1. Yesterday I shared a wildly angry review of our film All The Rage in order to talk about how expectation is a form of resistance to what is - and that resistance creates suffering. This reaction is much more about this person’s sense of judgement than it is about our film. 
2. It’s very easy to react strongly when someone comes to you in a rage. However, through practice we can learn how to respond rather than react. I think this practice is central to healing from trauma. We all gave trauma, but also hide it from ourselves. Trauma is scary.
3. Traumas big and small can lead us to have a defensive posture in the world. If we expect danger we will prepare for it. Unfortunately, we are often unaware of the ways in which we feel emotionally unsafe. The first step is to become more aware of how and why we are defensive.
4. Often times we feel anxious and don’t know why. This is a sign of trauma response. I remember starting to become aware of this when I went to college. I’d wake up nervous and ascribe it to an upcoming exam or paper. I often felt like I could not keep up. I did not understand
5. I had no way to articulate what was going on then, but I learned how to get it in check, and I also avoided situations where I feared living up to expectations. I have a lot of suspicion of all kinds of systems. I figured out how to avoid them in order to stay “safe”
6. I might get wildly anxious about a job, so I got ones with less expectation. I also found ways to connect with a lot of amazing and creative people who also distrust them. I understand systems are necessary but can see that they often become corrupted in understandable ways
7. Back to how to address the real problem- anxiety and defensiveness. Most of our sense of who we are is shaped by our experience. Many of our reactions in the world feel so automatic that to change them feels like trying to change who we are. That is all ego. Our ego defends
8. This automatic response is largely patterns learned through experience. Again, Trauma can make us feel unsafe. The big problem is that the part of our brain that feels so automatic can’t differentiate between a physical and an emotional threat.
9. If it perceives a physical and emotional threat in the same way it will prepare the body for conflict by releasing stress hormones. These hormones can help us escape from a bear or a mugger, but not from an emotion that terrifies us. This response can start to feel normal
10. When our emotional needs are not met as young children we learn to suppress them. For example you might have gotten punished or shamed for crying, so you learned that being sad is dangerous. You might have had an emotionally unavailable parent, so have trouble with emotions.
11. If having these emotions feels unsafe our brain will try to protect us from them. Dr John Sarno understood this and realized that the repression of emotions can be the cause of back pain. He postulated that the pain is a distraction from uncomfortable emotions.
12. We can also see it as the result of a defensive fear response. Some people might see it as a message from our body to pay attention to these emotions. One problem is that they are often so hidden from us that we can’t figure it out.
13. Once Dr Sarno realized that stress related to our emotions was the likely cause of the pain he was seeing, he developed a program of awareness that helped people learn to accept their emotions & lessen their fear of the symptoms. He called it TMS - tension myoneural syndrome
14. He began to work with psychotherapists, have all patients attend lectures on the cause, prescribed journaling, and got patients back to movement as soon as possible. He took a mind body approach at a time when the mind was dismissed within medicine. This led to his dismissal
15. Despite the profound success of his program his colleagues refused to pay attention. After World War 2 there was a collective effort to run from the trauma of that time. The first randomized control trial took place in 1948, and the RCT became the gold standard of science.
16. In general RCT’s did not include data concerning the emotions. This bio-technical approach took hold and all discussion of emotions was siphoned off to psychology- discussing emotions in relation to illness was seen as unscientific. To this day Sarno is seen as unscientific.
17. Things have begun to shift. Trauma awareness is becoming part of the cultural and medical lexicon. However trauma is complicated. It’s important to find ways of making it possible to help people move through their trauma. Still, becoming aware can lead to more defensiveness
18. One tool for addressing this on a personal level is to work on a practice of recognizing when we feel angry and taking ourselves out of a situation in order to be with the feeling. Remember, anger is often there to protect us from an emotion. We think someone “made us angry”
19. Once we start to see this we can dial down our reaction by noticing the emotion and learning to respond. Two great tools for this practice are “The Presence Process” by Michael Brown and “It’s Not Always Depression” by @HilaryJHendel which gives us the change triangle
20. hilaryjacobshendel.com/post/2018/07/1… here’s one post from her that gets into how certain emotions seemingly protect us from ones that feel unsafe - learning how to address this makes us able to respond rather than react. - the film review above was a rage reaction;the film “made” him mad
21. The difficulty of delving into our past trauma often makes us more reactive at first. We might argue that others are “triggering” a trauma response and feel enraged. Unfortunately, the ego will still try to protect us by attacking the threat. This can lead to more conflict.
22. When we can learn to step aside and process that automatic response without making the other person responsible it becomes more possible to respond in ways that make room for acceptance rather than resistance
23. None of this is simple or easy. However, as we do this difficult work we might find that other things do become easier. Acceptance doesn’t mean that we don’t address problems, but instead learn to face them with less resistance. We can turn a crisis into a “situation”
24. Acceptance also means understanding that these things take time, & often a lot of support. 1 trauma response is to not feel safe asking for help. Another might be an insatiable need of sympathy or support. Everyone has their own path to healing - empathy for ourselves is key
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