“Someone who has experienced trauma also has gifts to offer all of us- in their depth, in their knowledge of our universal vulnerability, and their experience of the power of compassion.”- Sharon Salzberg
What a week. You’d have to be living under a rock if you haven’t at all tuned in to the tumultuous news cycle in the US. Those that are survivors of trauma (specifically sexual assault and other forms of abuse) are incredibly triggered, and those that provide psychotherapy for trauma survivors are, well, ..busy (understatement). It is a time of tremendous shifts, it’s a time of political divisiveness and upheaval, some say greater than that of the era of the Civil War. I don’t doubt that. And it is through adversity that profound transformation and transcendence can and does occur (cue in silver linings here).Politics aside, we must collectively focus on how to heal the traumatized brain. In the latter three posts, I wrote extensively about the brain mechanics of trauma. I shared information about our wonderful amydalas, hippocampi, prefrontal cortex, and hypothalamus, among other miraculous brain components. We know how the brain scatters traumatic material in different parts of our grey matter, rendering a cohesive narrative approaching impossible for the healing individual. Brain-wise interventions, including EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing), help the traumatized survivor to develop an adaptive resolution to their trauma in which the “held charge” of the trauma (hyperarousal, hypervigilance, intrusive flashbacks, freezing, numbness, etc), can be desensitized and reprocessed in a cohesive manner (van der Kolk, 2015).
[To read the rest of this article by Andrea Schneider, click here.]
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