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Trauma and Dissociation, and a book review…

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In my recent post about the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, I wrote this:

I see one source in the dissociation of people from their “tools.” From everything they use, they are further and further removed. Things become “mere things.” We suddenly are no longer connected in a cycle of creation and destruction. We stand outside of it and look on…passersby, observers, voyeurs of our own self-destruction.

“Coincidentally” (if you believe in coincidence), I was reading a book today called “Waking the Tiger: Healing Trauma,” by Peter Levine.

He describes the official definition of trauma as a stressful occurrence “that is outside the range of human experience, and that would be markedly distressing to almost anyone” (pg. 24, which he takes from the DSM III).

He goes on to mention that trauma can include anything, from falls or accidents, to illnesses and sad events, to the “typical” things we consider traumatic such as rapes, drive-by shootings, war, disasters, etc.

I really really (yes, that’s right, I wrote it twice) like this book, and his approach, which is based around the evolutionary/physiological response to trauma, and an approach to treating it from that perspective. More on that in a second.

The author then describes how modern civilization and technology have taught us to ignore primary, instinctual, bodily-centered resources that once helped us to deal with traumatic events.

Previously in our history, we would encounter life-threatening events, which eventually resulted in finely-tuned responses to danger. I think this capacity is part of the “thrill-seeker’s” profile – they feel a need to experience this aspect of themselves more regularly than others.

As Levine says, “Modern life offers us few overt opportunities to use this powerfully evolved capacity. Today, our survival depends increasingly on our ability to think rather than being able to physically respond…The fundamental challenges we face today have come about relatively quickly, but our nervous systems have been much slower to change…When [the need for the successful facing of challenges] is not met, or when we are challenged and cannot triumph, we end up lacking vitality and are unable to fully engage in life” (pg. 43).

Later in the book, he even quotes Tom Brown, Jr. about the process of tracking. Clearly, he is describing a method of dealing with trauma that uses what I like to call “physiology tracking” in this book.

But it was the paragraph just before a section called “Dissociation” that really grabbed my attention. In it, he writes, “When constriction [as a response to a perceived threat or danger] fails to sufficiently focus the organism’s energy to defend itself, the nervous system evokes other mechanisms such as freezing and dissociation to contain the hyperarousal. Constriction, dissociation, and freezing form the full battery of responses that the nervous system uses to deal with the scenario in which we must defend ourselves, but cannot” (pg. 136).

This state is related to helplessness, which I’ve also written about in previous posts – particularly, learned helplessness, as a result of social conditioning or social conformity.

Levine recommends, specifically, that one not try to avoid dissociation, but rather, to become aware of the feeling of that state in the body, so that one can, first, recognize it, and, later, be able to be in a state of dissociation while still cognizant and active in the world. This leads to the ability to discriminate between physiological events that lead to (or have lead to) trauma, and those that do not.

I resonate extremely strongly with this book, for many reasons. The author’s approach to dealing with one’s problems through a continuing and ongoing process of deepening self-awareness seems to be the type of powerful medicine that everyone can use in their lives. But he also recognizes that physiological responses are rhythmical, as well as the need for play and a playful attitude when confronting survived trauma (at a certain point in the process, of course).

To the last point, about play, the author talks about wild animals’ tendencies to “reenact” traumatic or dangerous events, where they will play the role of hunter and hunted, and either experiment with new strategies for evasion or survival, or repeat the tactic used in the recent event. The physical act of evasion or survival itself is immediate and therapeutic.

In humans, reenactment happens both internally and externally. Internally, it represents itself in states associated with trauma, such as hypervigilance, anxiety, psychosomatic issues, sleeplessness, or other problems. It can also represent itself through repeated thoughts about the traumatic event.

Externally, reenactment can happen either in the “acting out” of previous traumas, either by inflicting those traumas on others, or by creating ritual behaviors that reflect and temporarily mitigate those physiological upwellings; or, external reenactment can take place in the recurrence of traumatic events in relationships, where we seek out situations with others through which our trauma presents itself, again and again, the body searching for a path to resolve that old wound.

Unfortunately, usually, our initial response only repeats itself again and again. With our minds not realizing that we’re replaying these patterns for a specific reason, we succumb to habitual responses, sometimes watching before our very eyes as things crumble apart and wondering “how can this be happening again?”

More subtly still, external and internal reenactment, at some point, collide, and the victim of trauma acquires patterns of behavior that simultaneously save them from further experiences like the first, but also prohibit them from being able to confront that traumatic experience and move beyond it.

Which takes me to his final point, his solution to this dilemma. Since we are confronted with traumas that we cannot resolve through physical means, and have developed habitual physiological patterns of response to situations in which we feel the same types of threat, we have only one tool by which to work with, on, and through those physical manifestations and feelings – awareness.

Through awareness of the traumatic event, awareness of our initial response to it, acceptance of ourselves and the fact that the event happened, and finally, a developed ability to pay attention and slow down when those feelings manifest themselves again, we have acquired tools to operate in a new dimension. Eventually, the nervous system will heal, the process will become second-nature, and life can be rich and fulfilling.

On a side-note, this process, of trauma, the formation of “protective” mechanisms which ultimately lead to further repetition of trauma reminds me strongly of the pain-spasm-ischemia cycle I was taught in massage school. In that process, damage occurs to muscle, the muscle “spasms” to protect itself from further damage, but in doing so, restricts blood flow to the area, preventing oxygenated blood (and white blood cells) from getting to the area to begin the healing process and remove restrictions. The “knot” gets bigger and bigger, till it causes overt pain and movement restriction…

Levine notes that our fast-paced culture doesn’t make this an easy task. Which brings me around to the final bit of my essay here (his book continues…if you’re interested, you should buy it and read it).

As I mentioned in my previous blog entry, it isn’t just the fast pace of our culture that “shields” us from slowing down and tracking our physiologies.

In fact, it seems that much of our culture has that exact effect.

Since reading Andrew Weil’s book “Eight Weeks to Optimal Health,” back in the 90′s sometime, I’ve engaged in what he calls a “news fast.” I don’t read or watch the news. Not at all. Haven’t in years, actually. And…nothing has happened to me because of it.

Weil recommends this practice because the news has a few qualities that cause human beings trouble, and for no good reason. First, the news is typically all bad. As Gary Gnu said, “No gnus is good gnus.” Second, the news is aggregated bad news from all over the world. So, not only are you getting a dose of bad news, but you’re getting a large dose of bad news composed of all of the bad news that happened today…anywhere. Needless to say, that news doesn’t really reflect the happenings in your habitat. Fourth, almost all of the news (because of its distant relation to your habitat) will make you feel completely helpless, frustrated, sad, or angry.

Learned helplessness, reinforced, twenty-four hours a day. Thank you?

But the news, or the way we “do” news, is just one symptom of a larger thang – of our approach to life…the philosophical underpinnings of our culture, expressed through or visible in the actions of our culture, and, of course, our selves.

a quick “thang” intermission:

I think one of the roots of that philosophy is a trauma-cycle, associated with something that happened to us culturally, maybe somewhere back in the mid-sixteenth century…in fact, when we were most susceptible to trauma, in our early-childhood…the Renaissance.

Not to be a conspiracy theorist here, but I hope Dan Brown is reading this blog and writes a nice book about this idea…and figures out what that event was, because I have no idea…hahaha.

However, it does seem that some “crisis” (which in Chinese is a character composed of the two characters for “danger” and “opportunity”) occurred, which we could not mitigate or win against, and have repeated ever since.

Hell, maybe it goes even further back than that.

But what stands out to me most is the point at which we dissociated from our tool-making.

We’ve been dissociated from our habitats for thousands of years. Human beings have lived in cities and such for around 8-10,000 years. Sure that could be a factor.

And life has been relatively “distracting” ever since we’ve been in cities. Fast pace, hustle and bustle, are nothing new.

But the loss of consciousness that we are using tools – that symbols are tools, machines are tools, that mathematics and language are tools – that seems more important.

When did that happen? And why? When did we lose sight of the fact that we make technologies to help us?

Because it was at that point that we committed ourselves to a path of recurrent trauma reenactment. It was at that point that we closed our eyes to a process within ourselves (as a culture).

It was at that point that it became “necessary” to pursue pain in order to deserve pleasure. This thing we see in cubicles and offices all over the world.

It was at this point that we begin to see scarcity as our ruling dictum, and fear as its messenger.

I place it in the mid-sixteenth century because that’s the first written record I’ve seen of this same sort of question (from Etienne la Boetie – the Discourse on Voluntary Servitude).

Maybe, like the Joker’s “SmyleX,” there is no single source, but the confluence of many things, contributing to our continued replaying of history.

Relationships, and the constant underlying change

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It’s tempting to live in a world of black-and-white, yes/no, on/off. I’ve been a big user of this type of worldview over the course of my life, with varying results. It seems, for me, to be most common at the early stages of things. When I’m learning something new, or just starting a project. At that point, the only thing I can rely on is my past experience, and it is much easier to deal with the new thing in a binary, all-or-nothing fashion. It automatically excludes certain possibilities, and makes action easier.

Later, when doing that no-longer-new thing, the relationship has become more complex. Intricacies have been revealed that won’t allow for that dialectical approach.

This is true in any relationship I’ve had, hence “relationships” in the title. I mean personal relationships, relationships to my culture, myself, ideas, or activities.

I recently started reading the Yuan Dao again, which really highlights a concept central to “Eastern” philosophies – change. While the Tao Te Ching does the same, to me, it doesn’t expose an aspect of change necessary for change to happen a well as maybe the Yuan Dao (a commentary on and exposition of the concepts in the Tao) does – the constant underlying change.

There are two ways I look at this – First, there has to be a “ground” or framework from which something can change. There has to be a “normal” for you to notice “abnormal.” The second point, though, is that most of the distinction that we make between something in its original state, versus the “new” thing we end up dealing with is based on ideas of constancy we get from the way we use thought and/or language.

The trick, it seems to me, is that even the “constant” undergoes change. Heraclitus, the pre-Socratic philosopher, said “everything changes, and nothing remains still,” and “you cannot step into the same river twice” (because the river changes before you’ve stepped into it again).

Many Western approaches to his statements take the black/white approach – “oh, he only believed in change,” or “oh, there was nothing constant.” But if you read the rest of the fragments of his work, there is the concept of Logos, which seems to be the fount or wellspring of all things, and the “logic” of the process of change. I’ll mention this again in a second, as its something I think we need to start considering and teaching in our lives/practices/schools.

In the river example, by calling/naming it a river, we’ve created a static “thing” in our minds that we can refer back to. I think this is the “tool-making” process of language. By creating “things” out of processes, we create static entities that we can manipulate, that we can use or try to change the way we want to.

The reality is much different, however, because these “things” never truly transform into static entities. They continue to change every second, which may (or may not) cause us problems down the road, when we want that “thing” that we’ve defined in our mind to behave a certain way (the way it was defined when we “thinged” it), and it does not comply. The river changes course, constantly shifts, seeks its own path, and overflows its banks or bursts the dykes or dams we make to contain it. At the very least, the river’s flow wears down the things we put in its path, and we have to constantly do maintenance to our methods of control.

I think this happens sometimes for people as they age. They may have defined themselves based on the look of their face at the age of 28, or 18, or how fit they were then, or their athletic accomplishments (or failures). As they grow older, those things change, they fade, they become impossible or possible only in different ways.

By remaining attached to the earlier concept, the person causes themselves emotional pain and eventually they begin to suffer.

In our culture, now, when that happens, the response is often to continue to exert control. Get botox injections, take hormone replacement therapy, plastic surgery, etc.

In that approach, the lesson is lost. The meditation on change never occurs, except in a black and white mode, where change is the enemy to be destroyed.

Unfortunately, as with a couple of other things I’ve been talking about with friends recently (like the ability to create interest in yourself for certain things) we aren’t taught much about change in our schooling, or our culture generally speaking. Maybe it’s because it makes it more difficult to govern, our societies or our lives. Maybe the subject-matter is too deep (Heraclitus was called “the obscure”). But I wonder what would happen if we did begin to meditate on change more frequently, and the constant underlying change.

Not only that, but what would happen if we began to understand that our “constant”s could be malleable. That we could shift our understanding of some “thing” that we thought we understood…that we weren’t tied to the opinion or approach we first formed when we started something…

…that we could change.

Exercise vs. Physical Activity

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What’s the difference?

“Physical activity” is anything you do with your body. It’s a very vague, broad term.

“Exercise” is more specific. Here let’s define it as the use of the body for a specific result. But let’s be even more specific, let’s talk about “working out.”

“Working out” is exercise to achieve greater strength or endurance, some health benefit, or aesthetic qualities.

We Indigenes
Indigenous means you’re born of a certain area. Literally “produced” (gen) “within” (in-).

Normally we think of “indians” with this term…or “aborigines” (a similar type of meaning to this word – “from” (ab), “the beginning” (origine, origin)).

While I’ll use the typically understood meaning of those words in this post, I think it’s worth pointing out that we all are “indigenous” to our habitat, whatever that may be at the moment. We are continually produced within and crafted by the environment (in every sense of the word – buildings, nature, people, weather) that we are within.

We also all are “aboriginal” – coming from our own origin. You can track your heritage back all the way to the “origin” if you have the time and gumption.

Source of the Physically Active
If you read my previous post, you know that I disagree with a lot of the arguments made these days in attempts to explain overweight/obesity, lack of physical activity, and associated diseases.

In sum – I think the built/man-made environment has very little real effect on what physical activities people choose to participate in, but that participation in physical activities and use of ones environment is largely a matter of imagination supported by a like-minded community – and examples of this can be found in many places today or throughout history. I think that agriculture is not the downfall of mankind, and that there are many examples of extremely healthy populations that practice agriculture. I think that over-abundance of cheap calories is not the cause of obesity or overweight, but that over-indulgence is.

Most importantly, I think that most of these arguments involve the removal (or subjugation) of self-responsibility from the individual and their free choice to engage or not engage in whatever they choose. Discussions supporting the built environment approach imply that people have no free will to engage in whatever they want, but are determined to behave in certain ways by their surroundings. Parkour would be a counter to this idea. Discussions of agriculture imply that people cannot choose what to plant in what manner. Masanobu Fukuoka would be a counterpoint. Discussions of over-abundant, cheap, and “empty” calories say that a person cannot choose to eat other things. Granted, this one is trickier, as some areas literally have no alternatives within easy grasp. But there still are alternatives – get out of those areas.

Any system, as I’ve mentioned before, is self-sustaining, by definition. Every system must seek to maintain, sustain, and maybe even to further, itself, in order to continue to survive in the presence of/cooperation/competition with other systems. Society is no different. The discussions mentioned above are part of society, so they reflect the values of that society. Mine is as well, so take it with a grain of salt.

How, Kemosabe
So what is it then, Josh? What’s the difference between working out and physical activity, and how does it relate to health?

Indigenous cultures are “physically active” throughout the day/week/month. Usually, in small discrete increments, but sometimes for extended periods of time at a stretch. Usually at relatively low intensities, but sometimes at very high intensities. And almost never at very high intensities for extended periods of time.

Indigenous cultures (except for ours here in the US) largely don’t “work out” to get their physical activity. Even in many places in Europe today the concept of going to a gym and working out is still seen as a secondary and inferior mode of exercise.

Rather, physical activity in indigenous cultures (and in many places in “civilized” Europe) comes from and in daily living. They walk to work. They walk to the store. They push or pull or carry their food, instead of driving it in a car. They may have to do physical activity to get their food. Their days have physical activity “built-in.”

I don’t want you to think that this is true only of “indians” and “aborigines” (as we typically think of those terms). I mentioned that there are places in “civilized” Europe where physical activity comes as part of daily living.

There are also a few agricultural communities that still behave this way, nestled within our own (US) culture.

An example of this is found in this paper: Physical Activity of Canadian and American Children: A Focus on Youth in Amish, Mennonite, and Modern Cultures, by David R. Bassett, Jr.

From the abstract:
“Amish and Mennonite children have higher levels of physical activity than modern-living children, despite less participation in competitive sports. As a result, Amish and Mennonite children tend to be leaner than their counterparts in contemporary society.”

If you can get your hands on it, you should read this paper. It’s very interesting. It says something that seems terribly obvious when you read it – that people who do physical work as part of their daily lives are leaner than those who do not.

But if you look deeper, you’ll see that the “agriculture” argument breaks down here as well. Amish and Mennonite groups participate in agriculture. It doesn’t make them fat or stupid.

They also have an abundance of available calories most of the time. But that doesn’t make them fat either.

They construct a built-environment very similar to any you or I might live in. There are buildings with rooms. But they don’t just sit in those rooms all day.

Opposite-Land
Where “traditional” human activity is intermittent, as I stated above (btw, this paper is a fantastic overview of “intermittent” exercise in the animal world), physical activity in our US culture has become limited to “workouts” – half-hour or hour-long blocks of relatively continuous, relatively intense exercise.

Problems of overtraining and burnout in physical activity arise because our exercise has no tempo, other than a factory-based one, a vestige of the early-industrial foundations of our “work culture.” That is, “work” in the United States is based mostly on ideas of labor that came about during the industrial revolution – still. Things like “shift work,” where the employee works a certain shift every day, set daily/weekly schedules, set meeting times every week, etc. – the artificial, machine-based (i.e., machine-rhythm) division of time into measurable increments, with the aim of “maximum production” – where the ability to produce never fades, never waxes and wanes, but is always set at the maximum.

This is even more apparent in the term we use to describe exercise – it’s a “work out.”

This industrial idea of work has little to do with what happens in “natural” living, where work, though it is intense, and regular, happens in waves of exertion and rest, happens with a rhythm that matches the ability of the body to produce energy, and in rhythm with the seasons, the weather, and the habitat.

Our ideas about what constitutes “exercise” have been shaped by this. Just go into any gym and look at all of the machines in there. To use a machine, you must become one. Using one, you are used by it.

The Big But
But, Josh, you might say, we don’t live in a culture where physical activity is demanded of us in our work, throughout the day. So we have to go to the gym to exercise. We have to “work out.”

Here’s where that old argument comes in again – that we are without option. That we have no free will. No choice. We “must” because “that’s how things are.”

I disagree.

In fact, I have to thank one of my clients for proving this point to me. He is a very successful corporate executive. He travels about two weeks out of every month. He’s in fantastic physical shape.

Yes, he does go to the gym to work out, but he also has a stability ball at his desk, that he sits on intermittently throughout the day instead of sitting on his office chair. When he is using the ball, he’ll do crunches, and other exercises whenever he feels like it. He’ll get some intermittent physical activity.

A more extreme version of getting intermittent physical activity in our daily lives, one that I really highly respect, and think that we all could take a cue from, is Herschel Walker.

When he was a boy, according to one article I read, he would do pushups and situps while watching TV and studying (which usually were happening at the same time).

Can you do that as well?

If you feel resistance to doing pushups and situps during commercial breaks while you’re watching TV, why is that? Let’s do some physiology tracking – Where does that resistance come from within you (I mean, physically – your gut, your heart, your mind, your limbs – where do you feel the “pressure”?) and where does it come from outside of you (peer pressure?)?

Why can’t we do pushups and situps at work? Or walk or run up and down the stairs a couple of times? Why can’t we get up from our desks to take walks around the office park whenever we’re feeling stagnant or burnt out?

Physical activity for us, has become a choice, not a necessity. We choose not to.

The answer to the question above is – we can, but we don’t. We choose not to.

Why don’t we? Why don’t you?