Reddit reviews Trauma-Sensitive Mindfulness: Practices for Safe and Transformative Healing
We found 21 Reddit comments about Trauma-Sensitive Mindfulness: Practices for Safe and Transformative Healing. Here are the top ones, ranked by their Reddit score.
Could you say a little bit more about what types of therapy you've been doing? How does your therapist recommend dealing with the disgust when it arises?
I've been doing working through some trauma in my practice and in therapy (Somatic experiencing, EMDR, and DBT). The DBT approach to stuff like this is interesting because it includes systematic efforts to antidote emotions by taking actions that are contrary to our immediate urges. You can check out the worksheet handout for this , which has opposite actions for disgust on page 5. So if you're experiencing disgust in situations where you know that it doesn't fit the facts of the situation and where acting on your disgust won't help you, they'd recommend doing the following:
> Opposite Actions for Disgust: Do the OPPOSITE of your disgusted action urges. For example:
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> 1. MOVE CLOSE. Eat, drink, stand near, or embrace what you found disgusting
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> 2. Be KIND to those you feel contempt for; step into the other person’s shoes.
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> All the Way Opposite Actions for Disgust:
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> 3. IMAGINE UNDERSTANDING and empathy for the person you feel disgust or contempt for. Try to see the situation from the other person’s point of view. Imagine really good reasons for how the other person is behaving or looking.
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> 4. TAKE IN what feels repulsive. Be sensual (inhaling, looking at, touching, listening, tasting).
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> 5. CHANGE YOUR POSTURE. Unclench hands with palms up and fingers relaxed (willing hands). Relax chest and stomach muscles. Unclench teeth. Relax facial muscles. Half-smile.
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> 6. CHANGE YOUR BODY CHEMISTRY. For example, do paced breathing by breathing in deeply and breathing out slowly.
I'd recommend starting gradually and on easier stuff so you're not biting off more than you can chew. As you apply it more systematically it will really build your self confidence and self-trust. It can also really help to start verbally disclosing more of what you're feeling to people that you trust.
I've got less experience with disgust than with shame, but I wouldn't be surprised if there's an associated felt sense that there's some group of people who'd judge you for the thing you're disgusted by, and whose opinion you're powerless to change. Sometimes getting over shame seems to involve getting OK with the idea that you're willing to push back 100% against that imagined group, give them the metaphorical finger, and metaphorically leave for a place where you'll be treated well. Disclosing your feelings in a safe place can help with this, although there can be some cognitive dissonance from people accepting things about you that you can't yet accept about yourself.
You could also try to find a therapist who does EMDR to identify historical memories that you're disgusted by and reprocess them to remove some of the emotional charge. The somatic experiencing approach would probably categorize disgust as a shutdown state like shame, and would probably say that when you notice disgust you should intentionally redirect attention to neutral/supportive stimuli like your feet on the floor, your back on a chair, your hands touching each other, etc. So try to relax, notice the scenery around you, reconnect with the people near you, joke around, and take your time getting back to the question of what to do about the disgust. Dip into it just a little and find a way to systematically relax and reorient before dipping back in.
I'd say that in general when you're approaching practice with a trauma history, path and stage descriptions are going to not be the best roadmap to be using. Trauma-Sensitive Mindfulness has a roadmap of increasing your "window of tolerance" where you're emotionally well-regulated. There's an interplay with meditation where better emotional regulation seems to make it easier to get to Equanimity, and where progress in insight (seeing sensations as just temporary sensations) itself promotes better emotional regulation. But forcing yourself to move too fast in either meditation or life can bring up an overwhelming amount of stuff, so sometimes you need to back off and give yourself time and space to process it more slowly. Metta's also good to work into your practice.
One final random thing -- can you find any comedy that's funny about either the things you find gross, or about how the process of disgust is itself funny? Sometimes exaggeration or absurdity or surprise can help us let go and find the humor in a situation. I've had some good results with this with social awkwardness, where stuff that I used to find cringe-inducing is now also pretty funny.
Good luck and we'd love to keep hearing how you're doing!
I've had an accumulation of doubts, and after having a steady daily meditation routine of 45 minutes, I'm not meditating hardly at all. I know that strong doubt is my problem, not so much doubt in the method of TMI or Culadasa, because I don't actually doubt either at all, but more worried that I'm not ready for all of this, that as a mother of small children I need to have different priorities :( Feeling a bit sad and lost, but I have actually taken some action to address some trauma that I know needs attention via therapy, and before doing TMI it didn't occur to me to address this as my life was functional and happy anyway, but now I know I have to address all of this sooner than later if I want to take my meditation path seriously... I'm planning to read from the dharma treasure recommended reading list and center on shorter meditation sessions, and especially do metta and walking meditation. And see how things go and how I feel I suppose...I feel sad about my practice, but I feel very good and happy about my life in general... Its a bit strange, but before having my children when I started to delve into Buddhism, I was sort of ready to jump head in to everything, but now I have very strong attachments to my children and their welfare, and I worry if I come to pieces as I walk my meditation path,if they will be affected...I did ask Culadasa about this via the patreon questions, but sadly the question didn't get answered as only those questions of who attended got answered (again couldn't attend that day as there was a change of time and I would have had to get a baby sitter). The path is going to have ups and down I suppose... I'm also reading a book called Trauma Sensitive Mindfulness as it addresses one of my doubts and worries.
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This is a powerful and important lesson. I personally can identify deeply with your experience. I am still recovering from meditative burn out related to trauma.
I do feel like the pragmatic community in general does not have a big enough discussion surrounding trauma. On many retreats, I was met with a quizzical look when I explained the feelings that I was having and told to just apply the method and things would work out.
Eventually, the method brought me to the same purgatory that you describe. I've gotta be honest and say that the purgatory sure felt like hell to me.
It wasn't until I hit a pretty dark place that I found Trauma Sensitive Mindfulness. After reading the experiences described in the book I reached out to David and he connected me with Willoughby Britton. Both the book and Willoughby helped me put my meditative experiences into a context that helped me get out of that hellish place.
A big lesson for me is that in order to reach a state of no self you have to have some respect and compassion for your sense of self to begin with. Often, the way trauma robs you of your feeling of inherent value is incompatible with the methods the pragmatic community prescribes for resolving these issues. Books like TMI and MCTB (which I love) often have this do x and y will happen approach to things but I personally remember feeling like a failure because I couldn't follow the most basic of these math-like instructions.
I'm going to piggy back on your post to say to anyone going through a similar experience that you are not alone. If the path gets so difficult that your day to day life becomes unbearable considering how trauma fits into your narrative might be important and necessary.
Also, note to the mods, I vote that you guys add some resources related to trauma to the r/streamentry beginners guide and reading list. I have been checked out of the sub since I have gone through all of this but taking a cursory look I don't see anything related to trauma in the guide. Please, ignore this request if I missed something.
Many thanks for what you have written here and much Metta.
/u/sunmusings, you might be interested in the book: Trauma-Sensitive Mindfulness: Practices for Safe and Transformative Healing
https://www.amazon.com/Trauma-Sensitive-Mindfulness-Practices-Transformative-Healing/dp/0393709787
Well, you would hyperventilate if your inhale were longer than your exhale. I don't think that's healthy for trauma survivors. For me, I definitely use breathwork / pranayam to help with anxiety and tension that are as a result of trauma. A simple breath is to inhale 5 counts, exhale 10 counts, repeating this. By making your exhale longer than your inhale, you activate your parasympathetic nervous system (rest and digest) and your vagus nerve, which is very calming for anxiety, stress, etc. Counter to this is a longer inhale and shorter exhale (hyperventilating), which stimulates your sympathetic nervous system (fight or flight), which would NOT be helpful for trauma survivors.
Because I have a tendency toward anxiety from my childhood abuse, pranayam and meditation have been life-changing in giving me the tools to both observe emotion when it arises, and allow my breath to carry the emotion through to its end (ie, until the emotion transforms and changes, as it inevitably does).
You may find the book Trauma-Sensitive Mindfulness to be good, as well as a book on yogic pranayam.
Hi, I hope this finds you well. I've struggled with anxiety for a very long time and it was not apparent how bad it was until my first retreat. This was about 5 years ago.
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Most of the time when I sit my breathing feels uncomfortable and tight. I used to end sits with way more anxiety because I was not addressing relaxation. You can really hurt yourself if you force it.
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Below are some things that have really helped me in the last year.
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I don't know anything about your past but you may want to look into the following:
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I'm sure if you look online you'll find free audio/pdf versions.
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https://www.dharmaocean.org/connect/free-audio-series/
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*** A lot of times "breath" meditation is not what we should be doing. Focusing on the breath can create a lot of problems with people with anxiety issues. Note! I did not say anxiety disorder. There are other ways of helping to calm your system down first. Don't be hard on yourself if you can't do "breathing" meditation. Learn to relax. It's absolutely possible. Little by little.
/u/TMIMeditation you might find this book helpful as a companion reference: https://www.amazon.ca/Trauma-Sensitive-Mindfulness-Practices-Safe-Healing/dp/0393709787
This kind of mind-induced somatosensory pain when meditating is often associated with trauma. I've worked with similar issues myself, though what you're describing sounds markedly more pronounced than what I've worked with.
If you know yourself to be a trauma survivor, then I would suggest finding a teacher that has some kind of background in trauma-sensitive mindfulness, and ideally some kind of professional mental health background.
One book (that I have not read myself), but gets mentioned a lot in this context is Trauma-Sensitive Mindfulness by David Treleavan.
Another one (that I've partially read) is The Body Keeps The Score by Bessel Van der Kolk. That last one is very informative but also difficult as many of the case studies that are described are pretty harrowing to listen to - just a warning.
I meet with a teacher twice per month, and much of what we do, besides meditation, and discussing practice, is essentially talk therapy. She also prescribes me a number of non-meditation exercises that are pretty standard in working with grief and trauma. I've found it very helpful and beneficial to my practice.
Incorporating some metta, or what Shinzen Young calls Nurture Positive would likely also be beneficial. If you can cultivate some practices that plain just make you feel good, that you can depend on as a resource, it can provide a sense of security that lets you navigate more painful sensations and associated memories/emotions/thoughts with a much needed felt sense of grounding.
I also have a blocked pingala channel, with a major line of tension all down the right side of the body, branches and blobs of tension into side channels, and kundalini is active in this area, which has led to some interesting times. My meditation practice is primarily focused on dissolving the blockages in that area. (EDIT: Here I recommended Your Breathing Body by Reggie Ray, who has recently been credibly accused of severely psychologically abusing his students. I have removed the link.) You might want to check out Trauma-Sensitive Mindfulness and possibly try a therapeutic modality that involves body awareness, like EMDR, Hakomi, or somatic experiencing. I have to run but will post more later.
Wonderful! This is 100% normal. When your mind gets quiet, all of this will come up naturally.
You've got it. Just let it come, let it be, let it go.
If it becomes too much, try easing off sitting meditation and weave in some walking or loving-kindness meditation. Mindful yoga would be good too.
Here is an interview my teacher that may give you insight into how meditation and therapy come together.
If you have a history of trauma, you might like this book.
Hey /u/Vlad_is_love, something to consider: There's been studies recently indicating that meditation can damage sleep and actually contribute to mental distress. Don't get me wrong, I've been a practitioner for 7 years and have practice / receive instruction from a monk who studied with Ajahn Chah along with Jack Kornfield in Thailand - but need to keep in mind that it isn't a cure-all.
I'd recommend reading - https://www.amazon.com/Trauma-Sensitive-Mindfulness-Practices-Transformative-Healing/dp/0393709787
> It directly addresses all these somatic symptoms which are really at the core of the schizoid condition.
No, it actually doesn't. But it can't hurt.
[Edit] Further thought correction: meditation can actually be problematic for people with trauma history. This book discusses the how and why & had a few good nuggets (tho not enough to be worth buying):
https://www.amazon.com/Trauma-Sensitive-Mindfulness-Practices-Transformative-Healing/dp/0393709787/
Are you aware of any trauma in your life? It’s possible meditation is bringing up some repressed emotions. Meditation can be practiced safely if that’s the case, but it’s good to be aware of the potential pitfalls. Trauma-Sensitive Mindfulness is a good book for this.
Interesting.
The F&F response definitely causes an increase in arousal, which is associated with a decrease in motor latency. People and animals that are in a high state of arousal do tend to have an excess of spontaneous movement. They can seem fidgety and twitchy.
Awareness of body sensations during the F&F response definitely tags memories, making them more vivid and hopefully helping the organism not make the same mistake again in the future.
Shivering itself though would not likely give on an evolutionary advantage *during* the stressful response. Combat veterans will tell you there's a certain ideal level of arousal that allows you to think quickly and act quickly. It's possible to go off the deep end, to be hyper-aroused to the point where you can't. At the extreme, you freeze (which does have an evolutionary advantage under some circumstances).
I'm currently reading a book on recovery from trauma (Treleaven, Trauma-Sensitive Mindfulness) that quotes literature suggesting that shivering is how an animal *discharges* the F&F response, that shivering is seen in the recovery period. Which may well have an evolutionary advantage, raising the question of how humans do it.
We do shiver, we also have verbal behaviors and emotional behaviors (such as weeping). Humans often suppress the discharge phase. We keep a stiff upper lip, keep on going, don't let anybody know what just happened. Theory is, that makes it more difficult to deal with the trauma later on. Hence the idea that trauma therapists might should get to the scene right away.
As for what to do after the fact, that's less clear. We know that reliving the trauma makes things worse (even though some people do precisely that, over and over). But we also know that dissociating from trauma -- pretending that it didn't happen, just not thinking about it -- doesn't work either.
Humans have a tendency to want to think it through (which sometimes -- not always -- involves talking about it), with the challenge being, to be able to think about it without re-traumatizing yourself.
They're actually right, though probably not for the reasons they think.
>mindfulness meditation―practiced without an awareness of trauma―can exacerbate symptoms of traumatic stress. Instructed to pay close, sustained attention to their inner world, survivors can experience flashbacks, dissociation, and even retraumatization.
The research into potential unintended effects of mindfulness meditation is growing.
Yes I have experienced this. I feel like stopping and listening to my thoughts/feelings can be a slippery slope to having a flashback. As a trauma survivor, it’s as if a movie is continuously playing scenes in the background of my mind related in some way to my past trauma. It’s as though I cannot or don’t have the will/way to stop playing the scene(s). Almost like a tv in another room, I can hear and see it, but mostly avoid going all the way into that room. When a flashback happens for me, I’m “in the tv room” and it consumes my thoughts completely. Along with these intrusive memories, I feel floods of intense emotions related to the memories followed by body sensations starting with shivering then excessive sweating, more shivering, and I feel like everything is wrong and I need to do something but there’s no way to decide what to do since the trauma happened in the past and is not currently occurring. That run-on sentence is a great example of how my mind starts just going haywire. I have conversations, fights and arguments with my violators, I replay the trauma trying to figure it out or remember more, and I start twisting situations in my current life to be worse than they are and find signs that I’m perpetually doomed. I let my thoughts totally victimize me, shame me, and give me the feeling like I’m worthless in the same way my violators did at the times of the trauma.
I can ignore “the tv” well and avoid being consumed by it by going through daily life distracting myself as much as possible. This manifests in over-working at work and at home. I read The Tao of Fully Feeling by Pete walker and he talks about how we become Humans Doing rather than Human beings when we try desperately to avoid our traumatic memories. With all of this said, meditation practice puts you in the position to fully focus on yourself, your thoughts, and feelings mentally and physically. Confronting this is very uncomfortable for someone with trauma because you cannot avoid the reality of how you feel and what the contents of your mind and personal experiences are during meditation. Or at least it seems this way. I haven’t read it yet, but there’s a book that promises to provide alternative way(s) to meditate. It’s called Trauma Sensitive Mindfulness https://www.amazon.com/Trauma-Sensitive-Mindfulness-Practices-Transformative-Healing/dp/0393709787/ref=asc_df_0393709787/?tag=hyprod-20&linkCode=df0&hvadid=312034012759&hvpos=1o1&hvnetw=g&hvrand=467801134514274600&hvpone=&hvptwo=&hvqmt=&hvdev=m&hvdvcmdl=&hvlocint=&hvlocphy=9007820&hvtargid=pla-426954383014&psc=1
The Body Keeps The Score is a fantastic book. Also, check out Trauma-Sensitive Mindfulness.
I ended up getting back into meditation when the pain was bad and I had a useless doctor. A lot of standard meditation advice doesn't work for me (btw there ARE dangers, especially with trauma), so I had to throw out a lot of it and sorta flail about until I found what worked for me. There' a book that I suspect might overlap a lot with what I worked out, but I haven't got around to reading it yet: https://www.amazon.ca/Trauma-Sensitive-Mindfulness-Practices-Safe-Healing/product-reviews/0393709787/ref=dpx_acr_txt?showViewpoints=1
My own approach was... ugh words are hard... I often thought of it as "balancing on a knife edge in a hurricane". it was partially.. um.. the one where you don't try and control your attention, you just try and be aware of where it is (which would quite easily settle on the pain, because pain). also part insight meditation. and it was like the pain was behind a giant dam, and I was letting just a tiny trickle through and figuring out how to process that and sorta.. surf/float on top of it instead of being sucked in.
What really helped was getting a better doctor and finally finding medication that worked, that got the pain down to a level where I could process it faster than it came in, and start draining that massive backlog. a couple of years of that and I actually got off the pain meds in the end :) :) although I do still have to be careful and I'm still not well enough to work.
Oh, and there were also times I focused more on teaching my muscles to relax, since their tension seemed to be causing the pain, and I had to retrain them to not do that.. but my laundry alarm went off minutes ago, I should go.
edit: oh, as a bonus my pain management seems to work on emotional pain too! yay!
as for the muscles... well, pain would make them tense and tension would cause pain. aren't feedback loops fun? :P I didn't start training them out of it until I found out I had a bladder problem ruining my quality of sleep (omg sleep is important) and had to retrain muscles to cure that. then I just sorta... applied what worked on them to the rest of my body a bit at a time. when one finally started to relax it'd go through a twitchy phase that felt kinda creepy... but if I could get through that, then it was a much happier muscle and if I could avoid pissing it off for a while it'd be much less likely to join in the spasms. The hardest have been the neck and jaw muscles; I'm still working on those even now, with the help of a physiotherapist (finally found one that's not a quack, yay). they are fucking stubborn, and when I do relax them they'll tense back up again, faster if I'm trying to focus at all. trying to think while relaxing them is like trying to walk in two different directions at once. :/ but hey, not being in constant pain is still pretty awesome. :)
Sorry about that:
https://www.amazon.com/Trauma-Sensitive-Mindfulness-Practices-Transformative-Healing/dp/0393709787
Frankly, I'd want to have an in depth conversation with your doctors before accepting that what they say is true. I have trouble believing they actually know much about meditation. While certain types of meditation can be destabilizing (though ultimately rewarding), simple mindfulness of the breath, a lovingkindness (metta) practice is far less likely to do so.
It's not surprising that being mindful brings up those feelings. The next step is to simply observe the feelings in your body without reacting to them. The feelings themselves can't hurt you, even though it feels like they can. Speaking from experience, eventually you will come to see them as simply empty vibrations with no significance beyond what they are in the body.
This book is very helpful for learning how to work with trauma in a gentle way that won't retraumatize: https://www.amazon.com/Trauma-Sensitive-Mindfulness-Practices-Transformative-Healing/dp/0393709787
While I'm here, maybe you will find something of your experience in this: https://www.dharmaoverground.org/dharma-wiki/-/wiki/Main/MCTB+The+Progress+of+Insight. I know it helped me frame my bad trip as not simply an aberration, but as something that thousands of people have gone through before as the Dukkha Ñanas when meditating (albeit much more forcefully since I was tripping).
Hey there,
Have you been diagnosed as having experienced trauma? Or are you currently experiencing traumatic stress?
From what I've read so far that may be the case. If that's so then I'd really recommend approaching mindfulness / Buddhism (I assume you learned impermanence there) with resources/teachers that are trauma-informed. Mindfulness can aggravate traumatic stress and in some cases cause retraumatization. You can still benefit from it, but only if you do it through trauma informed resources/teachers. I'd recommend having a look at Trauma Sensitive Mindfulness by David Treleaven: https://www.amazon.com/Trauma-Sensitive-Mindfulness-Practices-Transformative-Healing