. . Our minds were hard-wired in a different way due to childhood trauma.
Abused kids will never know what normal feels like, life always had trauma in it.
A normal nervous system we also will never know. We will carry more anxiety, fear, and paranoia than normal people.
Underlying all of this, below consciousness, my mind automatically scours every situation for danger, then focuses on the danger intently, almost exclusively.
Living with this subconscious threat brings many challenges to living a functional life.
Regular feelings and concerns disappear when a threat enters our consciousness.
Realizing and Accepting our plight is the first challenge.
Learning to navigate our inner world is key to carving out a livable existence.
Discounting the danger my mind searches out is possible but stopping it from searching is a losing battle.
I was never aware this part of my mind even existed, from my earliest memories I always felt like this.
For me, this is the core, the foundation of my childhood trauma manifested around intense fear.
My mind thinks it is still in an emotional war deep in its basement.
Each day brings another battle it has identified.
My mind is not the eternal optimist, he feels wounded, vulnerable, and unworthy at his core.
I can not disown his wayward ideas, trade this mind for a healthy one, the only escape is healing. . .
. . Avoidance is a major symptom of PTSD. We all avoid at different levels.
It happens because our defense mechanism (fight or flight mechanism) explodes when confronted by our triggers.
It feels like the scariest emotion we can experience, rats crawling all over us, being transported back to the battlefield, being trapped in a confined space, or maybe forced to give a speech in front of 100 people.
Normal people will never understand the level of distress, the level of fear we feel as real and present.
Anytime we approach one of these triggers, our suffering begins.
We assess the danger, try to make a plan, then build our resilience before the event.
It feels like we are facing annihilation, the destruction of the ego.
For me, public speaking is way out of proportion, no physical danger exists, however, the fear that it could bring shame and something worse than death comes alive.
My dad was extremely critical throughout childhood, so it has to be connected I have decided.
Logically, I know these emotions can not be true, that is the rational part of my brain. Other parts fear for my existence.
Still, I somehow ran a mindfulness group for five years and coached youth baseball.
Desire has overcome my fear in certain areas, maybe.
I do not understand some of complex PTSD symptoms and why I behave like I do.
I have carved out a space where I can handle most of my triggers. The rest are avoided like the plague.
My healing journey has allowed me to participate in much of life again.
Much better than my low point, nervous system turned upside down without the strength or ability to leave my house for six months . .
From “The Mind and the Brain: Neuroplasticity and the Power of Mental Force”
“As for the mind side, although the cardinal symptom of obsessive-compulsive disorder is the persistent, exhausting intrusion of an unwanted thought and an unwanted urge to act on that thought, the disease is also marked by something else: what is known as an ego-dystonic character.
When someone with the disease experiences a typical OCD thought, some part of his mind knows quite clearly that his hands are not really dirty, for instance, or that the door is not really unlocked (especially since he has gone back and checked it four times already).
Some part of his mind (even if, in serious cases, it is only a small part) is standing outside and apart from the OCD symptoms, observing and reflecting insightfully on their sheer bizarreness.
The disease’s intrinsic pathology is, in effect, replicating an aspect of meditation, affording the patient an impartial, detached perspective on his own thoughts.
As far as I knew, the impartial spectator in the mind of an OCD patient—overwhelmed by the biochemical imbalances in the brain that the disease causes—remained only that, a mere spectator and not an actor, noting the symptoms that were laying siege to the patient’s mind but powerless to intercede.
The insistent thoughts and images of OCD, after all, are experienced passively: the patient’s volition plays no role in their appearance.
But perhaps, I thought, the impartial spectator needn’t remain a bystander.
Perhaps it would be possible to use mindfulness training to empower the impartial spectator to become more than merely an effete observer.
Maybe, just maybe, patients could learn a practical, self-directed approach to treatment that would give them the power to strengthen and utilize the healthy parts of their brain in order to resist their compulsions and quiet the anxieties and fears caused by their obsessions.” . .
For half a century, Winton largely kept quiet about the work he’d done and the lives he’d saved during the early days of the war. Not even his longtime wife, Grete Gjelstrup, whom he’d married in 1948 and had three children with, knew anything about it.
It wasn’t until 1988, when Gjelstrup stumbled across an old scrapbook stuffed with letters, pictures and travel documents, that her husband’s efforts came to light again.
Despite Winton’s initial reluctance to discuss his rescue operation, Gjelstrup, with his consent, turned the scrapbook over to a Holocaust historian.
Soon others came to know Winton’s story. A newspaper article was written about him, followed by a BBC special.
Winton was praised around the globe, and letters of appreciation came in from major heads of state. Hailed as Britain’s Oskar Schindler, the German businessman who saved some 1,200 Jews during the Holocaust, Winton received an American Congressional resolution as well as honorary citizenship of Prague, the Czech Republic’s highest honor.
Streets were named after him, and statues were erected in his honor. In 2003, Queen Elizabeth II knighted him and in 2010 he received a Hero of the Holocaust medal.
In addition, several films were made about Winton and his work to save the kids who came to be known as Winton’s Children.
While a reluctant recipient of his global celebrity, Winton did welcome the chance to meet with many of those he had saved.
Several different reunions were organized, most notably on September 1, 2009, when a special train marking the rescues left Prague for London carrying a number of the original evacuees. As he had seven decades before, the 100-year-old Winton greeted the travelers as they came into London.
Over the course of many interviews, Winton was asked why he did what he did. His answers were always framed by his typically humble manner.
“One saw the problem there, that a lot of these children were in danger, and you had to get them to what was called a safe haven, and there was no organization to do that,” he told The New York Times in 2001.”Why did I do it?
Why do people do different things. Some people revel in taking risks, and some go through life taking no risks at all.”
. . From “The Mind and the Brain: Neuroplasticity and the Power of Mental Force”
Adam Smith, one of the leading philosophers of the eighteenth-century Scottish Enlightenment, developed the idea of “the impartial and well-informed spectator.”
This is “the man within,” Smith wrote in 1759 in The Theory of Moral Sentiments, an observing power we all have access to, which allows us to observe our internal feelings as if from without.
This distancing allows us to witness our actions, thoughts, and emotions not as an involved participant but as a disinterested observer.
In Smith’s words:
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When I endeavor to examine my own conduct…I divide myself as it were into two persons; and that I, the examiner and judge, represent a different character from the other I, the person whose conduct is examined into and judged of.
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The first is the spectator…. The second is the agent, the person whom I properly call myself, and of whose conduct, under the character of a spectator, I was endeavoring to form some opinion.
It was in this way, Smith concluded, that “we suppose ourselves the spectators of our own behaviour.” . .
. . From “The Mind and the Brain: Neuroplasticity and the Power of Mental Force”
“The most noteworthy result of mindfulness, which requires directed willful effort, is the ability it affords those practicing it to observe their sensations and thoughts with the calm clarity of an external witness:
through mindful awareness, you can stand outside your own mind as if you are watching what is happening to another rather than experiencing it yourself.
In Buddhist philosophy, the ability to sustain Bare Attention over time is the heart of meditation.
The meditator views his thoughts, feelings, and expectations much as a scientist views experimental data—that is, as natural phenomena to be noted, investigated, reflected on, and learned from. Viewing one’s own inner experience as data allows the meditator to become, in essence, his own experimental subject.
(This kind of directed mental activity, as it happens, was critical to the psychological and philosophical work of William James, though as far as we know he had no more than a passing acquaintance with Buddhist meditation.)” . .
Trauma may have happened in the past, but until it is integrated, the trauma tends to exist in an ever-happening present.
Trauma obliterates the past and the future and leaves you in a state where it feels like the trauma is always currently happening or you are always trying to protect yourself from it happening again.
Healing gives you back the full range of time, but you have to do the work first of clearing the trails of the past so that you might find the openings to the paths of the future again.
What helps you tell the different aspects of your story in the Identification phase?
What gets in the way?
One thing that trauma survivors struggle with is finding words, or telling their story and worrying that it’s not some perfect form of the truth.
Sometimes it can be hard to put into words what it is you are trying to describe—the words can seem too small for the emotions that you are describing.
The words true and truth can sometimes feel too big.
I like to remind myself and my clients that when I use the word truth in terms of healing from trauma, I am talking about truth with a little t, not a capital T.
When you are trying to tell your story, you are not on a witness stand—even if it can sometimes feel like it.
You are not trying to tell everyone’s truth, or some version of an objective truth, a truth that everyone would agree on.
You are trying to say what is true for you, in this moment as you tell it.
I have found that the most important work of the Identification phase can be saying one true thing at a time.
One true thing to get you started. One true thing as the cairn.
It can sound small, but it isn’t.
It can sound easy, but it isn’t—saying one true thing can be really hard. . .
“Even more striking is the loss of language during and after trauma.
During trauma, and even recalling trauma, there is reduced blood flow to the parts of the brain that process language, which hinders your ability to use language to store or retrieve memory.
The fact that trauma interferes with our language capacity is important to understand because it will help you have compassion for yourself as you try to find words and language for your experiences of trauma.
When you experienced your trauma, the parts of your brain that process language were essentially offline.
The brain, during trauma, tries to be efficient and sends its blood flow to the parts of the brain that are most needed in a crisis.
So your experience isn’t remembered in words, and that’s why it can be hard to remember the story in words.
This is why it can be so hard to find words to describe what you experienced—and why you spend so much time in the Identification phase working to bring language to your memory and trying to tell your story from different vantage points of understanding.” . .
PTSD - A Way Out.com 