Posted on by Afke@bluewin.ch

TRAUMA TOOLKIT

INTRODUCTION

We used to think that only horrific events would cause trauma. The soldier or civilian who witnessed death and destruction in war zones. A traffic accident in which people were killed in front of your eyes. These days we know better.

Research has shown that many people get traumatized in childhood, because there was a lack of connection and attachment to the parents. Relationship trauma can even have a worse impact on mental health than physical or sexual abuse. The CDC- Kaiser Permanente Adverse Childhood Experiences (“ACE”) Study (1995-1997) showed that almost two-thirds of study participants had at least one ACE, while over 20% reported three or more ACEs. The questionnaire concerns childhood abuse, neglect and household dysfunction, which proves to lead to an increase in physical and mental health challenges as well as a decrease in social success. For more information, please visit: https://www.cdc.gov/violenceprevention/aces/about.html

INDICATIONS OF TRAUMA

What is the most powerful memory of your childhood?

  • Hyper-arousal: increased heart rate, rapid or difficulty breathing, cold sweats, tingling, muscular tension
  • Constriction in body and narrowing of perceptions
  • Dissociation, mental blankness, spaced-out feelings
  • Denial, amnesia or forgetfulness
  • Feelings of helplessness, immobility and freezing, unable to take action
  • Hyper vigilance or hyperactivity
  • Intrusive imagery or flashbacks
  • Extreme sensitivity to light and sound
  • Exaggerated emotional and startle responses
  • Nightmares and night terrors or insomnia
  • Abrupt mood swings: rage or temper tantrums, frequent anger or crying
  • Shame and lack of self-worth, excessive shyness, or self-mutilation
  • Reduced ability to deal with stress or even panic attacks, anxiety, or phobias
  • Avoidance: places, moments, activities, memories, or people
  • Attraction to dangerous situations
  • Addictions: overeating, drinking, smoking, drugs, etc.
  • Inability to love, nurture or bond with other individuals
  • Fear of dying or having a shortened life
  • Diminished emotional responses
  • Chronic fatigue or very low physical energy
  • Psychosomatic illnesses: headaches, migraines, neck and back problems, chronic pain, asthma, skin disorders, digestive or immune system problems
  • Depression and feelings of impending doom
  • Feelings of detachment, alienation, and isolation (living dead syndrome)
  • Re-enactment: getting yourself in the same type of troubles over and over

Below I provide some resources, starting with personal practices to calm your mind, followed by healing practices for which you will need a qualified professional.

  1. Open focus

Change your state to open focus rather than closed focus (that deck chair on the beach rather than the tiger in the bush focus) using a “space between” meditation. 
Its power & effectiveness is scientifically proven by Dr Les Fehmi from Princeton.  https://openfocus.com/about-us/lester-fehmi/
I recommend Elsie’s meditation for this.

  1. Bi-lateral stimulation

Pass a bottle or ball from the right hand to the left hand in the middle, right in front of your core, then swing your left arm far left, back to the middle, pass the bottle to your right, swing your right arm far right. You can follow the bottle with your eyes, while keeping your head still. Works well to engage your brain through cravings for your addictions. Just keep going till you feel OK again.  http://bit.ly/MelissaTiersBilateral

  1. Stop The World: peripheral vision training

Focus and keep your eyes steady on one spot, while gradually expanding your peripheral view till you can almost look behind you.
Imagine going from focusing on the tiger in the shrubs to the relaxed stare from your deck chair on the beach. A very useful, 30 second practice for an office setting.
This practice is a.o. used by martial arts practitioners to increase their awareness skills and is also useful to train your meditation skills, with all its health benefits.

  1. Psy-Tap or Jin Shin Jyutsu

Acupressure points feed back information to the brain, thus impacting your health or emotions. To release stress, worry & tension: clench your dominant hand tightly around your non-dominant thumb. Babies know how to use this self-soothing method! J 
If you sense you may have a panic attack: clench your index & middle finger together with the other hand, hard.
In both cases: make sure you put pressure on the tip of the fingers or thumb.
For anger: pull your little finger out so you cannot make a fist and relax your lower jaw.

  1. Loving-kindness meditation & inner smile!

Positive Psychologists found that just 10 minutes loving-kindness meditation a day for 8 weeks will visibly change your brain, as demonstrated by brain scans.
Start with the Self Love meditation via http://bit.ly/LoveKindMeditation
Or check out Tara Brach https://www.tarabrach.com/guided-meditations/

  1. Heart breathing

When you think of someone who or some situation that really annoys you, check in with yourself what you’d want to say or do. Then put your hand on your heart & breathe into your heart, while thinking of someone you love dearly, or imagine stroking your pet. Allow for three, four deep outbreaths, while keeping that image.
Then, test again: how do you feel now about this person or situation?
For more info on the power of the heart: https://www.heartmath.org/

  1. Breathing practices

Breathing affects your body posture, body posture affects your emotional state.
The main point is that you slow down your breathing & your heart rate. Belly out as you breathe in, belly in as you breathe out. 7 counts in, 11 counts out. Relax your jaw, let your lower jaw hang, relax your face muscle & focus on your breath. Imagine your shoulder blades opening like two big sliding doors, imagine what material these doors are under your hands, what sound they make as they open up. Check out pranayama breathing techniques or https://www.somabreath.com/

Square breathing: 4 counts in, 4 counts hold, 4 counts out, 4 counts hold & repeat. 
Better sleep breathing: 4 counts in, 7 counts hold, 8 counts out, repeat as long as feels good. Or use the Pranayama app on your phone or tablet.
Yoga practice: e.g alternate nostril breathing (see youtube) or slow breathing cycling through the chakra’s, down the front on the outbreath & up the back on the inbreath.  

  1. Therapeutic yoga or other bilateral activities

When done with intention, calling up the emotions you are experiencing and then moving your body, doing yoga, spinning, running, dancing, drumming, playing the piano, skating, … you will be able to gradually work through the emotional overload. Translate the anger, fear, sadness into movement and your brain will be enabled to process the emotions. Run it out, dance and sing it out, and you will feel better.

  1. Shaking it out

In the wild, when a prey animal gets chased, caught, but makes a miraculous escape, you’ll see them shake afterwards. They’re shaking out the stress & adrenaline. Peter Levine’s method (see further below) shows we should do the same… rather than develop PTSD.  An easy way is to waggle your knees very quickly, alternately, or together, shaking the muscles in the upper legs and buttocks, while imaging all tension flow through your heels or soles of your feet. Or stomp your feet on the ground, like in tribal dancing, using some intense drumming music. Chinese practices, dance therapy, bio-energetics all advise to shake the body until it naturally falls still. You may want to find a qualified professional to work with. 

  1. EFT – Emotional Freedom Technique

EFT, or tapping, lets you tap on acupressure points to release what you no longer want & rewire into what you do want. It also works for phobias and pain. Make sure to connect with the feeling or memory you want to change and keep going till you reach 0 or 1 on the scale 0 – 10! In chronological order, here are 3 guru’s.  www.tfttapping.com, www.emofree.com, www.fastereft.com. The last link will get you a free video training course upon subscription. Or check out Brad Yates on YouTube for guided tapping. You may want to find a qualified professional to work with.

  1. Havening

This is a bazooka method that you can do on yourself. It’s bi-lateral stimulation to create positive brainwaves and dissolve the negative ones. It’s been demonstrated to work for depression, for PTSD, being diagnosed with a chronic illness, abuse trauma, losing a loved one.  So, use it. For yourself, a parent or a partner, when dealing with grief. For your teenager, when they go through a break-up with their first love. Or for your kid, after a bad nightmare.
Check out the YouTube video by Paul McKenna. http://bit.ly/HaveningPmcK
You may want to find a qualified professional to work with. 

  1. Somatic Experiencing

This body-oriented approach is the brain child of trauma specialist Dr Peter Levine – I recommend his book “Waking the Tiger – Healing Trauma”. This method allows you to move beyond trauma by engaging the bodily process that should have happened, rather than merely reliving what happened. This leading-edge method is based on the research findings that each organ of the body, including the brain, speaks its own “thoughts,” “feelings,” and “promptings,” and listens to those of all the others. Find a qualified professional to work with.

13. Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR)

In this therapy the patient briefly focuses on the trauma memory while simultaneously experiencing bilateral stimulation (typically eye movements), which is associated with a reduction in the vividness and emotion of the trauma. EMDR is based on the same principles as the Havening and Bi-lateral Stimulation above, while also in yoga and the therapy called Brainspotting eye roll practices are used. Our eyes as the windows to our soul. Find a qualified professional to work with.

  1. Reverse the memories

The NLP method for trauma release, based on the fast phobia cure, has been tested in various fields including hypnosis, with slight differences in the process, and has scientifically been proven effective. The trauma comes from the emotions which arise after the experience, and when the story line is reversed the neurologic processes are turned around so that the emotions come first and then the experience. This alters the pathways so that the trauma can no longer keep its structure. Find a qualified professional to work with.

  1. MDMA, psilocybin, ayahuasca

Clinical trials have now shown that psychedelics used in a carefully prescribed and monitored settings can induce an experience that is medically safe and that provokes profound, durable psychological and behavioral change. Each psychedelic drug has different effects and is best used for different types of trauma. Françoise Bourzat is a resource to look up for more information. Find a qualified professional to work with.

  1. Compassionate Inquiry

Compassionate Inquiry is a psychotherapeutic approach developed by trauma specialist Dr Gabor Maté to reveal what lies beneath the appearance we present to the world. Client and therapist unveil the level of consciousness, mental climate, hidden assumptions, implicit memories and body states that form the real message that our words both express and conceal. Through Compassionate Inquiry, the client can recognize the unconscious dynamics that run their lives and how to liberate themselves from them. Find a qualified professional to work with.

  1. Polyvagal theory

The vagus nerve runs from our head to our heart and gut. The vagus nerve serves the parasympathetic nervous system, which is the calming aspect of our nervous system mechanics. Dr Stephen Porges researched and developed the polyvagal theory, showing how the freeze, fight, flight responses can be calmed into a sense of safety through practices to strengthen the vagus nerve engagement and response. Find a qualified professional to work with. 

IN CONCLUSION

Do you think you carry trauma from a particular period in your life?

For any treatment to work, it is essential you have a base to start from. This means that if you are so traumatized that you feel you are in continuous stress, panic or overwhelm, and you can no longer feel the CORE YOU inside of you that wasn’t touched by all that happened, then you certainly need a trauma-informed therapist before you start to do any work. Because if you are in free fall, you need a parachute first. For instance, it is known that EMDR may cause overwhelm and re-traumatization if not done properly and with caution. So, creating that parachute is the first thing that needs to happen, and I am not explaining methods to do that in this overview. So, find a qualified professional to work with if you feel your parachute is not functioning.

These different practices are very powerful but not everything works equally well for everyone. For instance, if you are not a very visual person but sensitive to sound, you may want to work with sound therapy rather than EMDR.

While the list above is not complete, please be aware that the promise of healing trauma is sometimes given without scientific research backing up the method.
Also, two important treatment methods, Cognitive Behavioral Therapy and Psychoanalysis, are shown to have a negative effect on trauma. You cannot think your way out of trauma is the conclusion of the research.
Therefore, do your own research on Google Scholar before dipping your traumatized toe in. 

 

Explaining all the ins & outs of how de-traumatization works stretches too far for this e-book, but if you’d like to go over & beyond, into lasting life changes, you’re very welcome to give me a call or drop me a note for a free consultation.

Have some of these ideas & practices here resonated with you?
Then simply contact me by mail or via this site!

  • Release the energy drainers or negative impacts from bad memories & traumatic experiences.
  • Train your positive, resilient states to become more constant, more beautiful, more powerful.
  • Develop more options, more ways of reacting to situations or people, a sense of freedom in previously difficult situations.
  • The neurological re-imprinting will generalize itself to improve your life in all areas, work, relationships, privately, as your neurology absorbs the learnings.

 

In the meantime……  use these resources to start with your self-healing!