. When your care giver turns on you, you have to find alternative ways to deal with feeling scared, angry, or frustrated. Managing your terror all by yourself gives rise to another set of problems: dissociation, despair, addiction, chronic sense of panic, and relationships that are marked by alienation, disconnection, and explosions. #RyanPhillippe 2 of 7
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 needs. Holding a need, a need 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. We also have a mirroring need, or a need to be affirmed by our caregivers for our value and creative spirit. We have a desire to experience ourselves as part of a calm, wise, loving authorities who possess qualities we admire and are latent within us. We need relationships with others who are very much like ourselves and who therefore give us the feeling that we are members of the greater human family. The food of thy soul is light and space. #RyanPhillippe 3 of 7
The yearning of a soul, formed by Nature in a peculiar mould, for communion with those whom it bore a resemblance, yet of whom was not. Our caregivers facilitate the emergence of our authentic individual selfhood when they optimally respond to these needs. By contrast, when they neglect to meet them, most often because of their own unmet development needs, they derail our individuation. If individuation is derailed we might dissociate from our emotional life (holding wounds), experience ourselves as defective (mirroring wounds), and feel unable to be true to guiding ideals (idealizing wounds), and feel deeply estranged from others (twinship wounds). Moreover, when our needs are unmet, they remain unconsciously active but archaic and immature. There is then a lifelong need to find others to fulfill them. #RyanPhillippe 4 of 7
I once knew a someone, and his family and authority figures turned on him and spent a decade abusing him and teasing him and threatening his life on the daily bases for fun. He had absolutely no one to turn to. And they had hurt him so bad that he could feel the pain in his body, which constantly reminded him of what happened to him and there was no end in sight to when his suffering would end. And when they saw he was starting to feel better about himself and life, they would inflict more pain on him. When the people you love hurt you, it really messes with your head because you remember the good times and how much you love them and it hurts you to know that they would hurt you for fun and profit. And when someone in a high position of power hurts you, it is hard to end the pain and suffering because there is virtually no one who can stop them, so you are just left to hang in there and pretend everything is okay. #RyanPhillippe 5 of 7
People with these histories rarely make them connection between what happened to them long ago and how they currently feel and behave. Everything seems almost unmanageable. Some want to stay safe and drugs are illegal, so some people turn to drinking, they do not want to drink, but they also want to stay alive and need something to dull the pain so they can preserve their lives. Relief does not come until they are able to acknowledge what has happened and recognize the invisible demons they are struggling with. Think about men who have been abused by priests. They visited the gym regularly, took anabolic steroids, and were strong as Golden State Warriors. However, in our interviews they often acted like scared kids; the hurt boys deep inside still felt helpless. #RyanPhillippe 6 of 7
While human contact and attunement are the wellspring of physiological self-regulation, the promise of closeness often evokes fear of getting hurt, betrayed, and abandoned. Shame plays an important role in this: You will find out how rotten and disgusting the people in my life are and dump me as soon as they start to light in to you. Unresolved trauma can take a terrible toll on relationships. If your heart is still broken because you were assaulted by someone you love, you are likely to be preoccupied with not getting hurt again and fear opening up to someone new. In fact, you may unwittingly try to hurt them before they have a chance to hurt you. I give the flower of friendship to all sincere people, but I only share the sweet fruit of love with you. #RyanPhillippe 7 of 7
What Great Maxims are we Taught by a Knowledge of the World!
A mind which has once been opened by knowledge can ill endure the contraction of dark and perpetual ignorance. We can tolerate a great deal of discomfort as long as we stay conscious of the fact that the body’s commotions constantly shift. One moment your chest tightens, but after you take a deep breath and exhale, that feeling softens and you may observe something else, perhaps a tension in your shoulder. Now you can start exploring what happens when you take a deeper breath and notice how your rib cage expands. Once you feel calmer and more curious, you can go back to that sensation in your shoulder. You should not be surprised if a memory spontaneously arises in which that shoulder was somehow involved. We get accustomed to mental as well as bodily pain, without losing our sensibility to it. #RyanPhillippe 1 of 6
No misery can equal the struggles of a virtuous mind wishing to act in a manner becoming its own dignity, yet carried by passions to do otherwise. Both the conscious and unconscious mind forms a unity of power that transcends the ego, and sparks the divinity at the core of the soul. Like the Sunbeams, the soul of a man pervades and enlightens surrounding matter creating our ground of pure being/awareness, which is identical to the Universal Ground from which all creation proceeds. However, because we identify exclusively with the transient body, emotions, and mind, we lose sight of our true nature as pure being/awareness, the Knower in all states of consciousness. Men’s aim has been to keep men from having a soul for this World. A further step is to observe the interplay between your thoughts and your physical sensations. #RyanPhillippe 2 of 6
How are particular thoughts registered in your body? (Do thoughts like: My father loves me or I wish I did not cut my hair produce difference sensations?) Becoming aware of how your body organizes particular emotions or memories opens up the possibility of releasing sensations and impulses you once blocked in order to survive. However, the soul is a center of great luminosity and radiance; God as Father, a wise man; a divine Holy Spirit of the natural World invites of to inquire more deeply into the meaning of life and the nature of reality. We can regard God-images as sources of guidance on how to conduct our lives. God has such attributes as mercy, compassion, strength, peace, love, and wisdom and his love allows us an opportunity to consciously meet and realize one or another attribute of our true nature. The two great movements of the soul are the desire of honor and the fear of shame. #RyanPhillippe 3 of 6
One way to think of this process of transformation is to think of mindfulness as a lens, taking the scattered and reactive energies of your mind and focusing them into a coherent source of energy for living, for problem solving, for healing. In purity and love have we genius; the Gospel gives beauty to and godliness to the soul. Mindfulness has been shown to have a beneficial effect on numerous psychiatric, psychosomatic, and stress-related symptoms, including depression and chronic pain. It has broad effects on physical health, including improvements in immune response, blood pressure, and cortisol levels (stress hormone). It also has been shown to activate the brain regions involved in emotional regulation and lead to changes in the regions related to body awareness and fear. Research has shown that practicing mindfulness, staying in the moment and focusing on what is right, even decreases the activity of the brain’s Christmas day smoke detector, the amygdala (the almond shape set of neurons located deep in the brain’s medial temporal lobe, which plays a key role in the processing of emotions), and thus decreases reactivity to potential triggers. #RyanPhillippe 4 of 6
Study after study shows that having a good support network constitutes the single most powerful protection against becoming traumatized. Safety and terror are incompatible. When we are terrified, nothing calms us down like the reassuring voice, firm embrace, or sight of someone we trust and love. Frightened adults respond to the same comforts as terrified children: gentle holding and rocking and the assurance that someone bigger and stronger is taking care of things, or someone you know cares about you being there, so you can safely go to sleep. In order to recover, mind, body, and brain need to be convinced that it is safe to let go. That happens only when you feel safe at a visceral (internal organs of the body) level and allow yourself to connect that sense of safety with memories of past helplessness. #RyanPhillippe 5 of 6
After an acute trauma, like an assault, accident, or natural disaster, survivors require the presence of familiar people, faces, and voices; physical contact; food; shelter and a safe place; and time to sleep. It is critical to communicate with loved once close and far and to reunite as soon as possible with family and friends in a place that feels safe. Our attachment to bonds are our greatest protection against threat. I am pleased t receive the news of your success. Your diligence and your genius has created a vast space for you. It is great that your life dream has come true. Congratulations on your success! Wish you happiness and more success in the future! (www.thedeedle.com) #RyanPhillippe 6 of 6
