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I'm calling this my thesis because it's a summary of what I want to share with the rest of humanity, distilled out of what I learned from several years of struggling to recover from my own trauma. I had to pull together theories and strategies that weren't culturally available to me, so I am adding to the realm of human understanding, or at least making some information of practical value more accessible. I'm not expecting to present it to any degree-granting institutions, because I think degree-granting institutions are classist nonsense that I don't want to support.
I want my friends to witness my graduation from trauma. I am interested in discussing my thesis with other people. "Defending" it would seem a bit too adversarial. In the spirit of skipping the whole binary pass/fail thing, I'm posting my current draft with the intention of continuing to work on it as I receive feedback and think it over.
I mostly agree with the Continuum Concept, that humans evolved to be happy and healthy most of the time, and that the misery, addiction, chronic illness, etc. of modern humans says more about modern civilization than it does about human nature. I think that trauma is one of the main causes of our modern civilized human suffering. Bessel Van der Kolk, Peter Levine and others have described cases of both physical and psychological symptoms resulting from trauma, and resolving when the trauma was resolved.
I'll start with some terminology and my basic explanation of trauma, then offer my theory about how modern civilized humans came to carry so much trauma and some strategies that help me process my own trauma more effectively.
The autonomic nervous system is sometimes described as having two parts, the sympathetic nervous system, which gets us moving, and the parasympathetic nervous system, which slows us down and helps us rest. According to polyvagal theory, the parasympathetic nervous system can be better understood as two nerves: the dorsal vagus nerve, which is involved in the Rest and Digest, Freeze and Collapse states, and the ventral vagus nerve, which is more involved in the Feed and Breed and Social Engagement states.
According to my understanding of Polyvagal theory and evolution, our dorsal vagus nerve is evolutionarily very old, perhaps billions of years old. We share it with all animals. The sympathetic nervous system is slightly less old, hundreds of millions of years, and slightly less universal, but still shared with all vertebrates and some invertebrates. The ventral vagus nerve evolved with mammals. Reptiles and fish don't have it. I'd guess it's about a hundred million years old.
I'll be using the term "threat" to mean what my autonomic nervous system perceives as a threat. That is not the same as what my logical mind understands as danger, or what would feel threatening to another person in the same situation, or even what seems threatening to me in retrospect. Steven Porges offers the term "neuroception" for the way one's autonomic nervous system instinctively interprets cues of threat, safety, opportunity and connection. These cues come from our senses, both intenal and external, but neuroception is neither the raw sensation nor the stories our logical, verbal minds tell to make sense of our perceptions. The autonomic nervous system tells its own stories. In this article, unless I state otherwise, when I refer to threat, safety, connection or agency, I mean, as perceived by one's neuroception in the moment.
Steven Porges also redifines safety as a ventral vagal regulated state of one's nervous system, rather than absence of external threat. This doesn't work for me, because I need a word for absence of external threat, and redefining such a common word can lead to misunderstandings (and already has). I'll try to avoid using the word safety at all, but if I do use it I mean absence of threat, not a ventral vagal state.
I can list several autonomic nervous system states (also called responses) in order of increasing threat and decreasing agency, like this:
And two that don't easily fit into the ordered list:
If I organize them according to what parts of my autonomic nervous system are most activated in each state, adding red highlights for responses to neuroception of threat and green for neuroception of safety or connection, I get something like this:
The ordered list goes around in a circle. That makes sense to me because in the Collapse state, my dorsal vagus nerve shuts down my body and mind because my neuroception says that all is lost, there's no point doing anything, whereas in the Rest and Digest state, my dorsal vagus nerve shuts down most of my physical and mental activity because all is well, there's no need to do anything.
In the Rest and Digest state, mental activity slows down and changes, I might fall asleep, and physical activity slows down or stops. My energy is directed toward the internal processes of digestion, healing and growth.
The ventral vagus nerve, supporting connection, and the dorsal vagus nerve, supporting stillness, can work together to support cuddling, intimacy, and quiet, thoughtful conversations.
The Social Engagement response is the one I want to access in myself and a toddler when I greet them: eyebrows raised, voice soft and melodic, slight smile, eye contact. I read recently that this instinctive social engagement system also tenses the stapedius muscle in the inner ear, tuning our ears to hear higher pitched sounds more clearly, which helps us understand speech.
Feed and Breed is another state activated with the ventral vagus nerve. These are, after all, activities best enjoyed with others.
The ventral vagus nerve and sympathetic nervous system can work together to support Active Play, especially with friendly, face-to-face interaction.
The Fight and Flight responses feel warm, sometimes hot, and fast. Their signature is movement, heart racing, flushed face, breathing fast, movements may not be coordinated or precise. The point is to MOVE, FAST.
Fighting faces toward a threat, and humans tend to do it more with our arms. My fighting voice is loud, and my language is simple, direct or rude.
Fleeing faces away from a threat, or rather, toward safety or connection, and I do it more with my legs. If my voice gets involved, I'm interrupting and changing the subject.
Fight and Flight both relate to sympathetic nervous system activation. Fighting is my response to reduced options or reduced agency. Given a choice, I prefer to flee, like most creatures I know of.
If I don't perceive any option to fight or to flee, then I Freeze. The Freeze response feels blank, still, stuck. I might go limp or stiff, curl up like a foetus or tuck in my head like a frightened turtle. Speech becomes impossible or monotone, simple, confused or repetitive. I can think about half a thought at a time, maximum. Both my sympathetic Fight or Flight system and my dorsal vagal parasympathetic Collapse system are activated at the same time. Evolutionarily, it makes sense for situations where I need to hide or play dead while I wait for an opportunity to fight or flee. If I perceive an opportunity, I can switch from frozen to moving very, very quickly.
In the Collapse state, muscles go limp, blood supply to my brain decreases and I might lose some or all of my senses. Peripheral vision and balance are often the first to go. Understanding language can become difficult, maybe because my stapedius muscle goes limp or because language is evolutionarily very new, and the collapse state is very old.
In a fully Collapsed state, a person can even die of shock. In first aid courses, I was told to offer rest and reassurance to a person who's in shock, and keep them warm. The reassurance we offered in our practice sessions wasn't very sincere. It would come across as even less sincere in a real emergency. I think the advice was misguided. What I try to offer now is not reassurance but connection, to activate the person's instinctive Social Engagement system, which keeps them out of total Collapse. Opportunities for agency, however small, can also help.
Collapse is a dorsal vagal shutdown response without simlutaneous sympathetic or ventral vagal activation. This can happen in two different ways: A threat may become so overwhelming that my sympathetic nervous system gives up on actively responding, or it may be a kind of threat that I can't actively respond to.
Orienting is the Wood Between the Worlds of autonomic nervous system responses. When I'm Orienting I'm looking around, head turning, eyes wide open, listening, focussing on information coming from outside my body in the present moment. We mammals go into orienting intuitively when our neuroception tells us that it may be time to switch states, there's new information available and the response we're having may no longer be appropriate.
As part of the strategies I'll discuss later, I'm practicing consciously activating my Orienting response.
Orienting is so much more than just determining level of threat. It's figuring out where I am in the world, what's going on around me, how I relate to it all, what might happen next and what my opportunities are. When my neuroception picks up cues of threat, opportunities for connection and agency are particularly helpful. The books I've read about trauma have left out nature connection as something to orient to, even though that is probably what we evolved to orient to most often. A wild animal, or a wild human, orients to the non-human world many times every day, and it's not just a matter of, "No threat, okay, done." In fact, that is so far from what we evolved for that it doesn't really help me reset my nervous system, even if I perceive no cues of threat. The kind of orienting we evolved to do many times a day is more like:
"I'm in the forest on the south side of the valley where I was eating berries yesterday, and the wind has picked up and changed direction slightly since I last oriented, and there's that cloud, it's moved that way, and this plant that I don't feel like eating right now but I might come back for it, and that bird song that I didn't hear over the winter, and the kind of moss on that rock face tells me it's a seepage area, though I don't see any water dripping at the moment, and, and, and...."
Jon Young recommended having a sit spot as a core nature connection practice. That's basically sitting outdoors in the same place for an hour every day, just orienting.
The Fawn response may be unique to humans, and I don't understand it very well, though I know of a few situations where it's my default response. I try to avoid getting into those situations. I wonder whether it's unique to mammals who are already traumatized. All the other responses I just described have uses that make sense for a mammal with a healthy, non-traumatized nervous system, living in its natural environment.
I guess wolves and some other carnivores show submissive behaviour in the wild, as a way of taking a break from power struggles. What I think of as a Fawn response in humans isn't always blatantly submissive. For example, if someone I feel afraid of tells a joke that I feel really uncomfortable with, my impulse is to answer, participate, even elaborate on the joke. I consider that a Fawning response. Another phenomenon that comes to mind is that several women I know, when in heteroromantic relationships, find it impossible to coherently disagree with their partner's opinions when the partner is present, even if they have strong objections that they can articulate very clearly in their partner's absence. I'm guessing this is related to ancestral trauma about heterosexual relationships. It seems to occur even without traceable or relevant trauma in the current relationship, or in the individual's life.
Trauma means a creature has gone into a Freeze or Collapse state, and not fully come out of it. When the Freeze or Collapse state is happening in response to a present or very recent situation, it's called shock, or more specifically "psychogenic shock" to differentiate it from shock caused by physical injury or illness.
When does shock turn into trauma? Well, for our ancestors before the agricultural revolution, threats where generally immediate and physical. We probably evolved to maintain a Freeze response for seconds or minutes, rarely hours and never days. Similarly, Fight and Flight responses were most often needed for a few minutes at a time, and very rarely for more than a day. The Collapse response may have been experienced only during natural disasters, with severe illness or when people actually got caught and eaten by predators.
We could say that any psychogenic shock (Freeze or Collapse) that lasts for more than a few days is trauma. Alternatively, we could say that any Freeze or Collapse that outlasts the threat is trauma. The latter definition gets confusing, though, because the threats we perceive in modern life aren't as immediate and physical as the ones faced by our distant ancestors. Sometimes it's not obvious what's ongoing evidence of a real danger and what's a mistaken neuroception of threat, and either can become traumatic over time. Anyway, it's not just neuroception of threat that keeps a person in shock, it's the proportion of threat relative to connection and agency.
Regardless of what the stressors are, trauma starts off as a Freeze or Collapse state with the normal symptoms of temporary shock, and then if it's not resolved after weeks or months, it gets wierder, and goes on getting weirder until it's resolved. Over months and years, symptoms go from recognizable patterns of distress that relate to the stressful experience(s) that started the trauma, to patterns of mental disturbance that are more difficult to understand, to physical symptoms and eventually to almost any constellation of mental, emotional, behavioral and physical symptoms. I won't list all the possibilities here, because the list is almost endless. There's no symptom known to humankind that I can say for sure can't be caused by trauma. However, I will mention a few that are particularly relevant here.
Dissociation can include losing awareness of parts of my body, losing access to some emotions or thoughts, and reduced communication among parts of my psyche. In extreme cases, parts of the psyche can devide into two or more "camps" that stop trying to work together, sometimes called multiple personalities.
Flashbacks happen when my nervous system suddenly retrieves a trauma memory and tries to process it. A flashback can be brought on by any stimulus that reminds me of the trauma, including sights, sounds, smells, thoughts, interoceptive cues, kinesthetic memory, social situations, places and so on. Flashbacks can also manifest as any kind of remembered stimulus, not necessarily consciously recognized as a memory. Body memories are interoceptive memories of how one felt physically and emotionally, and it can be difficult to tell whether they're memories or just how I happen to feel in the present. Flashbacks can reproduce the mental state that went with the traumatic experience, including states I don't have conscious access to. An adult having a flashback from a traumatic situation that happened when they were three years old might think and talk more like a three-year-old than they could if they were deliberately acting. I was once slightly traumatized while in a psychedelic state, and later temporarily lost track of linear space-time as a kind of flashback. The psychiatrist I talked to said she believes most of what we call "psychedelic flashbacks" are trauma flashbacks of this kind. (She ought to know; the bookshelves in her waiting room were packed with books about psychedelic therapy.) Framing it in this way and having some strategies for resolving trauma at that point in my life, I didn't have a problem with ongoing flashbacks. I sometimes wonder whether it would have gone very differently if I'd retraumatized myself by thinking, "That medicine someone gave me by accident has made me crazy, I'm tripping out and I can't make it stop, now I'm doomed!"
Re-enactment is related to flashbacks, but rather than simply retrieve a memory, I find the traumatic situation replaying itself in waking life. This is generally unconscious, sometimes not consciously recognized until after it happens multiple times. Trauma re-enactments can be positively uncanny, they get so detailed and elaboorate, as if they were orchestrated by forces beyond the individual traumatized person's realm of influence.
So... when I notice someone doing something I don't like or experiencing a mental or emotional state I don't like, whether or not that someone is me, I want to avoid causing them trauma in relation to the thoughts, feelings or behaviour that I don't like. Trauma could compel a person to feel, think, say or do the same thing over and over, until they resolve the trauma. Having read this far, this may seem obvious. How to accomplish it gets a bit tricky. What could help a person get through a psychotic episode without feeling traumatized about their psychosis? A trauma flashback of psychosis would be more psychosis. Can we hold people accountable for violent crimes without traumatizing them about their own violent behaviour? And if people who were abused or neglected as children feel compelled to abuse or neglect children, what support would they need to avoid accummulating trauma about their own abusive or neglectful behaviour?
I remember reading about a study (maybe in Trauma and Memory by Peter Levine) that showed that mice can inherit specific sensory triggers through their birther line for at least five generations, even with the in-between generations never experiencing the trauma and never seeing other mice respond to the trigger. If that happens to mice, I see no reason why it wouldn't happen to humans.
That means that any of us could have trauma triggers from events that we as individuals never experienced, inherited from ancestors we never met. Sometimes it's helpful to dig into family history for more understanding, and other times the stories are lost from living memory and from the writen record, and we're left with ghost triggers. The good news is, we don't always need to know what happened. Regardless of what happen to whom, when, to produce my trauma, it affects me only to the extent that my body is carrying it in the present. I can and do deal with it in the present.
Humans, more than any other creatures, can compartmentalize our shock and go back to day-to-day life without resolving it. While I realize this is useful in some situations, it can also mean that we accumulate trauma from year to year. Civilized humans, in particular, seem to accumulate more trauma than humans still living outside civilization, and more than domesticated non-humans living within civilization. Why?
I believe we humans have evolved, and are evolving, to adapt to a huge variety of lifestyles, but these lifestyles had some patterns in common (at least up until the last ten thousand years or so). Humans evolved to live in tribes ot about 20 to 150 people, sharing food, sharing a land base, sharing an oral culture, tending fires and building shelters collaboratively. I've been to an event called Art of Mentoring that aimed to replicate this experience for a week. It was nowhere close, because we were missing the attachment relationships that would come from having lived, worked, learned, eaten, played, sung, danced and grieved together all our lives. In fact, there was something oddly disturbing about it. Maybe it would have helped if more of us had acknowledged more loudly that the pseudovillage on surrogate land, while interesting as a learning experience, was completely different from anything humans ever evolved for.
The basic tribal pattern dates back at least to the taming of fire, hundreds of thousands of years ago, and I would guess millions of years beyond that. Around the same time we learned to use fire, we developed symbolic language that allowed us to tell stories and jokes, and make plans. Eventually spoken language developed a life of its own, in the literal sense that language, culture and stories evolve in their own right, using humans as their host species or substrate. That was fine as long as culture was co-evolving in a mutually supportive relationship with its human hosts.
Some time within the last hundred thousand years, maybe as recently as ten thousand years ago, spoken language evolved a new level of complexity that gave culture more of an independent life. Human brains evolved new capacities for more abstract thought, including new ways of thinking about time, past and future, and therefore death. This may have been a gradual shift over thousands of years. I consider it an important turning point when human culture began to evolve way, way faster than human biology. Our instincts have kind of evolved to deal with stone tools, fire and the older aspects of spoken language. Our autonomic nervous systems have not had time to evolve for agriculture, thinking about the distant past and future, understanding death, social hierarchies beyond the known tribe of at most two hundred people, arithmetic, clocks, calendars or writing.
Before the shift to more abstract thinking, the situations in which a human most likely to have a traumatic experience were while they were away from their tribe, hunting, exploring or travelling. I imagine a traumatized person coming home at the end of the day or at the end of a journey: They're welcomed home by their familiar tribespeople. No one quizzes them immediately about what happened. Instead, they are greeted, offered food and water, affectionate touch and a safe place to sleep. If they are injured, someone they know and respect provides whatever medical care is available in their culture and their ecosystem. Later, after eating and resting and reconnecting with others, maybe they'll tell their story. We don't question them too soon. Maybe we don't ask questions at all. Some stories come spilling out that same evening, over dinner. Some won't be told until the little kids have gone to sleep. Some stories might wait until the situation is just right, around a fire late at night with a few particularly close friends, or in some kind of ceremony, or in the winter when we have nothing to do but drum, dance, sing and tell stories for hour after hour. Even if a traumatic experience happened close to home and involved other members of the tribe, sooner or later a situation arises where the story can be told.
When the time is right, the person who had felt traumatized gets a hero's welcome. Their attachment figures celebrate their survival, their courage, skills, wisdom, luck, strength, whatever brought them home alive. Once the story has been shared once, it might be told and retold a thousand times, with genuine gratitude that this person is back with us, and genuine curiosity about all the details, and genuine interest in learning everything we can learn from their experience. When someone has an experience that's so overwhelming it leaves them traumatized, the tribe as a whole needs to learn from it, to help avoid or survive similar situations for many generations to come.
That group learning is what oral cultures are made of. I suspect it's the evolutionary purpose of language and culture. I think it's also why humans are so good at compartmentalizing our trauma. Now that we have symbolic language, there's an evolutionary reason for storing the most overwhelming memories until the situation is just right for the story to be told and for the whole tribe to learn from it.
I've heard that cultures who are still opting out of civilization have specific rituals to help people tell stories that are difficult to tell. Some of these rituals are connected to natural rhythms, such as every evening after dark, or every winter at the very end of the harvest season. No one has to ask for a ritual to tell their particular story; the tribe holds the space, because the tribe needs the stories.
Modern civilisation does not hold that space. Learning from trauma survivors is more often given lip service than taken seriously, and is applied to members of acknowledged marginalized groups more than to unique individuals or members of groups whose experience of marginalization itself is marginalized. For an institution like the medical system to listen to a mere individual --- or any number of individuals --- and learn from what they have to say is almost unthinkable.
What changed? How did humans go from healthy, connected, resilient hunter-gatherers to the depressed, traumatized, anxious and submissive people we now call normal? I suspect that several thousand years ago, as our cultures evolved faster than ever before and our brains evolved faster then ever before just trying to keep up, we developed a new capacity that we weren't ready for, that we couldn't possibly have been ready for. It had something to do with self-awareness, and linear time, and the expectation of death, and the increasing sense of humans as separate from other beings and oneself as separate from other humans. It may have been something along the lines of what I call a harsh awakening, which I describe in my essay on spiritual privilege. Whatever it was, however it happened, humans apparently lost our trust in the non-human and the cycles of life, and started trying to outsmart our environment in order to support more progeny, to have more of "us" and less of "them." In more recent times this turned into an effort to have everlasting life, first through religion and now through supposedly imminent advances in medical care.
Why the sudden focus on one's own family? Why the fear of death? Death is the unknown, the unknownable, almost by definition. Early hunter-gatherers with their resilient nervous systems weren't worried about the unknowable, it was just an adventure. Where knowledge ends, our own default expectations of the universe fill in. The sense that the universe is basically hostile is characteristic of trauma.
Maybe when humans had next to no capacity to think about the future, we had next to no capacity for worry.
There are plenty of things in modern civilization that create unnecessary trauma, as well as things that interfere with resolving it. As one tiny example, if I watch the mainstream news ... Well, actually, I don't and mustn't watch the mainstream news. It wrecks my nervous system for days. The news is full of tragedies that I can't do anything about. If I witnessed these firsthand, I would be taking action by speaking up, running away, running to help, helping someone survive, helping someone grieve their losses ... taking some kind of action that would engage either my ventral vagus nerve or my sympathetic nervous system. When it's on a screen, I can't take action. The result is a partial Collapse, and unless I'm very careful, trauma.
I suppose the next thing to discuss is transitions between autonomic nervous system states. Going back the the list and the diagram ... I'm going to use the term "stress" for responses to more perceived threat and less perceived connection and agency, and I realize that's not the only definition of stress, but that's how I'm using it here because that's what I need a term for.
When my neuroception registers more threat or fewer options in the face of a threat, it doesn't take my autonomic nervous system very many seconds to jump from a state of less stress to a state of greater stress. Skipping over the states in between takes a fraction of a second.
On the other hand, says the other hand [Zworb took the pencil here], shifting from a state of high stress to a state of lower stress takes minutes, and I sometimes need several more minutes to go through each of the states in between.
For example, suppose I'm in Social Engagement, having a conversation with someone whom I don't perceive as threatening at all. Then they reach out and grab my arm with no warning. For me, this is a trigger, and because it restricts my movement, I go straight into Fight, skipping over Flight before my verbal mind even knows what's happening. I scream and smack the other person on the face.
Suppose they have the sense to let go of my arm, apologize and take a few steps back. Can I go straight back into Social Engagement? I would need to Orient first, both to my surroundings (by looking around) and to the other person (by talking with them, watching them and assessing whether they'll do the same thing again.) Supposing I can orient to connection and absence of threat, I would probably shake for a minute or two, as a kind of abbreviated Fight or Flight response that helps me transition back into Social Engagement. I might also need to act out a fight or flight response, for example by running, yelling, throwing things or jumping. Those can all be done safely and consciously. Once I've completed my fight or flight responses, I can orient and probably settle back into Social Engagement.
This makes sense evolutionarily. When higher stress states were needed, they were sometimes needed immediately, with not a second to waste. The lower stress states are just as necessary for survival and wellbeing, but because they are the default states for a healthy animal in the wild (including a human in a hunter-gatherer tribe,) there are hours and hours for feeding, breeding, resting, digesting and connecting. A wild animal can spare a few minutes in the transition to a lower-stress state, to orient and really make sure the state it's transitioning into is appropriate for the situation.
Here are some of the things my body does to transition from states of higher stress to states of lower stress:
And some things I can choose to do, to help my nervous system reset to a calmer state:
... and I'm sure I have others. I'll elaborate on some of the strategies I invented for myself, because I needed them and they weren't culturally available, and some that I heard or read about that I wish I'd known about earlier.
I see yelling as an expression of the Fight response. NVC stands for Non-Violent Communication, developed by Marshall Rosenberg and others. NVC focusses on four types of information: observations, feelings, needs and requests.
When I need to yell, I find it helps my sense of agency to fit some NVC content in, instead of (or as well as) yelling four-letter words or incoherent sounds. There's no need to control my tone of voice; I can yell "I! Feel! Angry! Please GIVE ME SOME SPACE!!!" in the same tone of voice I might use to yell, "#@$#@%$ OFF!!!!" It does feel better for my body to use my diaphragm and breath support, when I can.
I learned this one from Janelle Hardy in Vancouver. I'm practicing using it when I notice that my neuroception might be missing cues of safety, agency or connection. To orient, I look around, turning my head from side to side and letting my eyes wander until something catches my interest. I'm looking for something that promts a sense of delight, appreciation or curiosity. If I'm outdoors, I listen for bird songs. When I see something that catches my interest, I spend a moment paying attention to the raw sensory information I'm getting from it: colour, shape, shade, texture. I'm not looking for a name for the thing or a story about its meaning. Then I go back to looking around and repeat the process, finding another sight or sound to focus on.
What if my house is a mess? What if I start to orient and my gaze falls on the dirty dishes, the dirty floor, the mountain of laundry, the half-cleared table, the stinky garbage and a dozen other things I wish I'd dealt with days ago?
I can think of two options that work for my nervous system, and two that don't.
One that works is to step out the door. Then I can orient to plants and birds, or at least to the sky. Walking out the door is a flight response. I do it with the idea "I just need to get out the door, and then I'll feel better," and then as soon as I get out the door, I orient to the outdoors and feel better.
A Fight response that often works is to do one simple cleaning task and then either orient to the finished task and the indoor space, or step outside and orient to the outdoors. Either way, I switch back to orienting as soon as I feel able to. My priority is not to get the house clean, it's to take care of my nervous system.
Trying to thoroughly clean up everything I see is another Fight response, one that doesn't work so well for regulating my nervous system. The problematic part is "everything". If I direct my Fight energy toward an impossible goal, I'm very likely to slip into Freeze when I get tired or distracted, or into escalating Fight (rage) when my frantic movements cause me break one of those dishes I'm trying to wash.
Gazing helplessly at the mess is the other response that doesn't help take care of my nervous system, or my house either. It can easily become a Freeze or Collapse state.
A messy house is just one example. There could be any number of things preventing me from orienting to safety in a given time and place, and it might not be obvious what they are. As a general rule, I find it helpful to briefly do something that feels like fighting or fleeing, and as soon as it feels complete, go back to orienting. Often I'll let myself perceive a pretend threat, and then run away from it, hit it, break it, throw it away from me, etc. As soon as I notice my Fight or Flight energy dissipating, I go back to orienting.
Anything that helps me orient to connection, agency or absence of threat is called a resource. External resources can be people, places, objects, opportunities and so on. Internal resources can include memories of connection, agency, beauty and so on, or strategies, a sense of strength or of safety in one's own body, or connection with one's own body. Some of the books I read recommended using one's breath as a resource, but that doesn't work for me. For a while I had panic attacks where my breathing would be irregular and completely outside of my control, and trying to orient to my breathing as a resource not only made them worse, it could also trigger one out of nowhere. I know what my internal resources are, for the most part, and I can draw on them. To help another person regulate their nervous system, I would hesitate to direct their attention to anything internal unless I happen to know it's helpful for that individual. As another person interacting with them, I can offer a variety of external resources instead. Here's the simplest one:
"Hi. Can I help you right now?"
If they can understand and respond, that's an opportunity for agency, even if their response is to tell me to go away.
That's what I'm doing by posting this. I had an experience that was traumatic, and my culture didn't know how to support me to process it. The kind of trauma I had was unusual, and difficult to treat, but I don't think it was totally unique ... and if it was, well, so what? I want my culture to learn from my experience, so that if something like it happens even once in a hundred years, we can handle it better next time.
I don't expect mainstream culture to care, and I don't expect many people to read anything I write, and that's okay. I don't need to be some kind of guru, I just need to be making some progress on spreading the knowledge I've gained, so that my stories aren't going to waste. Even learning about trauma helped, and looking unsuccessfully on the Internet for anyone who had recovered from the same kind of thing I was recovering from, and reading up on neurology to find the technical terms I wanted, and for that matter, learning to type HTML so I could have a philosophy blog on my website.
When I was struggling with my own trauma, I noticed an impulse that I called the Go-Home-to-your-Tribe response. My autonomic nervous system was telling me that it was time to go home, find those friendly humans who know me so well that they accept me unconditionally, and tell them what I'd experienced so that the tribe as a whole could learn from it and protect ourselves better in the future. Unfortunately, those people were few and far between, available only on the phone and not very often. I don't live in an intact tribe.
I tried several different talk therapists, trained in different modalities, and got in arguments with all of them before figuring out my problem was with the basic framework of talk therapy. What's offered as professional talk therapy in modern civilization is missing several important elements of the hero's welcome.
For one thing, the therapist was in a limited professional role. I might never see them in another role, and if I do, it'll be awkward. That's not a robust attachment relationship. For another thing, it was up to me to show up on time for therapy. The time, place and length of session were dictated by the therapist's schedule, not my needs and certainly not my intuition.
The worst part was that I was supposed to pay them to listen to me, and pay them three times as much as I could earn per hour, and the even worse part is that they weren't learning from my stories! I was paying someone to take my hard-earned stories, my incredible, irreplaceable, once-in-a-lifetime stories of survival and recovery against all odds --- and throw them out the window! No wonder talk therapy didn't magically resolve my trauma.
I wonder about the placebo effect... If a person is enrolled in a study and then given a pill that happens to have no active medicine in it, is that different from being given a pill with no study? What about being in a study with no pill? I heard that some or other common antidepressant performed better in its initial trials than in the general population. What if it wasn't the chemical, but the experience of having one's experience recorded and learned from that helped people feel less depressed?
I can't unconditionally recommend psychedelics. I do think they can be an empowering option to have in mind, somewhere below physical excercise and above psychiatric hospital on the list of things worth trying. As I'll try to explain under altered state trauma below, when psychedelic experiences go well, they range from merely fun to life-changing, life-saving and transformative ... and when they're not so great, they can still be educational ... but on the rare occasion when they're harmful, they can be really, really harmful. I guess I'll suggest some things to have in mind if one were considering psychedelic medicine for treating trauma:
Somewhere, maybe here, I want to add a paragraph about the danger of being retraumatized by sincere efforts to resolve trauma, the importance of orienting frequently while processing and the validity of postponing processing indefinitely until we're resourced for it. Here goes.
I believe all or almost all trauma can be resolved, with adequate resourcing. I also realize that in modern Western civilisation, some folks live with very little resourcing, either internal or external.
The pattern I see is that these are kinds of trauma that can easily become part of a person's life, identity and relationships. In my experience, there's little to no culturally available support for resolving these more challenging kinds of trauma.
For contrast, suppose an adult who is generally well-resourced and comfortable in their life is a passenger in a car crash, but no one is badly hurt. The experience could traumatize them and they might need help processing it, but the methods that are culturally available (in the culture I'm living in) are probably adequate. That's because they have a safe-enough, connected-enough life to go back to once the accident itself is dealt with. I call this shock trauma.
One of the most infuriating myths I've encountered in recent years is that trauma in general, and attachment trauma in particular, can only start in childhood. I suspect its purpose is to prop up the equally infuriating myth that modern industrial capitalist civilization is basically okay, and individuals who struggle are flawed. Actually, I think what passes for an ordinary way of life within modern industrial capitalism is enough to traumatize anyone, however mature and resilient and free of childhood trauma they may be to start with.
I believe that adults have attachment needs, and are therefore susceptible to attachment trauma when those needs are too severely unmet for too long. Attachment needs change as we mature, but they never go away. I intend to write an article soon about attachment and emotional development, so I won't go into it in great detail here. For myself, I need secure relationships with at least three humans and one place on the earth in order to keep my attachment stress within a manageable range, and I consider that totally normal and healthy.
The attachment theory of the surrounding culture I live with is more like this:
Okay, so apparently I still have some anger about being told that my attachment needs were not valid, and that having attachment needs as an adult meant there was something wrong with my childhood. I guess I need to write and publish that article about attachment. My childhood was relatively attachment-friendly, actually. For several years I was securely attached to at least six adults and three places on the earth. In processing my adult attachment trauma, I could have drawn on memories from those years as healing resources if I hadn't had therapists and friends attacking my sense of my own childhood and implying that I'd been a broken person all along.
If I had had significant attachment trauma from early childhood, people's well-meaning attempts to trace my adult attachment trauma to childhood would have been even more harmful. When I have trauma from recent experiences that I remember clearly, it's much safer to process that before digging for anything else.
Anyway, what I set out to write about attachment trauma is that humans can get traumatized about unmet attachment needs just as easily as any other unmet need such as food scarcity, touch deprivation, lack of shelter or privacy or opportunities for growth learning or contribution. What makes attachment trauma tricky to resolve is that it generates triggers and dissociative "blank" feelings related to connection, and connection is a basic resource for resolving trauma.
I'm pretty sure human sexuality evolved for more than just reproduction. If it had evolved purely for reproduction, female bodied humans would be interested in sex only at the phase of our cycle when we have a chance of conceiving, like many other mammals. That most of us can enjoy sex much more often than that given the right emotional context points to an emotional purpose, which could be bonding and attachment and could also relate to processing emotions and resolving trauma.
The same goes for psychedelic states. What I'm calling a psychedelic state involves an altered or nonlinear perception of space and time, altered sensory processing, intense and fluid emotions and increased or altered connections between brain regions (and therefore parts of the psyche). I don't think it's coincidence that such a wide variety of chemical compounds, some only found in a particular plant and fungus and others only made in modern chemistry labs, produce such spectacular and similar mental states. I've also heard of people attaining psychedelic states without medicine, for example through spinning, drumming and fasting. I conceptualize some of what we call psychotic states as psychedelic states that happen spontaneously. I think we evolved the capacity for psychedelic states because they are so extremely powerful for resolving trauma.
The same intensity and fluidity of emotions that make sexual excitement and psychedelic states so powerful for healing also make them fun as long as nothing goes horribly wrong, and extra traumatic when things do go horribly wrong. Some people say there's no such thing as a bad trip. They've never had one. Something like one out of ten high-dose psychedelic experiences is extremely unpleasant. The majority of those can be processed and ultimately be beneficial, even life-changing. What I'm calling a bad trip is not just something I'd regret while it's happening, it's more like someting I'd still regret ten years later. These are relatively rare, but they do happen, so I take them seriously.
Without advocating for or against sex or drugs, my takeaway about how they interact with trauma is, if I choose or expect to be in a vulnerable, impressionable state, I want to set myself up with abundant opportunities to orient to connection, belonging, agency and absence of threat.
The definition of developmental trauma that Bessel Van der Kolk and others proposed (unsuccessfully) for the DSM focussed on people who'd had extreme, recurring traumatic experiences in early childhood. I see their work as valid and important, I am considering choosing a different term for the broader definition that I want to write about.
As I see it, what makes it developmental trauma is that it's connected to a developmental transition or phase, and thus to one's identity across some period of time. That can come from traumatic experiences that recur over a significant period of time in relation to one's development (weeks for infants, months for children, years for adults,) or that are connected to a developmental transition such as being born, starting to talk, birthing a baby, ... I don't know, maybe puberty? Menopause? Moving out? Losing a parent? ... or to developmental needs such as attachment, food, shelter, movement or self-expression.
Either way, what makes it developmental trauma and not just shock trauma is that the identity one held before the trauma is no longer available. One can't just go back to the way things were before being born, or developing the impulse to crawl or speak or play outside, or before one's own child was born, etc.
I call it ongoing trauma when one can't go back to a previous calm state, not because of a developmental shift but because the stressor that's causing trauma isn't going away. Climate anxiety is an interesting example that I won't dive into here, except to recommend Climate, a New Story by Charles Eisenstein.
I'm thinking of people who know they are targeted by violent organizations, including military, gangs and police. That's a lot of people. I've been reading about transformative justice, and discovering that it's been practiced and developed by people who don't have the option of calling the police because they live in American cities where city police departments serve the agenda of gentrification, and anyone who is disabled, poor, unhoused or not white is at risk of spontaneous police violence every day.
The closest thing I have to reckon with, as an able, educated, queer, white, not-very-politically-active single parent living on income assistance in this part of the world is the British Columbia Ministry for Children and Family Development (MCFD). I think I'm white enough, well enough and (currently) housed enough to be relatively safe from MCFD. It helps that Min is so clearly healthy and okay. If I were indigenous, unhoused or really struggling to parent, I would be too scared to type here that I feel scared of MCFD. They do take kids away from parents, and that is enough of a threat to cause ongoing trauma for many parents. (It also discourages parents who are struggling from reaching out for help, which is why Fragaria has no such system. For every kid who benefits from being removed from their family, there are several whose lives are made more stressful by the interventions and investigations, and hundreds of parents who could be better resourced if they weren't scared to ask for help. This is me claiming some agency by expressing an opinion and orienting to absence of threat by deciding that MCFD probably won't take Min away as long as we have what they consider acceptable housing.)
Other potential sources of ongoing trauma include systemic oppression, having a loves one who is missing or in danger for a long time, living with a severe illness, or feeling stuck in a job that feels dangerous and not empowering. In all these cases, one can't orient to an absence of threat, because the traumatizing threat is ongoing and real. That means it's all the more important to orient to agency, connection and belonging --- as people who live with oppression and violence and still take care of their nervous systems have known for centuries.
Spiritual trauma is a bit difficult to describe In English, and I'm not fluent in any languages that might handle it better. Drawing on Michael Daniels' definition of mystical experience as an experience of a relationship to a fundamental reality, I could define spiritual trauma as the result of experiences that damage one's relationship to a fundamental reality. It can be caused by a loss of faith, fear of going to hell, belief that a loved one is going to hell or by what I call harsh awakening, which I describe here. Loss of faith can mean losing faith is a religious or spiritual belief system that one relied on for reassurance or belonging, or losing faith in modern mainstream science and dogmatic atheism. The experience of not knowing what kind of universe one lives in, lacking a trusted reality to orient to, can be traumatic.
I went back and added horror to the list above. ........................................... defines horror as witnessing torture or extreme harm inflicted by humans, being tortured, or causing harm oneself. Such experiences force a person to realize that humanity in general, and oneself in particular, is more capable of inflicting harm than one thought one was. That affects one's identity.
As I mentioned above, flashbacks often bring back the mental state that went with the original traumatic experience, so sexual trauma flashbacks can come with sexual arousal, psychedelic trauma flashbacks often come with some aspect of the psychedelic state, life stage trauma flashbacks can pull a person back to an earlier phase of emotional development, ... and horror trauma flashbacks can put a person into a state in which they feel capable of, or even compelled to inflict, harm.
Now that is interesting. It means that the punitive justice that is the default response to violence in western civilization (with the possible exception of Norway) is probably doing more harm than good in the long term.
An impulse to reenact trauma is a really common symptom. Reenactments can be astonishingly detailed, accurate and dramatic. That means that anyone who has caused harm and is traumatized about their own experience of causing harm is at risk of reoffending, simply because of the trauma, even if the factors that compelled them to cause harm in the first place become irrelevant. That goes a long way toward explaining the epidemics of child abuse, sexual abuse and violence generally in societies that don't know how to resolve trauma.
I'm currently designing a justice system for Fragaria. I guess I need it to interrupt the many interlocking cycles of intergenerational trauma, particularly the kinds of trauma that are hard to treat. How to do that while holding people accountable for their decisions, repairing harm that is done and protecting people from recurring harm is the major unresolved question in Fragaria at the moment.
The best I can do in waking life is to orient to connection, belonging and agency, because safety is an illusion, a privilege and a luxury that not everyone can afford.
Please participate in my emergent ritual of graduation from trauma by sending me feedback! Is any of this information new to you? Do you notice any gaps where things are left unexplained? Typos? broken links? Things you outright disagree with? Things you'll consider doing differently after reading my thesis? Send me an email, I'll be excited to hear from you.