Traumatic Stress Response

Few people in our culture seem to understand how a traumatic psychological experience can effect people.  Because I work on the healing side of things, I’m more familiar with the after effects than in the heat of the moment.  However, I think common symptoms are useful to know.  The following list of symptoms of experiencing traumatic psychological stress is adapted from the CDC’s website:

Physical symptoms

People experiencing any of the following symptoms should seek IMMEDIATE medical attention:

• Chest pain, Difficulty breathing, Severe pain, or Symptoms of shock (shallow breathing, rapid or weak pulse, nausea, shivering, pale and moist skin, mental confusion, and dilated pupils)

People may also experience the following physical symptoms. If these symptoms occur over time or become severe, they should seek medical attention. Additional physical symptoms include:

• Fatigue, Nausea/vomiting, Dizziness, Profuse sweating, Thirst, Headaches, Visual difficulties, Clenching of jaw, Nonspecific aches and pains

Cognitive symptoms

If these symptoms occur on the scene people may not be able to stay clearly focused to maintain their own safety or to rescue injured victims. People may experience momentary cognitive symptoms; however, if symptoms are chronic or interfere with daily activities, workers should seek medical attention. These symptoms include:

• Confusion, Disorientation, Heightened or lowered alertness, Poor concentration, Poor problem solving, Difficulty identifying familiar objects or people, Memory problems, Nightmares

Emotional symptoms

Strong emotions are ordinary reactions to a traumatic or extraordinary situation. People should seek mental health support from a disaster mental health professional if symptoms or distress continue for several weeks or if they interfere with daily activities. Emotional symptoms include:

• Anxiety, Guilt, Denial, Grief, Fear, Irritability, Loss of emotional control, Depression, Sense of failure, Feeling overwhelmed, Blaming others or self, Severe panic (rare)

Behavioral symptoms

As a result of a traumatic incident, people may notice the following behavioral changes in themselves or coworkers:

• Intense anger, Withdrawal, Emotional outbursts, Temporary loss or increase of appetite, Excessive alcohol consumption, Inability to rest, pacing, Change in sexual functioning

The thing that is so noteworthy about this list is that it is almost a complete laundry list of mental illness symptoms.  In my time as a healer, I have seen people blame themselves for these kinds of symptoms far more often then they recognize that they originate from traumatic psychological stress.  This is one of the first patterns I typically have to unwind before the issues can be fully resolved.

If more people recognized that these symptoms were caused by psychological factors, more people would seek help more often, and earlier.  Much suffering could be avoided.  The next time you are having difficulty with mental, emotional, or physical functioning, I hope you will consider asking if there could be previous or current traumatic stress behind it.

Poem: Worshipping Mara

This is a story mostly untold

about a man that was more than bold

long tempted by many a demon

he rejected them by being one

 

with himself and with each one of his emotions

He made peace with suffering and his notions

that he had to be anything that he was not

he let go of everything that he felt he ought

 

to do or to be and simply was

long leaving behind every cause

until he was struck by a very peculiar insight

demons were part of creation too and had a right

 

to be loved and to be cherished

but all who would had long perished

“So who is it that will love the demons?” he asked

there was no one remaining to whom this was tasked.

 

So Buddha journeyed from far his home

and travelled across the ocean’s foam

to where he found Mara’s lair

and saluted her in prayer

 

“Please let me worship you and give you the love that you deserve”

“Who are you and what makes you think that you can the Mara serve?”

“I am a mortal man to give love a voice.”

“How can I be sure that this is your will’s choice?”

 

“I submit to love greater than myself, nothing more and nothing less.”

“Very well, I will accept you into my heart by what you do confess.”

That was the beginning of their marriage strange

during which so many tears they did exchange
For Buddha knew that his desire was neither good nor bad

Mara was doing the only job that she ever had had

So he worshiped her with his body and soul

and she, over time, slowly became more whole

 

She remembered that she gave both pleasure and suffering

and from her heart felt her love for the very first time spring

She came to accept the job that she had been given

and for her past, she came to feel fully forgiven

 

And so it was that she learned to give desire with compassion

and from his love, a brighter world she began to fashion

Sometimes we are Buddha, and sometimes we are Mara

Regardless we are all made of desire’s binding straw

 

So when suffering is brought to you by desire

do worship her with your all of your tears of hot fire

And when Mara brings you happiness

to her all your tears of joy confess

 

We can all do as Buddha did and accept our wants

and in doing so release the suffering that us haunts

And in doing so we tame desire to work for us

and the darkness in the universe to us adjusts

(c) Karl Ernst Foelsche 5/2/15

About Emotional Release

I enjoy getting feedback and questions from all of you out there.  Thanks for following along.  In the spirit of encouraging that, I’m going to reply in more depth to a comment from lizziecarver:

“I agree with a great deal of what you say.  I have just one comment/question – the word “purge” has quite violent connotations for me and echoes of punishment, too. If we are already punishing ourselves with unhelpful feelings due to negative beliefs about ourselves and the world, I feel it is very important not to continue in that underlying pattern. I wonder how it would feel to use another word, for example “release”, instead?”

I replied: Pure, release, cry it out, scream it out, go into flashback… these are all possibilities. Here’s the dictionary definition (thank you, m-w.com):

1 a : to clear of guilt
b : to free from moral or ceremonial defilement
2 a : to cause evacuation from (as the bowels)
b (1) : to make free of something unwanted (2) : to free (as a boiler) of sediment or relieve (as a steam pipe) of trapped air by bleeding
c (1) : to rid (as a nation or party) by a purge (2) : to get rid of

Purge can have violent connotations (probably coming from Soviet Russia in the 30’s). However, it doesn’t seem to be a dominant meaning. It does seem to have a dominant “get rid of emotion” meaning, which I actually didn’t realize consciously until I looked it up. I used the word in that spirit.

The key is to get rid of the feelings that are limiting you in whatever ways feel appropriate and safe for you.  The method matters less than the results.  So here are some questions that you consider to see whether you are getting the results you deserve or not:

1. When you are done releasing, do you feel better?  This is less a question of absolutes, and more a matter of whether or not you can feel the difference.

2. When you are done releasing, does your mind focus shift towards productive / useful things?  If you find yourself focusing on painful things, then most likely there is more emotional garbage that you will benefit from throwing out.

3. Do you feel positive about basic self-care?  Feeling good about doing things like eating, paying bills, going to work, taking care of children, and so forth makes a big difference.

4. Are you performing the self-care that you would want a loved one to do and feel positive about?  If not, there is likely some significant work to be done in getting some blocks out of your way.  Taking basic self-care of yourself is fundamental to maintaining your mental health.  When you feel positive about basic self-care, it is a whole lot easier to maintain healthy habits and behaviors.

For people who have significant trauma (like complex PTSD, for example), step 1 is absolutely critical in building a foundation for continuing your recovery.  Getting a release, feeling better, and noticing the results is a huge milestone for some people.  I was unable to cry with any regularity for over a decade.  This is a miserable place to be.  I didn’t even recognize it as how much of a problem it was until long after I started crying regularly again.

Some people’s emotional release is more dramatic than others.  For example, I’ve been screaming and crying into a pillow for many years now.  With complex PTSD, releases can be more intense than for other people, because there tends to be a large backlog of emotional issues to be resolved.

For other people, emotional release can be more slow and steady.  One of my fellow NLPers, a good friend named Marci, describes one of the ways she releases as “oozing”.  She experiences body signals slowly exiting her body with some frequency.  While I sometimes get this kind of release, it tends to be rarer.

An ex of mine would release through her legs on a regular basis.  Her legs would shake and get painful for a bit, and then she would feel better.  The key was that it worked for her.

Sometimes with intense emotional releases, people can go into full body shakes.  I’ve done this many times in the past.  This is worth keeping in mind.  The first time people have an experience like this, it can be very unnerving.  Another female friend of mine (an incest survivor) went into a flashback while she was having sex that resulted in full body shaking and rocking.  It spooked her boyfriend, who had never seen anything like that before.

It is far easier on people when they understand that emotional release can get intense and look scary at times.  However, not releasing emotions is far worse.  When you integrate regular emotional release into your life, you are far more likely to able to feel the way you want to and do the things that you want to do.

Repressed Handedness: An Underdiagnosed Problem

I’ve worked with several clients who have had issues with forced handedness changes in the past.  It’s a problem that leaves lasting scars.  According to the Consulting and Information Center for left-handers and Converted Left-handers, the primary symptoms are:

• memory disorders (especially in the recall of learned material)
• disturbances in concentration (being easily tired)
• legasthenic problems or dyslexia (i.e. problems in reading and writing)
• spatial disorientation (uncertainty concerning the left and right)
• disorders in fine motor skills that manifest themselves in handwriting
• disturbances in speech (ranging from stammering through stuttering)

These primary consequences can then transform into various differing secondary consequences:

• inferiority complexes
• insecurity
• introversion
• overcompensation through heightened performance
• contrariness; an oppositional and provocational manner; (e.g. the class clown in school; and the persistent, compulsive wise-cracker in adulthood)
• various distinctive disorders in behavior
• bedwetting and nail-biting
• emotional problems lasting into adulthood with neurotic and/or psycho-somatic symptomology
• disorders in the personality profile

(All of the above copied verbatim)

This is a hell of a list of symptoms.  I wish they were better known and people were more sensitive to the challenges that forced handedness changes cause.  People are better off using the hand that is most comfortable for them to use.

My girlfriend has a daughter (9 months old) that is most likely left handed.  People are already telling her to use her right hand.  In posting this here, I hope that I will wake a few people up to just how toxic this kind of behavior is.

Early in my recovery (in 2006), I had an inner child come out and confess to a good friend of mine that I had been punished extensively by my father for using my left hand as a very young child.  It was traumatic enough that I lost time.  My friend was similarly traumatized by the confession, and could not remember much about what I told her.  I only found out in passing when she mentioned it to me in passing later on.

I then did some research, and found the site above.  It was noteworthy that I had every single symptom except for bedwetting and nail-biting.  I was floored when I saw this list.  “Holy shit is that me!” I thought to myself.  It explained so much of my struggles over the years.  It explained why I felt like I had to try harder than everyone else around me to get the same amount of work done.

Even before I started my recovery, I had noticed that my left side came out strongly when I did Aikido.  Additionally, I had a music therapist girlfriend tell me that I led with my left foot when I walked.  I’ve been told I eat really well with my left hand.

I later learned my handedness swap was caused by extreme physical and emotional abuse by my father.  I’ve been burned, scalded, beaten, and raped for being left handed.  Of course, that was most likely what happened to him as well.  He was born in Germany in 1940, and seems to remember very little of his childhood.

My father has the musical talent and creativity that is associated with left handers, so it seems extremely probable to me that the reason that he did what he did to me was that it happened to him first.  I also doubt he knows it consciously.  The real giveaway though was how he would fly into an extreme rage whenever I confused right and left.  I can guess only too well about he must have been punished for that.

I dabble in retraining myself towards my left hand.  I switch sides shaving, for example.  It’s challenging turf though.  Given the extreme trauma that was heaped on me to force my handedness change through life threatening measures, it’s not comfortable for me to use my left hand for most things.

Our children and our society as a whole deserve better than this kind of legacy.  People deserve to feel good about using their bodies in the way they are meant to be used.  I hope that some of you out there will pass this information along to people who will benefit from it.

The Recovery Onion Peeled: A personal example

I thought I would add a personal example from my own experience to illustrate the challenges of peeling the onion of psychological trauma.  I’m going to use the frame of what I call my “mommy issues”, because many people have significant challenges with maintaining healthy romantic attachments.

My mother was an alcoholic, and a sociopath.  She abused me emotionally, physically, and sexually.  This resulted in me having more than my share of issues around my connections with women.

My mother was a smart woman, as many sociopaths are.  She read a lot, and taught high school English.  She wrote poetry and had a literary bent to her.  She was a fairly serious intellectual, and avowed feminist.  It was only later that I discovered that her feminism was just a smokescreen for her emotional sadism.

Before my recovery really got going, I remembered that from the age of six, my mother treated me better than my father did.  While she was angry and emotionally abusive, she was less so than my father.  My father was impossibly emotionally distant and directed his verbal rage at me freely.  This had profound and lasting effects on me.  I trusted women more than men as a result.

This meant that I sought women out for companionship and friendship.  I had severe difficulties with forming any kind of serious relationships with men.  I tended to see them as activity partners rather than friends.

In college, I found my first girlfriend my junior year, and stayed with her almost 11 years.  Our relationship was troubled from the beginning, because we were both emotionally troubled.  We both struggled with our mental health challenges, and neither one of us had a conscious understanding of where our issues were coming from.  The depression was crushing at times.

From that relationship until last year, the mental health challenges of my partners were something that felt personal to me.  While intellectually, I got to the point where I understood that my partner’s problems were not about me, it still didn’t feel that way.  Whenever they would withdraw or get angry, it felt very personal.  Even though most of the time it had nothing to do with me, I felt responsible their behavior and what they were feeling.

This is how my mother trained me.  She even told me that everything I did was a reflection of her.  Even before I understood that her sociopathic viewpoint, I knew that my sole purpose in life was to make her look good and take care of her.  This is a common problem with people who project their issues onto others.

The thing about these kinds of belief systems is that they get burned into your mind and body when they are reinforced with physical and sexual abuse.  I had to be responsible for her, because my life and my body were on the line.  As far as my evolutionary machinery was concerned, my mother’s moods were deadly serious business.  That meant that I took my partner’s moods with equal seriousness.

Over the years I got better about boundaries, and I got better about disconnecting from people who were not treating me well.  It was a serious struggle.  I had to do immense amounts of work around feeling responsible for others upsets.  I got better and better about being emotionally present for others regardless of what they were going through.

Last year, I met a woman at a party who became my girlfriend.  We had quite a few things in common, and we enjoyed each other’s company immensely.  The chemistry was really good.  However, there were some problems from the start.

She was a nurse, and was super busy.  It was not unusual for her to work 80 hours a week.  She ran herself repeatedly into the ground emotionally and physically at work, and didn’t have much time for anything else, especially given that she had a child.

This meant that she had little time for me, and often would cancel seeing me at the last minute.  At first, this frustrated me immensely.  I was totally into her, and she was unable to make me a consistent priority.  As usual, it felt personal, even though I knew it wasn’t.

Given that I knew it wasn’t personal, I kept purging.  I slogged through some brutal flashbacks of abandonment and my mother telling me I would never be good enough.

A few months into our relationship, her lateness and cancelling no longer upset me.  I would have preferred to see more of her, of course.  But I was happy to just write and wait for her to show up.  If she made it, great.  If not, I had other things to do that were good too.

By historical standards, this was a shocking development.  It was radically different than how I had felt before.  Even more noteworthy was what happened a few months ago though.  While we were together, she got upset, and left crying, telling me that she needed some time alone.  I walked her out the door, reminding her that she was not alone in whatever she was facing.  That was the last time I saw her.

I wrote her a few times expressing my concern and support, but I have yet to hear anything substantial back from her.  Of course, I love her, and hope she feels better, but I don’t feel responsible for what she’s going through.  I’ll support her to what extent I can if she’s ready for me.

What was stupefying about this development was that it didn’t bother me.  I didn’t take it personally at all.  In fact, I felt positive.  I’d been there for her, and I felt great about the time we had had together.  I had done what I could, and I felt great about that.

There are people who are not ready for what you have to offer them. That’s nobody’s fault.  But staying connected and focusing on people who aren’t ready for what you have to offer them limits you.  That’s why you can gain so much from looking for better things out there.  When you stay connected to what you don’t want, it limits the time and energy you have for what you do want.

Since then, I found another relationship that is even better than the one that I had before.  I feel very fortunate about that.  However, I doubt it would be possible for it to be doing as well as it is if I hadn’t worked so hard on my last one.

I hope this illustrates some of the challenges of peeling the recovery onion as well as giving some hope to all of you out there that could use some.  Best of luck to everyone in walking their recovery path.

Peeling The Recovery Onion

The objective of the healing process is to feel better.  When you change what you feel, your behavior follows and changes in turn.  If you do this enough, it will become a habit.  It’s most powerful when you learn healing techniques and start doing it on your own.

Changing what you feel allows you to feel the way you want to.  This may sound simple, because it is.  That doesn’t mean it’s always easy though.  For some people, particularly those that have been heavily traumatized, this can be the hardest work they will ever do.

Regrettably, there are many out there in the mental health field that are less than candid about this reality.  There are also those that lack clarity about this point and drown others under a sea of jargon and technical expertise.  The DSM is a wonderful example of this.  It is a very expensive book that is filled with all sorts of problems, and very short on offering any solutions to the problems.

People can focus on the problem people have and talk about the symptoms of mental illness and feeling bad all they like, but it really doesn’t help much.  Having different labels and sets of related symptoms just tells you how the problem manifests.  It doesn’t tell you how to fix the problem.

Another way to say this is that just because you’ve named the problem doesn’t mean that you have any idea how to go about fixing it.  Admittedly, sometimes having a label for your problems is useful.  It can help you feel less alone and less crazy.  That’s a good thing.

However, having a name for your problems is only useful if helps motivate you to start moving towards healing.  It’s a question of understanding how your fears have limited you, and feeling good enough to move beyond it.  If you don’t feel good about fixing your problems, your recovery process is unlikely to be sustainable.

The tools that you use to do this matter less than the results.  If the tools you are using don’t help you feel better then you may be better off changing them.  On the other hand, for those that have been badly hurt, it can be challenging to feel better even when you are using tools that are working.

One of the things that challenges people is using techniques and not ending up feeling better.  Particularly with complex PTSD, when the psychological trauma is stacked thick and deep, people can peel layers and not feel significant relief at times.  This can be absolutely brutal.  When people are in the middle of this, the agony is soul-wracking.

It can be heartrending to see people working as hard as they can to hold onto some kind of hope.  When they are facing everything they can with every ounce of courage and energy they can muster, and not getting the results that they would want, it is extremely unfair.  On the other hand, sometimes that is the only way out.  When you’re going through hell, the key is to keep going!

I’ve walked this path myself.  For over 30 years, I had no real hope that my life would ever get better.  Even when I started feeling better, and starting using healing techniques on a daily basis, I did not consciously believe that I would ever have the life that I wanted.  This makes me extremely sympathetic towards those that face similar circumstances.

People often deny the harshness of this reality.  They will minimize or judge others on this kind of path, and blame the victim.  Certainly, some people do fear what they do not understand.  However, it is also likely that they fear what it would take for themselves to also walk the path of healing.

I believe that it is critical for our species’ survival to understand the nature of mental health problems.  However, it is even more important to understand the nature of the solution than the problem itself.  And that is to keep purging until you feel the way you want to.

It also means supporting others who are doing the same.  We can all use help on our paths to creating the lives that we want.  Giving and receiving and feeling positive about it makes the process a whole lot easier.

Got Recovery Questions?

No, I won’t answer ALL of them… but I will answer ones that I think are interesting or useful to other people.  Furthermore, I will answer them from the perspective of someone that is walking the recovery path.  I will also be reposting questions that I’ve answered for others elsewhere here to get the ball rolling.

I have complex PTSD myself.  It’s brutal working through it at times, and I’m not going to pretend that it’s easy to resolve many emotional problems.  I’m extremely sympathetic to how overwhelming the recovery process can be at times.  I’ve been there, and slogged through it far too much of the time.

There’s a difference between simple and easy.  My recovery process has gotten to the point where I know what to do and when to do it.  And that’s purge, purge, purge.  When do I do it? Whenever I don’t feel the way I want to.

I wasn’t always this way.  I’ve known what to do for years now, fortunately.  On the other hand, even when I knew what to do and how to do it, I wasn’t getting the results I wanted yet.  This, quite frankly, sucked.  Fortunately, most people get results far faster than I did because of how severe what happened to me was.

In the earlier stages of the recovery process, what to do can feel much murkier.  Emotional support is often critical for maintaining forward momentum.  People can lack clarity on what the real issues are.

This is why finding emotional support is so critical in recovery.  It is difficult to move forward without other people around who have kept moving, and know that it leads to results.  Denial and avoidance can short circuit the process.

“Setbacks” happen far too often. People also drop in and out of recovery.  Some people burn out spectacularly, and that’s always sad.  Remember: any progress is good progress!

Once you have done enough work that you have faith in the process and you have people that consistently support you, it’s a totally different game.  I’ve had that for years now, although the people have changed over the time.  Expect that.  Not everyone moves forward at the same rate.

I wish everyone out there consistent progress towards emotional healing with the support they deserve if they seek it.

I Had One Of Those Days…

You know, one of those days that only clients are supposed to have… the ones that are supposed to become less frequent as you recover? Yeah, that.

As I have done many times before, I’m walking into the spiral of intimacy with someone I love and care about very much. (Not much point in doing it otherwise, is there?) It means facing my fears about whether or not my new partner is going to be emotionally and sexually present for me in the ways that I would her to be.

Yesterday, I got triggered when my new partner was not as present as I would have liked her to be. I went through multiple rounds of flashbacks. The most intense one was at the extreme end. I found myself an extremely young child, barely able to talk, telling my mother “mommy, I want to die,” over and over again. I was begging her to kill me. I stayed in the memories for significantly longer than usual, screaming into a pillow.

In some ways, the experience was a milestone of how far I have come. I was fairly calm afterwards and between the rest of the flashbacks. I woke up today and went out and saw a friend for lunch, and I felt emotionally positive and present while I was there. You could call it testament to the fact that when you do healing work regularly, it does improve your ability to face the worst of things.

I thought that posting this would be useful to others as a point of reference. Yes, some people really do face stuff “that bad.” There are people out there who will understand the pain you’ve faced. On the flipside, it is also possible to face some really awful stuff and function pretty well and even feel decent shortly afterward. It has been my experience and that of my clients that when you have the right environment to face things and you do so regularly, you do get better.

I wish everyone out there luck and success in their healing journeys.

(This is a recycled post from 29 days ago.)

The Writing Process

Ever taken a writing class?  I have.  My least favorite part of writing is talking about the process of writing.  It may be because I’m a healer, but I don’t care about how people write.

How you write is not going to be how I write.  I’m going to write what I want, in the way I want to, in the way that works best for me.  I hope that you will do the same.

As a healer, my experience is that what you feel leads what you do.  When you feel good, you can do amazing things.  Today, for example, I felt really good, and I banged out a couple of poems, editing two chapters, and reorganizing my books.  That’s pretty amazing, even if I do say myself.  It was a hell of a good day.

The thing is, I now have written over 200K words on the nature of healing and how to do it for yourself.  My writing process is fundamentally emotional in that it is about purging the fear and doubts that have stood in the way of me helping as many people heal as I can.  Purge, purge, purge.  That’s the name of the game.

To hell with structure and micromanagement.  Purge your doubts and you will feel good enough to do amazing things.  And that’s exactly what people are telling me I have done.

My experience is that the writing organizes itself just fine when you feel good enough.  When you heal, you get clarity and your gifts shine through in ways that are impossible to ignore.  Focusing on the writing process instead of the healing process obscures that fact.

So, if you’re an aspiring writer out there, make a commitment to feeling better.  When you hit doubt and fear about writing, purge it.  First of all, you get to feel better.  Secondly, you get to be more productive.  It’s simpler and more efficient that stagnating in doubt.

Any writing is good writing.  It will take care of itself when you feel good enough to let it do so for you.  The universe wants to speak through you, and it will do so when you feel good enough to let it.