A light heart and a thin pair of breeches goes through the World. Some people are unfortunate and suffer repeated and often serious traumas—everything from abuse and neglect to persistent community violence and harassment. Developmental Trauma Disorder (DTD) is the exposure to multiple, chronic traumas, which has a much more pervasive and long-range influence on an individual’s self-concept, on their sense of the World, and on their ability to regulate themselves. If people who suffered from DTD were accurately diagnosed, this would make research and treatment of chronically traumatized children and adults who suffer from pervasive biological and emotional dysregulation, failed or disrupted attachment, problems staying focused and on track, and a hugely deficient sense of coherent personal identity and competence easier to fix. These issues transcend and include almost all diagnostic categories, but treatment that does not put them front and center is more than likely to miss the goal of mental health. With healing mental health issues, our goal is to reduce the amount of stress placed on the person and to apply the lesson of neuroplasticity, the flexibility of brain circuits, to rewire the brains and reorganize the minds of people who have been programmed by life itself to experience others as threats and themselves as helpless. Social support is a biological necessity, not an option, and this reality should be the backbone of all prevention and treatment. Recognizing the profound effects of trauma and deprivation on child development need not lead to blaming parents. We can assume that parents do the best they can, but all parents need help to nurture their kids. Nearly every industrialized nation, with the exception of the United States of America, recognizes this and provides some form of guaranteed support to families. Quality early-childhood programs that involve parents and promote basic skills in disadvantaged children more than pay for themselves in improved outcomes. 

Also, speaking of programs to help the disadvantaged, does it make sense to feed antiquated people cookies and cakes for breakfast, and keep them up at all hours of the day and night with fights, loud noise, and blasting music? We could probably save the system money and the individual money by providing them with healthy foods and making sure they are in a relaxing environment where they can rest and enjoy their lives, instead of feeling like they are being held hostage by a dysfunctional building management agency. Many of these people did not come from houses wracked by poverty, domestic violence, nor drug abuse, but in their retirement are forced to live around those types of situations, which scares them and stressed them out beyond belief.  We need to improve their living conditions, as they have more than paid their dues to society. In some communities there are house-visitation programs in which skilled nurses help to provide a safe and stimulating environment for seniors to make sure no one is milking them for their Social Security retirement, nor feeding them sugar, drugs, or soaking them in beer. When people are shown love, they imagine a better future for themselves, instead of fearing that this could be their last day on Earth. When tried with children, from at risk houses, twenty years later the nurse house-visitation system reported that not only were the children were healthier and were less likely to report being abused or neglected than a similar group whose mothers had not been visited. They also were more likely to have finished school, to have stayed out of jail, and to be working in well-paying jobs.  

Economist, instead of reading celebrity gossip, have calculated that every dollar invested in high quality home visitation, day care, and preschool programs results in seven dollars of savings on welfare payment, health-care costs, substance-abuse treatment, and incarceration, plus higher tax revenues due to better paying careers. When I go to Europe to teach, I often am contacted by officials at the ministries of health in the Scandinavian countries, Canada, Asia, United Kingdom, Germany, and the Netherlands and asked to spend an afternoon with them sharing the latest research on the treatment of traumatized children, adolescents, seniors, and their families. The same is true for many of my colleagues. These countries have already made a commitment to universal health care, ensuring a guaranteed minimum wage, paid parental leave for both parents after a child is born, and high-quality childcare for all working mothers. Could this approach to public health, preventative maintenance and services to help people stay healthy, have something to do with the fact that the incarceration rate in Norway is 71 per 100,000 people, in the Netherlands 81 per 100,000 people, and the United States of American 781 per 100,00 people, while the crime rate in those countries is much lower than in ours, and the cost of medical care about half? Seventy percent of prisoners in California spent time in foster care while growing up. The United States of America spends $84 billion per year to incarcerate people at approximately $44,000.00 per prisoner (which is almost as much as the average American taxpayer makes in a year); the average American makes $53,657.00 a year. The northern European countries spend a fraction of that amount. Instead, they invest in helping parents to raise their children in safe and predictable surroundings. Their academic test scores and crime rates seem to reflect the success of those investments. Will men prefer the happiness of others at the neglect of their own? 

Although interruptions in human dialogue may be very painful, at least they are clear-cut. Individuals may suffer acutely when they lose a loved one, but they usually realize they are suffering, and they know why. The vital force missing in their lives is recognized and acknowledged. There is, however, another dimension to human dialogue that is far more subtle and often quite difficult to recognize. For if dialogue can grow, it can also deteriorate, slowly and subtly, to the point where an individual can be trapped in a totally impoverished relationship without even being able to recognize what happened nor why. This process is very similar to the way the body grows and ages, on a day-to-day basis, without any visible change. The very fact that a person can tolerate deteriorated dialogue and sometimes even encourage it is something that we would often prefer to deny, for reflecting on the implications is not pleasant. Since dialogue involves reciprocal sharing with other human beings, its deterioration must also be reciprocal, and each person must share part of the responsibility. An individual can only receive to the extent that he gives, and, in that sense, dialogue is a mirror of his personality. This idea is neither particularly new nor radical. Psychoanalysts spend years in personal analysis trying to understand their own personalities, because they recognize that if they are not aware of their own anxieties, then their own insecurities will block them from listening to their patients. In the dialogue of psychotherapy, the patient can only communicate those thoughts and feelings that therapist is willing to share, and this reciprocity can be burdensome, anxiety provoking, depressing, or exhilarating. The psychoanalyst tried not to indulge in the delusion that all the difficulties in psychotherapy arise from the fact that the patient has problems.  

The National Association of State Mental Health Program Directors served 6.1 million people annually, with a budget of $29.5 billion. If the patient flees from the therapy or terminates the therapeutic dialogue prematurely, psychotherapists reflexively begin to search for their own unconscious contributions to this disruption. A similar situation exists in all human relationships. Take, for example, the erosion and dissolution that occurs in so many marriages. Problems seldom emerge unilaterally from the behavior of only one of the partners; usually both contribute to the deterioration. This is not a particularly easy idea to accept, especially for those who have gone through the trauma of divorce, for it is always easier psychologically to blame the other person for problems than to search for one’s own contributions. Children who were regularly pushed over the edge into over arousal and disorganization did not develop proper attunement of their inhibitory and excitatory brain systems and grew up expecting that they would lose control if something upsetting happened. This was a vulnerable population, and by late adolescence half of them had diagnosable mental health problems. There were clear patterns: The children who received consistent caregiving became well-regulated kids, while erratic caregiving produced kids who were chronically physiologically aroused. The children of unpredictable parents often clamored for attention and became intensely frustrated in the face of small challenges. Their persistent arousal made them chronically anxious. Constantly looking for reassurance got in the way of playing and exploration, and, as a result, they grew up chronically nervous and nonadventurous. Early parental neglect or harsh treatment led to behavior problems in school and predicted troubles with peers and a lack of empathy for the distress of others. This set up a vicious cycle: Their chronic arousal, coupled with the lack of parental comfort, made them disruptive, oppositional, and aggressive. Disruptive and aggressive kids are unpopular and provoke further rejection and punishment, not only from their caregivers but also from their teachers and peers.

By far the most important predictor of how well people coped with life’s inevitable disappointments was the level of security established with their primary caregiver during the first two years of life. Resilience in adulthood could be predicted by how lovable mothers rated their kids at age two. Understanding the life-threatening nature of the lack dialogue makes it easier to comprehend the radical, often violent manner in which many people flee from situations of deteriorated dialogue. Sometimes individuals who have been married for years suddenly up and leave without warning, to live with another person. Frequently, they leave at great personal cost. They may be drained financially; often they are cut off from their own children and their social circle; their careers are placed in jeopardy and sometimes ruined; material possessions that they slaved for years to acquire are quickly cast aside. At the same time, the person left behind is often totally shocked, left with a profound sense of rejection, resentment, or even hatred. Crushed beyond the point of recovery, the abandoned mate may even die. We have encountered such. Much how Prince’s girlfriend Vanity died at age 57, of kidney failure, and two months after then Prince died at age 57 also. Dialogue has deteriorated blew a certain critical threshold, until one of the partners can no longer tolerate the isolation. If he only left because of money, the sex, or emotional disturbance, then the one mate’s flight might not be so crushing to the one left behind. If it were only some-thing that caused him to leave, then it all would be easier to accept emotionally. However, usually it is not some-thing that causes the disruption—it is some-one. Both individuals contribute to the breakdown in dialogue, and no idea can be more painful than that, no idea can be more threatening.

Human communication is fragile. Interruptions in human dialogue can range all the way from very brief absences from loved ones to the permanent loss of dialogue through death. By monitoring the occurrence of disease and even the occurrence of death, these investigators have been able to weigh numerically the effects of death of a spouse, separation, divorce, death of a close family member, children leaving the house, and death of a close friend. All of these disruptions were followed by a significant increase in disease and death. These statistical relationships between human loss, disease, and death suggest that those who experience interruptions and disruptions in the dialogue of life require help and support. While it is true that only individuals can love and participate in dialogue, such interactions, like chemical reactions, require the proper social milieu in order to flourish. Thus, an individual’s grief, insecure ego, inability to love, shattered dialogue, or entanglement in loneliness traps is also a collective problem for society. If children lose their parents or are abused, neglected, or abandoned by their parents, it seems obvious that someone else must help them. It is generally recognized that children require love, and if they do not receive it from their biological parents, society has an obligation to help them. The debate here centers on how such love can be effectively provided. Similarly, when adults suffer from interruptions in the dialogue of life—when they are bereaved, experiencing divorce or separation, living alone or lonely—they too require help, and it is in society’s collective interest to provide it. The problem, then, is how? I once knew this guy who really looked up to his father, but after spending a year getting to know him, he started to strongly dislike his father to the point he wanted to forget he ever existed. He looked at his dad as being a desperate coward, who has no control over his life, would do anything for a dollar, and someone who was not really a man. 

Psychiatrists, psychologists, social workers, and other health professionals do know a great deal about bereavement and loss, and they are on the whole quite cognizant of the physical and emotional impact of disruptions in dialogue. An entire new discipline called crisis intervention has developed within the past few decades specifically designed to begin immediately helping those experiencing interruptions in dialogue. These professional groups are performing a vital, and in many cases, absolutely essential, service. What is at issue here is the usefulness of an exclusively objective approach to assisting people in trouble. Ironically, the most problematic aspect of these professional efforts is that they now seem to be so necessary. They seem to be filling a void that is constantly growing. One is left to conclude that perhaps individuals, who suffered interruptions of dialogue a few decades ago were not cared for properly, or that the sources of support that once existed have now been eroded and are no longer viewed by society as particularly helpful. There is a new diagnosis of Developmental Trauma Disorder: Children who develop in the context of ongoing danger, maltreatment and disrupted caregiving systems are being ill served by the current diagnostic systems that lead to an emphasis on behavioral control with no recognition of interpersonal trauma. Studies on the sequel of childhood trauma in the context of caregiver abuse or neglect consistently demonstrate chronic and severe problems with emotion regulation, impulse control, attention and cognition, dissociation, interpersonal relationships, and self and relational schemas. In absence of a sensitive trauma-specific diagnosis, such children are currently diagnosed with an average of 3-8 co-morbid disorders. The continued practice of applying multiple distinct co-morbid diagnoses to traumatized children has grave consequences: it defies parsimony, obscures etiological clarity, and runs the danger of relegating treatment and intervention to a small aspect of the child’s psychopathology rather than promoting a comprehensive treatment approach. 

It is my opinion that in much the same way that medicine slowly abandoned its appreciation for the healing role of bedside manner, society has abandoned its appreciation for the healing capacity of human contact. Emotional support that once came from families, neighbors, friends, ministers, rabbis, and priests is now purchased from psychiatrists, psychologist, and various social service agencies. While delivering needed support to people, these professional helping groups have also tended to usurp our functions and relieve us of our sense of personal responsibility. Understanding the nature of human dialogue and the degree to which an individual’s very existence is sustained by other human beings helps us explain why the loss of a loved one or the lack of love can be so devastating. It also suggests why those who are suffering interruptions in the dialogue are often avoided. To engage a bereaved person in dialogue means sharing his or her pain. What emerges from the eyes of a bereaved individual is grief, what emerges from the eyes of those who live alone is loneliness; what emerges from the eyes of the unloved adolescent is frightened anger. These people all need to share these painful aspects of the lives through dialogue. The dialogue of pain, anxiety, anger, and loneliness is also part of life, but it is a dialogue that can be both frightening and painful. How convenient to label these as scientific-medical problems and therefore have others look into their eyes. And remember, if you have spent a year abusing and depending on your son, I am sure you noticed he is starting to like you less and less and no longer sees you as a man, but a punk. You may want to do something kind before his heart hardens towards you and he grows to hate you. 

The Doctor knew his fellow creatures better than most men, knew that inner life which so seldom unfolds itself to unannotated eyes. Polarities are a state in which two ideas, opinions, are completely opposite or very different from each other. Reality is organized in polarities: the inner and outer vortices, expansion and contraction, pleasure and pain. There is a natural movement between polarities. Pleasure is followed by pain and pain is followed by pleasure. Expansion leads to contraction and contraction leads to expansion. The natural flow between the polarized vortices is created by trauma. Organisms have evolved exquisite processes to heal the effects of trauma. These processes include the ability to unite, integrate, and transform the polarities of expansion and contraction. If these polarities are integrated in a gradual fashion, then trauma can be safely healed.  Pendulation is something that is naturally always occurring. All experience is in constant movement between polarities. Yet, with trauma, pendulation gets interrupted and attention fixates on the trauma. Without an even flow between the vortices, attention is drawn further into the trauma vortex. This produces an experience of more sensation and emotion than we can remain present with, which leads to overwhelm. When an even flow of pendulation is reestablished, it regulates the nervous system, creating the resiliency that is necessary to remain present and discharge trauma. This resiliency, or self-regulation, is the ability to allow experience to come and go without becoming fixated in some way. 

I know what it is like to experience and ongoing trauma, especially when it follows you and everywhere you go, something bad happens because you are being targeted. Then we you return to these areas or see images, your memory of the trauma come back and you have to mentally fight to stay present and enjoy that moment and it is hard. However, my mother always tells me to be thankful for what you have and find things to enjoy, walk by faith and not by sight, and God will bless you with more. However, if you stay stuck in the past or worrying about the future, your trauma vortex will expand and like a hurricane, it will draw in more bad experiences into your environment. So when you catch yourself slipping back into an old memory, think of something happy. Self-regulation is normally developed through early attachment with our primary caretakers. The development of the ability to adaptively cope with stress is directly and significantly influenced by an infant’s early interaction with the primary caregiver. The more solid our foundation in secure attachment, the more resilient we will be to traumatic experience. Secure attachment is the antidote to trauma. Intense or early trauma, such as fetal trauma, can result in an inability to be here and now, even in basic, everyday ways. Such trauma can cause a person to live in a chronic freeze or dissociation until the energy is discharged. States that bound-up energy can also manifest as chronic physical symptoms such as headaches, back pain, gastrointestinal problems, and asthma.  

As pendulation is established, titration can occur. Titration involves releasing traumatic stress a little at a time, staying with only as much as we can be present to in the moment. Titration slowly allows traumatic activation to be accessed and assimilated so that the nervous system can gradually adjust to each level of excitation. If higher and higher levels of activation are allowed, it leads to overwhelm. Overwhelm can look like either emotional numbing and dissociation or emotional flooding. The higher the levels of activation, the further away a person can get from the here and now. As traumatic stress is released a little at a time, a person becomes more able to remain present with whatever arises. There is a natural movement between the vortices as we remain present on the level of sensation in the body. It flows back and forth like a figure eight or infinity sign, taking support from the inner vortex and bringing it to the trauma vortex, being present with a piece of the trauma vortex, and then returning to the inner vortex and orienting to the here and now. This vortex description of titration mimics what occurs more deeply when a client has recognized the ground of being. A surrender into this being or awareness allows our innate wisdom to bring up only as much as can be met fully in the moment. This meeting dissolves or releases the traumatic energy back into the ground of being. In this meeting it is revealed that the trauma and our essential being are one and the same. 

The flow is a meeting of whatever arises and a dissolving into the source of it all, again and again. This can occur when there is both recognition of awareness and resiliency in the nervous system.  An individual may lac a dialogue of love and still remain relatively healthy as long as other forms of human dialogue are maintained and the individual does not become socially isolated. In its most general meaning, dialogue consists of reciprocal communication between two or more living creatures. It involves the sharing of thoughts, physical sensations, ideas, ideals, hopes, and feelings. In sum, dialogue involves the reciprocal sharing of any and all life experiences. As a definition, the idea of reciprocal sharing, responding to or communicating with other living creatures, sounds innocent enough. However, the process officially goes beyond anything that can be measured with scientific instruments. I hear that at last you are permitted to visit the mainland. Thinking of our reunion soon, I am more excited than the sea across which we have been looking at one another. May happiness and joy accompany you like your own shadow! May your success and progress like Sunrise spur you on forever. 

If prudence consists in wishing well to oneself, young flirts are as prudent as old souls. After a single traumatic incident—a dog bite, an accident, or witnessing a drive by shooting—children can indeed develop basic Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) symptoms similar to those of adults, even if they live in safe and supportive houses. As a result of having the PTSD diagnosis, we can now treat those problems quite effectively. In the case of the troubled children with histories of abuse and neglect who show up in clinics, schools, hospitals, and police stations, the traumatic roots of their behaviors are less obvious, particularly because they rarely talk about having been hit, abandoned, or molested, even when asked. Eighty-two percent of the traumatized children seen in the National Child Traumatic Stress Network do not meet the diagnostic criteria for PTSD. Because they often are shut down, suspicious, or aggressive, children who suffer from traumatic events now receive pseudoscientific diagnoses such as oppositional defiant disorder meaning this kid hates my guts and will not do anything I tell him to do. Or these kids are labeled as having dysregulation disorder, meaning he has temper tantrums. Having as many problems as they do, these kids accumulate numerous diagnoses over time. Before they reach their twenties, many patients have been given four, five, six, or more of these impressive but meaningless labels. If they receive treatment at all, they get whatever is being promulgated as the method of management du jour: medications, behavioral modification, or exposure therapy. These rarely work and often cause more damage. And psychoactive drugs, psychopharmaceutical, or psychotropic drugs can actually poison your kids or make them suicidal. 

Medical drugs are chemical substances that changes the brain function and results in alterations in perception, mood, or consciousness, and many times the children do not know what they are feeling or experiencing and cannot really express that the drugs are making them sick. And with more than 20 million school children Worldwide to are hooked on this dope, it is important to take into consideration that between 2004 and 2012, there have been 14,773 reports to the U.S. Federal Drug Administration on psychiatric drugs causing violent side effects including: 1,531 cases of homicidal ideation/homicide, 3,287 cases of mania, and 8,219 cases of aggression. And children aged 7 to 19 taking Adderall and Dexedrine and methylphenidate products such as Ritalin, Concerta, and Focalin, are four to five times more likely to die of sudden unexplained cardiac arrest than other children. As we organized our findings, we discovered a consistent profile: a pervasive pattern of dysregulation, problems with attention and concentration, and difficulties getting along with themselves and others. These children’s moods and feelings rapidly shifted from one extreme to another—from temper tantrums and panic to detachment, flatness, and dissociation. When these kids got upset (which was much of the time), they could neither calm themselves down nor describe what they were feeling. Having a biological system that keeps pumping out stress hormones to deal with real or imagined threats leads to physical problems: sleep disturbances, headaches, unexplained pain, oversensitivity to touch or sound. Being so agitated or shot down keeps them from being able to focus on their attention and concentration.

To relieve their tension, these children engage in chronic masturbation, rocking, or self-harming activities (biting, cutting, burning, and hitting themselves, pulling their hair out, picking at their skin until it bled). It also leads to difficulties with language processing and fine-motor coordination. Spending all their energy on staying in control, they usually have trouble paying attention to things, like schoolwork, that are not necessarily directly relevant to survival, and their hyperarousal makes them easily distracted. Having been frequently ignored or abandoned leaves them clinging and needy, even with the people who have abused them. Having been chronically beaten, molested, and otherwise mistreated, they cannot help but define themselves as defective and worthless. They come by their self-loathing, sense of defectiveness, and worthlessness honestly. Was it any surprise they did not trust anyone? Finally, the combination of feeling fundamentally despicable and overreacting to slight frustrations makes it difficult for them to make friends because they have had a breach in the protective barrier against stimuli leading to feelings of overwhelming helplessness. As you are now aware of, the trauma vortex is a rupture causing life-energy to rush out explosively. The trauma vortex is a recapitulation of past, uncompleted responses and exits outside the stream of our present life experience. Nature simultaneously responds by creating a counter vortex to balance the force of the trauma vortex, which is also called the inner vortex. The inner vortex exists inside mainstream life experience and is a primal rhythm or force that is a natural complement to the trauma vortex. It contains resources that naturally assist the healing of trauma. It is part of our instinctual nature that our attention is drawn to danger. Whenever life’s stimuli are associated with past trauma, there is a perceived danger and attention gets pulled in that direction. We tend to either get fixated in reliving or reenacting our traumas or in trying to avoid them. These responses keep us out of the present moment and in an experience of our mind’s distorted interpretations of the present. Yet it is our essential nature to be in the present moment. Past and future exist only as mental constructs. Life occurs in the now. Our wisdom is trying to provide an opportunity for our instinctual and essential natures to unite in healing the trauma. In the name of Allah, the entirely merciful, the especially merciful, all praise is due to Allah, Lord of the Worlds, it is You we worship, and You we ask for help. Guide us to the straight path—the path of those upon whom You have bestowed favor, not of those who have evoked Your anger or of those who are astray. Rest in peace, Sean Price, you are loved and will never be forgotten. 

Prudent people in other’s matters are not always prudent in their own. Nearly every medical disease, from cancer to retinitis pigmentosa, has advocacy groups that promote the study and treatment of that particular condition. However, until 2001, when the National Child Traumatic Stress Network was established by an act of Congress, there was no comprehensive organization dedicated to the research and treatment of traumatized children. The mental, biological, or moral development of traumatized children was not being systematically taught to child-are workers, to pediatricians, or in graduate schools of psychology or social work. Childhood trauma is radically different from traumatic stress in fully formed adults. Bill Harris had extensive experience with child-related legislation, and he went to work with Senator Kennedy’s staff to create a law. The bill establishing the National Child Traumatic Stress Network (NCTSN) was ushered through the Senate with overwhelming bipartisan support and has more than 150 centers Worldwide. So, you see how Bill Harris and Senator Kennedy’s staff saw people in need of help and instead of slandering them, hurting them, or trying to terminate them, they formed a network to help others in need. The National Child Traumatic Stress Network is led by coordinating centers at Duke University and University of California Los Angeles, and the NCTSN includes universities, hospitals, tribal agencies, drug rehab programs, mental health clinics, and graduate schools.

Each of the sites, in turn, collaborates with local school systems, hospitals, welfare agencies, homeless shelters, juvenile justice programs, and domestic violence shelters, with a total of well over 8,300 affiliated partners. So, unlike these news agencies who pretend to care, but clearly have a maleficent agenda, the World is not a bad place, there are a lot of kind people reaching out to help those in need, so do not lose faith in humanity. Once up and running, the NCTSN had the means to assemble a clearer profile of traumatized kids in every part of the country. They led a survey that examined the records of nearly two thousand children and adolescents from agencies across the network. The vast majority of the children came from extremely dysfunctional families. More than half had been emotionally abused and/or had a caregiver who was too impaired to care for their needs. Almost 50 percent had temporarily lost caregivers to jail, service in the military, treatment programs, and had been looked after by strangers, foster parents, or distant relatives. About half of them reported witnessing domestic violence, and a quarter were also victims of sexual and/or physical abuse. There was no way to classify the wide-ranging symptoms of hundreds of thousands of returning Vietnam veterans. This forced clinicians to improvise the treatment of their patients and prevented them from being able to systematically study what approach actually worked. The adoption of the Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) by the DSM III in 1980 led to extensive scientific studies and to the development of effective treatments, which turned out to be relevant not only to combat veterans but also to victims of a range of traumatic events, including rape, assault, and motor vehicle accidents.

Between 2007 and 2010 the Department of Defense spent more than $2.7 billion for treatment of and research on PTSD in combat veterans, while in fiscal year 2009 alone the Department of Veterans Affairs spent $24.5 million on in-house PTSD research. The DSM definition of PTSD is quite straightforward: A person is exposed to a horrendous event that involved actual or threatened death or serious injury, or a threat to the physical integrity of self or others, causing intense fear, helplessness, or horror, which results in a variety of manifestations: intrusive re-experiencing of the event (flashbacks, bad dreams, feeling as if the event were occurring), persistent and crippling avoidance (of people, places, thoughts, or feelings associated with the trauma, sometimes with amnesia for important part of it), and increased arousal (insomnia, hypervigilance, or irritability). This description suggests a clear story line: A person is suddenly and unexpectedly devastated by an atrocious event and is never the same again. The trauma may be over, but it keeps being played in continually recycling memories and in a reorganized nervous system. So why is the media in Sacramento engaged in torture and making life hard on the son of a veteran? All compulsion neurotics are superstitious in this manner and often against their better judgement. The neurotic’s guilty conscience is just as incomprehensible if traced to real misdeeds.

A compulsion neurotic may be oppressed by a sense of guilt which is appropriate to a wholesale murderer, while at the same time he acts towards his fellow beings in most considerate and scrupulous manner, a behavior which he evinced since his childhood. And yet his sense of guilt is justified: it is based upon intensive and frequent death wishes which unconsciously manifest themselves toward his fellow beings, in this case the son of a veteran. However, if we subject the aggressor(s) to psychoanalytic treatment, which makes his unconscious thoughts conscious to him he refuses to believe that thoughts are free and is always afraid to express evil wishes least they be fulfilled in consequences of his utterance. However, through this attitude as well as through the superstition which plays an active part in his life, he reveals to us how close he stands to the savage, who believes he can change the outer World by a mere thought of his. The primary obsessive actions of these neurotics are really altogether of a magical nature. If not magic, they are at least anti-magic and are destined to ward off the expectation of evil with which the neurosis is wont to being. Whenever I was able to pierce these secrets, it turned out that the content of this expectation of evil was death. The problem of death stands at the beginning of every philosophy; we have heard that the formation of the soul conception and of the belief in demons which characterize animism, are also traced back to the impressions which death makes upon man. Behold, all who are incensed against you shall be put to shame and confounded; those who strive against you shall be as nothing and shall perish. 

May our friendly hands hold more firmly and our heart get nearer! Psychotherapy can only be partially or temporarily helpful if it does not acknowledge what is actually most true. Psychology has been built on the belief in a separate, individual self, which is not essentially true. Traditional psychotherapy works from the premise that the individual self requires to be changed or improved. However, all lasting change comes out of genuine acceptance and this acceptance comes when we discover our true nature. It cannot arise from an imaginary self that is believed to be independent. The imaginary self can try to accept that which it finds unacceptable, but it cannot succeed. Only love itself has no resistance to what is. Your charm, maturity, and wisdom will grow as you learn to love yourself.  Many people think that is they accept things as they are, they will never change. Yet the acceptance or surrender that I am speaking of here is the power that truly transforms. That is why I put an emphasis on direct experience when it comes to truth. This truth cannot be fully understood by the mind; it can only be revealed through direct experience. And so, when people relax their impulse to get rid of painful sensations or feelings and simply be present with themselves, they discover that their discomfort effortlessly dissolves or transforms over times. It is the first light of morning of my highest hope to get your sacred friendship. Do you hear my praying faraway in the night? May your life be full of joy, happiness, and satisfaction.  

When it comes to healing trauma, however, additional skills may be required. Trauma is the inability to be present with what is here and now. When we have experienced trauma, it tends to pull us out of here and now into there and then. It returns us to repetitive re-experiencing or re-enactment of the past trauma. Trauma actually destabilizes the nervous system in a way that disrupts our natural ability to be in the present moment. Paradoxically, healing trauma requires being here and now. Not worrying about the past, nor the future. Therefore, healing trauma usually requires a skillful method that can facilitate being presents with the nervous system’s experience of trauma in the body. This process is greatly enhanced by the conscious recognition of awareness. By its nature, awareness is present with whatever appears within it. When we are conscious as awareness, and our trauma arises, we are not identified with it; we are not fixed and therefore no longer at the effect of it. There is naturally a being present with, or letting be, which allows a relaxation of the contracted, traumatic energy. Thus there is a synergy between the conscious recognition of awareness, which facilitates a skillful method, and the method, which facilitates being present with trauma. This synergy results not only in the healing of trauma, but can also result in liberation from suffering itself. Let us listen to the blessings of the Earth in this beautiful and warm World. I wish you a happy life and a successful study in this promising Summer.  

Inclined as we may have been to ascribe to savage and semi-savage races uninhibited and remorseless cruelty towards their enemies, it is of great interest to us to learn that with them, too, the killing of a person compels the observation of a series of rules which are associated with taboo customs. These rules are easily brought under four groups; they demand reconciliation with the slain enemy, restrictions, acts of expiation, and purification of the manslayer, and certain ceremonial rites. The incomplete reports do not allow us to decide with certainty how general or how isolated such taboo customs may be among these races, but this is a matter of indifference as far as our interest in these occurrences is concerned. Still, it may be assumed that we are dealing with widespread customs and not with isolated peculiarities. The reconciliation customs practiced in this community, after a victorious band of warriors has returned with the severed heads of the vanquished enemy, are especially significant because the leader of the expedition is subject to heavy additional restrictions. As the solemn entry of the victors, sacrifices are made to conciliate the souls of the enemy; otherwise one would have to expect harm to come to the victors. Some hear voice, suffer financial ruin, or spend their days hating people. As part of the forgiveness ritual, a dance is given and a song is sung in which the slain enemy is mourned and his forgiveness is implored: Be not angry because your head is here with us; had we been less lucky, our heads might have been exposed in your village. We have offered the sacrifice to appease you. Your spirit may now rest and leave us in peace.  

Why were you our enemy? Would it not have been better that we should remain friends? Then your blood would not have been split and your head would not have been cut off. Similar customs are found among the Palu in Celebes; the Gallas sacrifice to the spirits of their dead enemies before they return to their home villages. Other races have found methods of making friends, guardians, and protectors out of their former enemies after they are dead. This consists in the tender treatment of the severed heads, of which many wild tribes of Borneo boast. When the See-Dayaks of Sarawak being home a head from a war expedition, they treat it for months with the greatest kindness and courtesy and address it with those most endearing names in their language. The best morsels from their meals are put into its mouth, together with tidbits and cigars. The dead enemy is repeatedly entreated to hate his former friend and to bestow his love upon his new hosts because he has now become one of them. It would be a great mistake to think that any derision is attached to this treatment, horrible though it may seem to us. Observers have been struck by the mourning for the enemy after he is slain and scalped, among several of the wild tribes of North America. When a Choctaw had killed an enemy he began a month’s mourning during which he submitted himself to serious restrictions. The Dakota Indians mourned in the same way. One authority mentions that the Osaga Indians after mourning for their own dead mourned for their foes as if they have been friends. Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you.  

Sometimes we find the valuable gift is more valuable under the starry sky by chance. Our study also confirmed that there was a traumatized population quite distinct from the combat soldiers and accident victims for whom the Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) diagnosis had been created. Some people do not remember their traumas (one of the criteria for the PTSD diagnosis) or at least are not preoccupied with specific memories of their abuse, but they continue to behave as if they were still in danger. They go from one extreme to the other; they have trouble staying on task, and they continually lash out against themselves and others. To some degree their problems do overlap with those of combat soldiers, but they are also very different in that their childhood trauma has prevented them from developing some of the mental capacities that adult soldiers possessed before their traumas occurred. The consequences of caretaker abuse and neglect are vastly more common and complex than the impact of hurricanes or motor vehicle accidents. Probably because when a caretaker or someone you trust abuses you, there is often no end in sight. Out of 17,421 people who participated in a research study about childhood events, however, they typically did not grow up in households where there were adverse experiences.

The study revealed that the trauma many of these people suffered was a result what happen to them as adults, their choices and decisions in life caused them to experience abuse and despair, and they blamed their parents for it. These people came from middle class, well educated, and financially secure households with medical insurance, and they reported no adverse childhood experience. More than likely, children who come from good houses, and were cared for and did not experience abuse, but mess up their adult lives blame their parents for the failures because the lives of the parents look so easy and the grown children become jealous and feel that they are entitled to that lifestyle because they grew up privileged and do not want to put in the work to emulate the lifestyles of their parents. Instead, they act up, as adult, and try to make the parents feel guilty in hopes of getting money, cars, or property, instead of working for it themselves. As these children matured, they did not outgrow the effects of their early experiences of being cared for and provided for and that is what they came to expect their entire lives. It turns out what was really going on is these grown children experienced higher workplace absenteeism, financial problems, and lower lifetime income because they did not adequately prepare themselves for adult life. All of the suffering that is brought to psychotherapy is a confused or contracted expression of the unconditional love that we are. When suffering is embraced by this love, the confusion is clarified, the contraction is relaxed, and we are released into a simple presence.

Once awareness awakens to itself in a human being, it is possible to liberate all forms of confusion through this meeting, including those resulting from trauma. Left to itself, the ego-personality will endlessly repeat trauma or try to hide from it. Only the unconditional love of conscious awareness can truly embrace it. It is when awareness somehow meets itself as Love, when all experience is touched directly that Love, that is dissolved, freed, healed, transmuted, and transformed. When experience is met with full acceptance without any resistance, it reveals itself to be the same Love. Nothing survives this meeting. Nothing stands up to the presence of being and remains. We naturally move away from pain. However, there is also a movement of intelligence within all beings that is moving toward what is, without needing to fix or change anything. It is the coming together of awareness and its experience that is freeing; that is Love. That is Love returning for itself. And it has no motive other than union. This is touching and transformative. Transformation takes place in the present moment. Our past traumas can be resolved only in the here and now. This resolution involves an open receptivity to what appears each moment without any form of resistance, interpretation, or identification. By fully allowing what is, moment-by-moment, all experience finds its natural resolution. To have a good friendship is to have a beautiful wish. Do you feel stars are bright tonight? May my sincere friendship like the Sunshine on your smiling face today! 

Noble minds emulative of perfection may be allowed a little generous envy. Imagine being young and not having a source of safety, making your way into the World unprotected and unseen. Persecution and discouragement depress ingenuous minds, and blunt the edge of lively imaginations. Keep in mind that people universally feel ashamed about traumas they have experienced. However, great works are performed, not by strength, but perseverance. How do you take a trauma history? How many would trust a complete stranger with such delicate information about their personal life? Who do you rely on in your daily life? When you are sick, who does the shopping or takes you to the doctor? Who do you talk to when you get upset? In other words, who provides you with emotional and practical support? Some people give surprising answers: nobody. Yet, I never give up on things that I choose to do. Perseverance is the surest road to success.  

Some people do not have the option to run away or escape; they have no one to turn to and no place to hide. Yet, they somehow manage their terror and despair. They go to school or work the next day and pretend everything is fine. Felicitate thyself then upon thy defects; which are evidently thy principal perfections; and which occasion thee a distinction which otherwise thou wouldst never have. When youth feel pervasively angry or guilty or are chronically frightened about being abandoned, they have come by such feelings honestly; that is because of experience. When, for instance, youth and seniors fear abandonment, it is not in counterreaction to their intrinsic homicidal urges; rather, it is more likely because they have been abandoned physically or psychologically, or have been repeatedly threatened with abandonment. When youth are pervasively filled with rage, it is due to rejection or harsh treatment. When youth experience intense inner conflict regarding their angry feelings, this is likely because expressing them may be forbidden or even dangerous.   

When youth must disown powerful experiences they have had, this creates serious problems, including chronic distrust of other people, inhibition of curiosity, distrust of their own senses, and the tendency to find everything unreal. However, the difference between a common man and a poet is, that one has been deluded, and cured of his delusion, and the other continues deluded all his days. Sweet pliability of man’s spirit, that can at once surrender itself to illusions, which cheat expectations and sorrow of their weary moments! After three years of therapy approximately two-thirds of patients show markedly improvement. The patients who remained self-destructive had told us that they did not remember feeling safe with anybody as a child; they had reported being abandoned, shuttled from place to place, and generally left to their own devices. If you carry a memory of having felt safe with somebody long ago, the traces of that earlier affection can be reactivated in attuned relationships when you are an adult, whether these occur in daily life or in good therapy. 

However, if you lack a deep memory of feeling loved and safe, the receptors in the brain that respond to human kindness may simply fail to develop. If that is the case, how can people learn to calm themselves down and feel grounded in their bodies? The use of inquiry to deconstruct the apparent, constructed self can have a powerful therapeutic effect. By turning the light of awareness back on the experiencer itself, such inquiry has the potential to awake people to a deeper level of identity where antiquated beliefs, stores, and patterns of conditioning no longer exert the same control. Once you recognize and directly experience the deeper silence, spaciousness, and peace beyond the mind’s chatter, it becomes increasingly difficult to be seduced by the same beliefs and stories again. Many people in our acutely self-conscious, self-help culture have compounded their problems by overly analyzing and interpreting their feelings, impulses, and motivations. In the process, they have just added psychological material to the complex stories and identities they have constructed about themselves.   

Most forms of conventional psychotherapy leave this fundamental construct unchallenged and instead work within it to solve problems, change habits, and reveal deeper meanings for the fictitious me. By encouraging direct experience of feelings and sensations unmitigated by the mind while inquiring into the beliefs and stores that cause suffering, people must deconstruct the self and World construct system entirely. So forget what others say about you and make an attempt to understand and orient yourself by embodying your most basic values and sense of who you are. They way in which you find validation is to learn to deal with your core struggles and overcome them. Rather than struggling within a dream to solve problems that the dream presents, it is far easier and more effective to wake up from the dream and recognize that the problems were imaginary. All of our experience is an expression of this nature that accepts all forms of its expression, no matter how pleasurable or painful. This awareness is unconditional love as it equally accepts the most sublime ecstasy and one of the most painful of all human experience, trauma. It is only in this embrace of the manifest by the unmanifest (what you wish to become true) that true transformation or healing takes place. 

When your mind starts commenting and interpreting and drifting into stories, gently guide yourself back to your body. You may find this practice unfamiliar and uncomfortable, but you will gradually grow to enjoy it. The light seen in front on a long way is hope, and the light seen in the cold Winter is warmth. My God (Jehovah, Allah, LORD Almighty), you are that light on the way of life, which gives me warmth and hope. It seems all news cut off after we left each other for several years. The yearning to you let me hardly want to eat anything. Even dirt and flying birds miss me, my dearest men! If you are standing by the lake, if you are looking at the White Squall, each wave is my yearning—my yearning! If you see the ardent beckon? If you hear calling full of deep love, calling for you, I wish it flies towards you with pleasure and laughter every day in the coming year. A pleasant mood and the ensuing good health are the biggest capital for happiness. Wish you a cheerful mood and longevity. You will soon start to feel real again and learn to include the thoughts and feelings that passed through your awareness. One will regain a sense of the peace and joy that you experience many years before. The human mind has a powerful hold over the being. Is it really true that you are such an awful person? Is it really true that nobody loves you? Is it really true that your son hates you? Is it really true that the last thirty years have been wasted?  What effect does it have on you and your life to hold such negative beliefs? And who would you be without them? 

Little by little we are beginning to cut through the dense clouds of cognition and beliefs that made up you and World construct system—and little by little they are beginning to loosen their hold over you, as you grow to realize that they were, indeed, just stories and that they caused you tremendous suffering. Begin to discriminate between your projections onto reality and reality itself, which enables one to choose reality over fiction and unreality. As the clouds of stories and beliefs thin out, the radiance of presence, with which you had reconnected in our earlier work, shined through more and more. Before our meetings, you believed, in accord with our psychological culture, that we have to “work through” all the anger and resentment and unresolved issues of a lifetime in order to experience any real happiness. We were both working at Cambridge Hospital (one of Harvard’s teaching hospitals) and, sharing an interest in how trauma had affected the lives of our patients, we began to meet regularly and compare notes. We were struck by how many of our patients who were diagnosed with borderline personality disorder (BPD) told us horror stories about their childhoods. Because the task of being happy seemed so overwhelming, you had given up in despair and resorted to suicidal ideation as your only real solace. BPD is marked by clinging but highly unstable relationships, extreme mood swings, and self-destructive behavior, including self-mutilation and repeated suicide attempts. However, no one knows what was happening to you, nor what people were saying and doing and showing you, until now. 

Now, you know that nothing needs to be worked through nor eliminated—you can merely see your stories for what they are without getting caught by them. If they grabbed hold, you can always inquire using the four questions we talked about above to loosen up with grip. (Because you had once seen quite vividly that your true identity had nothing to do with your personality, you could hold the stories in a bigger space). This realization afforded you enormous relief, and your suicidal ideation stopped. Where is your depression right now? Can you show it to me? How do you know your depression exists? And where is your miserable childhood right now? Does it exist now, or is it in the past? And where is this past located? In this moment, can you find any problem? You do not have a radical inquiry and I am helping strengthen the realization that your so-called problems are the constructions of your mind. Rather than being deep-rooted neuroses requiring long-term psychotherapy, as many conventional psychological theories teach, your problems ceased to exist for you in those moments when you stopped investing them with psychic energy and identification. And that is why these thugs in this building, those reporters and the critics keep slandering you. They know they created these problems and hurt you and they see they no longer have any power over you and that the truth is out there and roaring like Ben Crawford. What these people have put out there will come back to them. Play your video games and love life.