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My friend and Alexander Technique instructor, Imogen Ragone, and I share an idea from her BodyIntelligence work and the Alexander Technique has helped me “turn around” one of my most stressful triggers – hyperacusis and synesthesia stemming from trauma. We also discussed other situations in which you can use “the turnaround” and how you can use it yourself.
Having lived with Complex PTSD my entire life and studied the biology of fear for several years, I’ve come up with a neuroscience-based recovery plan:
1. Recognize that I wa
s powerless during my traumatic experiences and the long-term effects of Developmental Trauma and its changes to the architecture of my brain have made my life unmanageable.
2. Understand that trauma is never the fault of the survivor but a toxic or threatening environment.
3. Acknowledge that everything I did to survive was necessary; if I’d been capable of making better choices I would have. Understand some of my actions may have harmed others and I can apologize, make amends, make reparations, as my recovery unfolds and those capabilities return.
4. Appreciate the power of trauma to dysregulate the nervous system and that neuroplasticity is my salvation; what was built can be seriously renovated.
5. Decide to focus my attention on repairing my nervous system, integrating my brain, and healing my attachment style. “Focused attention is your superpower.” – Dr. Dan Siegel
6. Make a searching and fearless inventory of the MASSIVE volume of good things stolen by trauma/abusers, and cultivate determination to reclaim whatever is reclaimable. Recognize that one secure relationship from childhood is the seed of my resilience.
7. Acknowledge Complex PTSD is a normal, natural, and brilliant response to an overwhelming experience or chronically toxic environment.
8. Recognize severe child maltreatment results in insecure, avoidant, or disorganized attachment styles and recognize these can be changed.
9. Use my understanding of the biology of fear to recover safety and connection, seek appropriate treatment, and educate my providers.
10. Discontinue encounters with providers and others who trigger or otherwise jank-up my nervous system; all interpersonal visits must be net neuropositive.
11. Accept that accountability will not come from the domination system that a) allowed the abuse; b) protects perpetrators; and c) wants me to shuddupalready. Just like my abusers.
12. Hold accountable whichever abusers are still alive in whatever ways bring me resolution.
13. Use my watercolors, words, and wits to find and develop materials that help inform providers, protect me from further abuse, and share with others.
14. Share my journey, struggles, and successes, encourage and empower others, and speak up against cruelty, contempt, and domination.
Having survived severe Developmental Trauma, lived with Complex PTSD my entire life, and studied the neurobiology of fear for about 6 years, I’ve developed a strong set of recovery tools. These are selected for their positive neurophysiological effect and support for a healthy nervous system led by safety and connection instead of driven by threat detection and protection.
Neuroaffective Relational Model (NARM) therapy: a modality designed specifically for recovery from Complex PTSD. Unlike previous therapists, my NARM practitioner actually helps me regulate. This is a resilience and strengths-based process, what a person with Developmental Trauma needs.
Craniosacral therapy helps my body release tension and better regulate.
Alexander Technique classes twice a week, plus daily practice helps me cultivate a sense of ease and safety. These simple-but-profound exercises are a mainstay of my recovery.
Laughter Yoga online gives me fun, safe, engaging social interaction that is beneficial to my whole body and ability to connect, feel safe, and have fun.
Therapeutic riding / co-regulation with horse 3 times a week helps build healthy routines, creates the incentive to move, helps me downregulate, builds strength, flexibility, and coordination.
Forest Walking, which helps regulate the nervous system. I often notice how trees keep growing no matter what disasters have befallen them.
HeartMath 3x daily coherence/HRV practice helps me build and cultivate neural pathways to “reduce and avoid stress while experiencing increased peace, satisfaction, and enjoyment.”
Authentic Movement helps me feel safely connected and present in my body while in motion.
Stellate Ganglion Block (SGB) gives my nervous system the opportunity to downregulate or recalculate environmental threat level.
Medical Marijuana helps alleviate symptoms and assist with processing trauma. Studies show “cannabis can reduce activity in the amygdala – a part of the brain associated with fear responses to threats…[and] cannabinoids could play a role in extinguishing traumatic memories.” Cannabis’s entheogenic properties can help process trauma.
Mindfulness, which, according to Dr. Dan Siegal at UCLA School of Medicine, helps integrate the brain.
Interpersonal Neurobiology, the knowledge of which helps me understand the biological imperative to connect at the heart level and learn how to achieve it. This “interdisciplinary approach invites all branches of science and other ways of knowing to come together and find the common principles from within their often disparate approaches to understanding human experience.”
Hand-held ultrasound shows soft tissue of the neck during SGB treatment.
I was initially doubtful because studies are largely on young vets with PTSD from war, rather than older people with Complex/Developmental Trauma. However, I had the pleasure of speaking with Dr. Eugene Lipov, who developed the procedure for PTSD. He told me that in his experience “hypervigilance is hypervigilance,” effectiveness depends on individual response, “how much trauma they’ve had and how long they’ve had it,” and with my complex and compounded trauma he felt I had about a 50% chance of success.
The good doctor was right! Each treatment gave my nervous system the opportunity to downregulate or recalculate my threat level. Aside from tinnitus and chronic muscle tension, all other symptoms were dampened. Access to my prefrontal cortex (PFC) increased, energy and spirits rose, and pretty much everything was easier. For about two weeks. This is a fraction of the usual 1-3 month relief.
At about 14 days “symptom creep” came on rapidly and my functionality went down in seemingly equal measure. During the first treatment gap of 35 days, my condition quickly deteriorated until the last two weeks I was near death and very near death.
Fortunately, tho I am a difficult/complex case, the SGB treatments still seem to “build on each other” as others describe. Gradually, my baseline anxiety level has gone down, as has the level of ambient pain. This is a great relief!
It occurred to me that ongoing traumatic events are a significant factor in my SGB effectiveness window. I would have a better response to SGB if I could focus only on healing my nervous system instead of dealing with continuing trauma. I can’t control most things, but I can avoid some triggering things.
After two particularly bad experiences with new providers, which heavily triggered me and caused me great dissociation, I determined it best to suspend all medical interactions except those with providers I can trust to not trigger/harm me. I canceled all others, including consults, tests, and screenings, even my dental check-up. Now, I can focus as exclusively on healing my nervous system as possible.
Soon we will complete SGB #6, which will be a left-sided procedure instead of the usual right. This due to new info I found at Dr. Sean Mulvaney’s site. He reports that a small number of patients, who respond well to the right side, will respond profoundly to the left. Fingers crossed!
Good sources of more info about SGB for PTSD:
My father–whose behavior made him a monster to me–was buried with honors at Arlington National Cemetery in September. I spent weeks readying. I bought dress slacks, pulled together an outfit, worked through my fears, and intensively practiced three lines of “Amazing Grace” to sing during the ceremony. Still, I was unprepared for a shocking moment that could have ruined the day.
I kept my composure well through the surprisingly touching flag folding ceremony and after. But then the guns went off numerous times, CRACK! CRACK! CRACK! The rifle reports were too much for my nervous system. Their intense sharp sounds triggered my hyperacusis and audio-somatic synesthesia–symptoms of a hypervigilant brainstem–which sent me into RED ALERT! and opened the flashback floodgates. I tried to use the coping skills I’ve practiced for three years, which help calm my nervous system, but my hyper-vigilant brainstem did not comply.
My body started to shake and I quickly recognized I was unable to down-regulate by myself. I knew I desperately needed to co-regulate, so I sought my brother, who stood physically distanced behind me. We both wore face coverings so I asked if I could hold on to him because I needed some co-regulation. Of course he agreed.
I tried to attune myself to the calm of my brother’s nervous system as I also pendulated “ground, space, ease,” as my Alexander Technique instructor had reminded me. I held tight to my brother’s calm steady arm as I desperately worked to regulate. My body continued to shake and shudder and images, feelings, thoughts from the past swirled inside me. I focused on feeling my brother standing there for me, supporting me while I went through something horrible.
It didn’t occur to me that the piper would play “Amazing Grace” during the gathering. By then my system had settled and I regained my composure. After that discombobulation, I didn’t feel up to singing aloud, so I sang along quietly. My therapist has said imagining has the same effect on the nervous system as the real thing, so I imagined I belted out the song.
An older cousin read the eulogy he wrote. It was kind and moving. He choked up at the beginning and we all choked up with him. When he got to the part about how my father was such a good role model, had high moral standards, and taught my cousin and his brothers to fix cars, electricity, and other things, I was only slightly disoriented. The man he spoke of wasn’t the man I had known my entire life. I reminded myself that my cousin could be exceedingly magnanimous and that perhaps my father really did do those things for the boys in his life. He wasn’t cruel and contemptuous 100% of the time, and not to everybody. I also reminded myself that my father was the kind of man who would disinherit two of his children on the basis of sex. I sang “Amazing Grace” to myself again to ground myself.
When it came time to place a rose on the grave, I held my necklace with the portrait of Granddaddy, and silently recited modified lines from Jim Henson’s movie, “Labyrinth”: “Through dangers untold and hardships unnumbered I fought to take back the child you have stolen. You have no power over me!” In my mind I added, “Now you are in a marble box, going in the vault, in the dirt. You are a few handfuls of ash that can never hurt me or anyone else again!”
More recently, I told my therapist about this and other experiences of reconnecting with my brothers, their partners, and my nieces, and nephews. “It’s like I have a family!” I exclaimed.
“There are so many ways to be family that are f***** up,” my therapist reminded me. She suggested maybe it’s not that I feel like I have a family, but that I feel love. She’s right. It doesn’t feel like family; it feels like love.
“Women described being misdiagnosed or given painkillers instead of addressing underlying issues. One woman lost her child traumatically. Another had to experiment and eventually diagnose herself because her doctor was no help,” the newspaper noted, regarding Black women in our community.
“Instead of addressing underlying issues” is the motto of mainstream medicine/psychology. If the medical profits industry wanted to address underlying issues, it would have to focus a hella more on Developmental Trauma/Adverse Childhood Experiences, the Number One Health Crisis in the World. Developmental Trauma has a massive and lifelong negative effect that destroys human lives and taints those in future generations. Yet, we all but ignore it, particularly in medicine/psychology.
Developmental Trauma is correlated to a shocking degree with: learning difficulties, problems with authorities, violence, criminality, homelessness, joblessness, substance abuse, incarceration, relationship issues, mental health problems, and the onset of chronic disease at midlife followed by an early death. Add epigenetic trauma atop of this and it’s a wonder anyone survives. A perfect storm of social disaster, this trajectory is nearly impossible to escape and often causes Complex PTSD in survivors.
UNLESS the right kind of help is available. Which is rarely an option in a system that does not even acknowledge the underlying issue, much less, have a clue how to appropriately respond. Most of us are doomed!
Mainstream medicine/psychology is about 20 YEARS behind neuroscience. “Mental health care” widely available to people suffering from Developmental Trauma/Complex PTSD is Antebellum. It focuses on “chemical imbalances in the brain” and “learning to make better choices” when the underlying issue is a nervous system dysregulated by unresolved trauma. This degrading “treatment” pathologizes and shames people for their normal, natural, desirable, and brilliant neurophysiological response to threat.
This is a travesty! Such a system harms and kills people every day. It also harms the providers, who want to help and think they’re helping but don’t understand why the patient/client is not responding as they’d hoped and expected. They’re actually not “treatment-resistant,” but not getting the right treatment.
As a survivor of Developmental Trauma and subsequent trauma starting before I could speak, I’ve had to educate myself and my providers to avoid further harm. Harm like I found at the #ChristianaCare mega-hospital complex. Their providers: Rx a black box med; denied me the pharmacogenetic test that would have revealed that class of medicine is bad for me; ignored my concerns about suicidal ideations from the black box Rx; secretly changed my treatment plan so I was *not* referred to the specially trained providers I needed; ignored my increased concerns about suicidal ideations from the black box Rx; sent me to their ED for “a psych evaluation” that was not a psych evaluation but a sales pitch for #RockfordCenter for Behavioral Health, a modern era Cuckoo’s Nest; shipped me off to the funny farm; refused to address my grievance and remedy the systemic problems that caused this; and now the hospital tells me I need to stop talking about what happened.
“When it comes to trauma the problem is with reality,” as Dr. Bessel van der Kolk noted. But mainstream medicine/psychology does to trauma survivors as did our abusers: pretend to be beneficent, build the victim’s trust, turn around and exploit them when they least expect and are most vulnerable, act like it’s the victim’s fault.
If this is the kind of obstacles we face, most of us adults with Developmental Trauma are doomed. Few will make it out alive. The rest will be convinced that they are defective. They’ll suffer long and hard before they die young.
But it doesn’t have to be this way. America could become a society that cares about those whose root problem is they were stuck in a dangerous or toxic situation as a child. Their early experiences wired them for fear, danger, grief, loss, pain, and suffering. They’re hurt, angry, and don’t know what drives it, and the antiquated medical/psychology system doesn’t have answers.
Fortunately, neuroplasticity is our salvation. We can learn how to reorient a PTSD-wracked nervous system. We can develop new neural pathways that foster our sense of safety and connection. The Norton Series on Interpersonal Neurobiology, 66 titles and growing, is particularly helpful.
Here’s to the day mainstream medicine/psychology can embrace the neurobiology that saves adults with Developmental Trauma from the typically cruel trajectory. Here’s also to the probable decades between, when We, The People, can learn this on our own and help ourselves and each other heal. No shaming or pathologizing necessary!
“When we understand the biology of fear we don’t’ have to be railroaded by it.” #TraumaAwareAmerica
#DevelpmentalTrauma
#AceStudy
#AdverseChildhodExperiences
#ComplexPTSD
#PTSD
#CPTSD
#Neurobiology
#TraumaRecovery
#StopPsychAbuse
#PsychologyAbuse
#PsychAbuseSurvivor
In this KOPN radio interview with Vic Day of “Women’s Issues, Women’s Voices,” my host asked me to explain how I became a Trauma Awareness Activist-Artist, or, as I say, “janked-up, ticked off, and doing something about it.”
“It was the only thing left for me to do after a lifetime of trauma and being harmed by the medical system I turned to for help with trauma.”
Part 2 The definition
