In an Unspoken Voice: How the Body Releases Trauma and Restores Goodness

Highly traumatized and chronically neglected or abused individuals are dominated by the immobilization/shutdown system. On the other hand, acutely traumatized people (often by a single recent event and without a history of repeated trauma, neglect or abuse) are generally dominated by the sympathetic fight/flight system. They tend to suffer from flashbacks and racing hearts, while the chronically traumatized individuals generally show no change or even a decrease in heart rate. These sufferers tend to be plagued with dissociative symptoms, including frequent spacyness, unreality, depersonalization, and various somatic and health complaints. Somatic symptoms include gastrointestinal problems, migraines, some forms of asthma, persistent pain, chronic fatigue, and general disengagement from life.

We may not be responsible for the world that created our minds, but we can take responsibility for the mind with which we create our world. – Gabor Maté

Trauma is the great masquerader and participant in many maladies and “dis-eases” that afflict sufferers. It can perhaps be conjectured that unresolved trauma is responsible for a majority of the illnesses of modern mankind.

When we fight against and/or hide from unpleasant or painful sensations and feelings, we generally make things worse. The more we avoid them, the greater is the power they exert upon our behavior and sense of well-being. What is not felt remains the same or is intensified, generating a cascade of virulent and corrosive emotions. This forces us to fortify our methods of defense, avoidance and control. This is the vicious cycle created by trauma.

As I feel less overwhelmed, my fear softens and begins to subside. I feel a flicker of hope, then a rolling wave of fiery rage. My body continues to shake and tremble. It is alternately icy cold and feverishly hot. A burning red fury erupts from deep within my belly: How could that stupid kid hit me in a crosswalk? Wasn’t she paying attention? Damn her! A blast of shrill sirens and flashing red lights block out everything. My belly tightens, and my eyes again reach to find the woman’s kind gaze. We squeeze hands, and the knot in my gut loosens. I hear my shirt ripping. I am startled and again jump to the vantage of an observer hovering above my sprawling body. I watch uniformed strangers methodically attach electrodes to my chest. The Good Samaritan paramedic reports to someone that my pulse was 170. I hear my shirt ripping even more. I see the emergency team slip a collar onto my neck and then cautiously slide me onto a board. While they strap me down, I hear some garbled radio communication. The paramedics are requesting a full trauma team. Alarm jolts me. I ask to be taken to the nearest hospital only a mile away, but they tell me that my injuries may require the major trauma center in La Jolla, some thirty miles farther. My heart sinks.

The door suddenly jerks open. A wide-eyed teenager bursts out. She stares at me in dazed horror. In a strange way, I both know and don’t know what has just happened. As the fragments begin to converge, they convey a horrible reality: I must have been hit by this car as I entered the crosswalk. In confused disbelief, I sink back into a hazy twilight. I find that I am unable to think clearly or to will myself awake from this nightmare. A man rushes to my side and drops to his knees. He announces himself as an off-duty paramedic. When I try to see where the voice is coming from, he sternly orders, “Don’t move your head.” The contradiction between his sharp command and what my body naturally wants—to turn toward his voice—frightens and stuns me into a sort of paralysis. My awareness strangely splits, and I experience an uncanny “dislocation.” It’s as if I’m floating above my body, looking down on the unfolding scene. I am snapped back when he roughly grabs my wrist and takes my pulse. He then shifts his position, directly above me. Awkwardly, he grasps my head with both of his hands, trapping it and keeping it from moving. His abrupt actions and the stinging ring of his command panic me; they immobilize me further. Dread seeps into my dazed, foggy consciousness: Maybe I have a broken neck, I think. I have a compelling impulse to find someone else to focus on. Simply, I need to have someone’s comforting gaze, a lifeline to hold onto. But I’m too terrified to move and feel helplessly frozen.

The paradox of trauma is that it has both the power to destroy and the power to transform and resurrect.

The right way to wholeness is made up of fateful detours and wrong turnings. —C. G. Jung

Recently, a young Iraq veteran took issue with calling his combat anguish PTSD and, instead, poignantly referred to his pain and suffering as PTSI—the “I” designating “injury.” What he wisely discerned is that trauma is an injury, not a disorder like diabetes, which can be managed but not healed. In contrast, posttraumatic stress injury is an emotional wound, amenable to healing attention and transformation.

Most of the time we have solely our thoughts as meager substitutes for our instinctual drives. We not only put a lot of energy into our thoughts, but we also frequently confuse them with reality; we come to believe erroneously, as did Descartes, that we are our thoughts. Thoughts, unfortunately, are poor surrogates for experienced aliveness, and when disconnected from feelings, they result in corrosive rumination, fantasy, delusion and excessive worry. Such perseveration is not really surprising, as the paranoid tendency toward concern for potential threat in the face of ambiguity might have had a significant adaptive advantage in earlier times. Now, however, it is the currency of our judgmental, negativistic “superegos.” On the other hand, when we are informed by clear body sensations and feelings, worry is diminished, while creativity and a sense of purpose are enhanced.

wild animal would following a frightful encounter with a predator. What ethologists call tonic immobility—the paralysis and physical/emotional shutdown that characterize the universal experience of helplessness in the face of mortal danger—comes to dominate the person’s life and functioning.

help to create an environment of relative safety, an atmosphere that conveys refuge, hope and possibility.

The power of goodness—in this case, the organism’s innate capacity to restore itself to health and balance—is encouraged by a bystander, an empathetic witness who helps to prevent trauma by embodying kindness and acceptance.

The “talking cure” for trauma survivors should give way to the unspoken voice of the silent, but strikingly powerful, bodily expressions as they surface to “sound off” on behalf of the wisdom of the deeper self.

This shows up as symptoms of alexithymia (the inability to describe or elaborate feelings due to a deficiency in emotional awareness), depression and somatization.

A person who is deeply feeling is not a person who is habitually venting anger

When Bull studied the patterns of elation

Contrary to what both Darwin and James thought

Nothing that feels bad is ever the last step.” This experiential process involves the capacity to hold the emotion in abeyance

If your everyday practice is to open to your emotions

the “neurotic” personality creates and perpetuates its symptoms through an unconscious constricting (hypertonicity) or collapsing (hypotonicity) of the musculature.‖ It is only through building a refined awareness and allowing the muscles and viscera spontaneous expression that we can begin to dissolve the “neurotic” and traumatic (split off) parts of ourselves and lay claim to a deeper

The degree to which we cannot deeply feel our body’s interior is the degree to which we crave excessive external stimulation.

The constriction of sensation obliterates shades and textures in our feelings. It is the unspoken hell of traumatization. In order to intimately relate to others and to feel that we are vital

Our relationship with others is utterly dependent upon a mutual exchange of sensory data

Along with the method I have described throughout this book were the conjoined twin sisters of embodiment and awareness. This asset

I feel alternating waves of fear and sorrow. (20. This discharge in waves allows for the natural experience of pendulation—expansions/contraction as discussed in Step 3 in Chapter 5—and softens the feelings of sorrow and fear.)