An Integral Pathway: Reflecting Organic Design

Why This Doesn't Take What It Used to Take

People sometimes ask, reasonably, how deep work can happen without the kind of time commitment the early pioneers of this field required — daily sessions, sometimes residential, over years. It's a fair question, and the honest answer isn't "it doesn't need to be that deep." It's that the route has gotten shorter.

The pioneers of depth work built something extraordinary, yet social changes prioritized the external gains over internal ones. In the “work” culture that developed over the last 50 years, in this country, everything became measured according to ‘efficiency’, in the most limited definition of the word.

Here's what's changed too: we now have direct, technological access to what those pioneers could only infer through language alone. Tools like neurofeedback let us see the nervous system doing what it's doing, in real time, rather than reconstructing it after the fact through free association and interpretation. Integrating polyvagal work helps to build ground that took years to achieve. The unconscious was never some separate, mysterious basement. It's somatic. It's visible. And when you can work with it directly, through the body, instead of waiting for it to surface indirectly through weeks of talking, the pace of the work changes.

This is what I mean by working non-dually. Mind and body were never actually two systems taking turns — that was always a convenient fiction, one the old model had to maintain because it only had one tool, language, to work with. When you engage both at once, each one gets you to the same insight faster than either could alone. Two wings, not one. And it restores integrative capacity to your being, which is all that’s needed. When mind and body work together, Being is restored. The starting point, “Doing mode,” is the result of dis-integration. Relational function is restored and a natural rhythm replaces it, one in which responding is fluid and dynamic, not predicated on “shoulds” or “hacks”. or “checklists”. When your relationship with yourself runs smoothly, relationships with others follow.

I want to be clear about what this isn't. It isn't a claim that depth work can be rushed, or that meaningful change happens without real investment of time and attention. It also isn't a suggestion that you need to show up daily, or replicate the intensity of those early residential models, to get somewhere real. That's actually the opposite of what I'm saying. The old model needed that much time because it was working with one lens. A different lens, informed by what we now understand about the body, can arrive at the same depth with a fraction of the hours — not because the destination changed, but because the route got shorter.

That's the advantage of this era, used well. Not less depth. Less waste.

In short: if you're weighing whether this kind of work is realistic for your life, the historical model isn't the standard to measure yourself against. It was built for a different set of tools. It is designed with the understanding of what integration requires, not conceptual understanding but one born of direct experience over decades of refinement.

Read my Substack

Human suffering is not simply the presence of symptoms. It reflects a disruption in relationship—with ourselves, with others, with our bodies, with meaning, and ultimately with life itself. Healing restores relationship. Everything else in my work flows from this premise.

This principle is explored from three complementary perspectives throughout my work:

Practice — restoring relationship through psychotherapy, nervous system regulation, and embodied approaches.

Inquiry — essays exploring consciousness, culture, language, and the symbolic dimensions of being human.

Integration — guided practices that help translate understanding into lived experience.

If what I’ve written resonates with you, I encourage you to explore my Substack, where I publish essays from an evolving book on consciousness, relationship, and the recovery of our shared humanity.

Conscious Embodiment: Interoception and Neuroception

Interoception and Neuroception are two pillars for Conscious Embodiment. To be a good steward of your body, you need to be able to receive signals from it. Not when you are merely hungry, tired, or hurt, but as a stable functional relationship.

Much of our nervous system operates outside of conscious awareness. Yet we all have the capacity to become more attuned to what is happening within us. Two processes play an important role in this awareness: interoception and neuroception. Interoception refers to our ability to sense internal signals from the body—such as breathing, tension, emotion, or shifts in energy—while neuroception describes the nervous system’s automatic detection of safety or threat in our environment. As these capacities develop, we become better able to recognize our internal states and respond to them wisely. This growing awareness forms the foundation of embodied self-regulation, allowing us to move through life with greater stability, presence, and choice.

Developing Interoception and Neuroception (separate to Embodiment post)

A key part of this work is developing two important capacities:

Interoception
The ability to sense internal signals from the body — such as tension, breathing, emotion, or shifts in energy. Interoception helps us recognize what our system needs in the moment.

Neuroception
A term used in polyvagal theory to describe the nervous system’s automatic detection of safety or danger, often outside conscious awareness.

As these capacities develop, people become better able to recognize their own internal states and respond in ways that support regulation and well-being.

This growing awareness forms the foundation of conscious embodiment — a state of psychological integration in which people can feel their experience, understand their needs, and respond to life with greater clarity and presence.

Nervous system training, such as polyvagal training, heart-rate variability training and neurofeedback are key ways to begin. I will soon be adding a deeper embodiment post, discussing breathwork, healing with sound, light and energy experiential techniques, also an orientation to psychedelic therapies. Look out for that too.

The Architecture of Depth: Sound, Symbol and Energetics

Restoring the Sacred Engine

The Core Pillars of This Work

• Direct Energetic Integrity: We operate entirely outside the third-party complex to ensure that the energetic loop of prana remains completely pure, confidential, and untainted by corporate surveillance.

• Non-Dual Architecture: We do not treat you as a collection of symptoms or a broken diagnostic code. We view your psychological friction through the lens of your archetypal map and the somatic storage of your life history.

• The Evolutionary Mandate: This space is not a way station to help you comfortably tolerate an unexamined life. It is an alchemical furnace designed for those ready to step onto a revolutionary platform of total self-realization.

I developed an integrative model that allows a third entry point into restoring wholeness. It is also a way to build on the re-integration process that the Mind to Body and Body to Mind pathways restore.

Please visit this page for a more in-depth view of this program. bhchap.com/acutonics

Or the “Sound, Symbol, and Energetics” page in the Navigation Menu.

Restoring the Sacred Engine: Symbolic Integration and Integral Function

The Core Pillars of My Practice

• Direct Energetic Integrity: We operate entirely outside the third-party complex to ensure that the energetic loop of prana remains completely pure, confidential, and untainted by corporate surveillance.

• Non-Dual Architecture: We do not treat you as a collection of symptoms or a broken diagnostic code. We view your psychological friction through the lens of your archetypal map and the somatic storage of your life history.

• The Evolutionary Mandate: This space is not a way station to help you comfortably tolerate an unexamined life. It is an alchemical furnace designed for those ready to step onto a revolutionary platform of total self-realization.

Part 4: The Architecture of Depth

The Deficit of the Literal Mind

Loss of Integration and Symbolic Function

Modern behavioral therapies treat language as a literal instrument. They ask you to change your self-talk, correct your logical fallacies, or manage your narrative. In doing so, they treat the mind as a machine and your words as a basic software program.

Deep analytic therapy begins where the literal mind fails. We work in the lineage of the revolutionary "talking cure" — spanning from the rigorous excavations of classical Psychoanalysis to the mythic, archetypal horizons of Jungian analysis. In this container, language is not literal; it is symbolic. Your symptoms, your repeating relationship patterns, your paralyzing anxieties, and your dreams are not broken cogs to be fixed. They are a complex, symbolic language spoken by the unconscious, desperately trying to communicate a truth that the conscious ego cannot yet tolerate.

The Pillars of Deep Analysis: Restoring Symbolic Function

• The Unconscious as an Intelligence: We do not view the unconscious as a dark basement of repressed impulses, nor as a glitchy computer. It is a living, dynamic intelligence. The gridlocks you face in life are purposeful roadblocks engineered by the psyche to force an ego-collapse, clearing the ground for the deeper Self to emerge.

• The Symbolic Mirror: When we "talk" in this practice, we are listening to the undercurrents. A complaint about a boss is tracked back to an ancestral imprint. A recurring nightmare is met as an initiating deity. An inexplicable block in your creativity is mapped as an active psychic defense. By tracking the symbolic function of your suffering, we find the hidden blueprint of your transformation.

• The Archetypal Tapestry: Drawing from the Jungian tradition, we recognize that your personal suffering is woven into the collective fabric of human myth. Your struggles are not uniquely pathologized mistakes; they are archetypal passages. When we elevate your personal pain into its mythic and collective context, the isolating weight of pathology dissolves, replaced by the dignity of a sacred initiation.

The Ultimate Platform of Autonomy
To engage in deep analytic therapy is a radical, subversive act in a world obsessed with speed, optimization, and superficial compliance. It requires the courage to sit in the mystery, to decode the messages of the unconscious, and to allow the ego-defenses to dissolve so that true psychological authority can be reclaimed. This practice is a space where the soul is permitted to speak its own language, and where you are met not as a patient to be cured, but as a mystery unfolding toward its own liberation.

Money as Prana — The Energetic Law of Exchange

Money as Prana — The Energetic Law of Exchange

In yoga, the word prana refers to life energy. We exchange that energy constantly. We give it through our attention. Our labor. Our relationships. Our time. Money is simply one expression of that life energy. Every financial exchange changes a relationship.

Money is not neutral currency; it is prana — a crystallized form of a person's life force, time, labor, and intent. In an authentic therapeutic container, the direct exchange of this prana is a vital component of the medicine itself.

"Transaction" is the objectified form of exchange, just like "provider" is the objectified form of a transformational therapeutic relationship. When another payor enters the room, they are now the source of the energy being provided. This affects the relationship in more than one way.

First, the investment is split. The responsible party is now more invested in the process than my client. They inject a corporate mind into a relational process to protect their investment. What results is not the same.

Second, the life energy given is not from whom wants a return. It changes the degree of commitment a person feels about the process. It becomes part of "insurance world" — a place I go, like any other doctor appointment — and exactly the part of you that would otherwise be in the room checks out. This is largely unconscious, so isn't chosen. It reflects how we understand the world and where we place things in our mind. That alters the experience in a way that you cannot know until you've had them both.

It isn't just that insurance is a "bad guy" — it's the bridge that leads right back to where you started instead of taking the off ramp to where you wanted to go instead.

A culture that already teaches us to relate to ourselves as objects naturally creates systems that reinforce that relationship.

Direct investment changes the relationship. When we invest something that genuinely matters to us — our time, our energy, our money — we naturally become more engaged in the outcome. We stop asking someone else to heal us and begin participating in our own healing.

• True transformation requires "skin in the game." When you directly invest your own prana into your healing, you make a fierce, conscious declaration to your subconscious mind: I am prioritizing my evolution over my comfort. I am fully funding my own liberation.

• The ego strives to maintain homeostasis, to use as little energy as required so that it can recycle that energy in the direction of growth and evolution — integration, what symbolic function allows. This means the baseline experience is that change is hard. When you are already taxed, it can seem impossible. This is partly what makes scarcity mindset so easy — and why it's much easier to turn over your financial responsibility to an insurance company, which certainly leans into this when selling you something.

• When therapy feels like a low-stakes, outsourced utility, it easily degrades into a comfortable lifestyle way station — a place to vent week after week without ever committing to the terrifying, beautiful work of structural collapse and rebirth.

By operating entirely on a direct-pay basis, I prioritize the total integrity of the process. Your files are completely private, untouched by corporate surveillance. Your timeline is dictated by your own motivation (readiness), not an actuary's spreadsheet. The financial investment you make is the very first ritual act of your transformation — a direct, unmediated exchange of prana that honors the gravity of the work we are about to do.

It isn't that insurance is "bad" — it's the bridge that leads right back to where you started instead of taking the off ramp to where you wanted to go instead.

What does objectification actually mean or feel like?

Someone objectifies themselves when they learn to see themselves, their needs, and their responses through the lens of another's expectations — and loses touch with themselves in a fundamental way. This is the underlying condition beneath most of the labels we've gotten used to applying to ourselves.

Labels describe. They don't explain.

Situating yourself inside the mindset of someone else (or what you assume it is), and relating to yourself as what you imagine they see, then taking that as your own starting point— that's how people objectify themselves. When you don't expect your needs or your own experience to matter, you stop seeking relationship on its own terms, with reciprocity and congruence as an organic principle .

You start accommodating to what you're presented with, in order to protect yourself. Over time that becomes "natural," a "default setting." It is not. 180 degrees not.

A culture that already teaches us to relate to ourselves as objects naturally creates systems that reinforce that relationship.

The Dilution of Psychotherapy in the 21st Century

PART 1 — The Dilution of the Craft: From Revolution to Way Station

Have you ever wondered why therapy can feel strangely helpful and strangely unsatisfying at the same time? You gain insight. You learn skills. You understand yourself better. Yet something still feels untouched. That isn't because therapy doesn't work. It's because therapy itself has changed.

Most people assume therapy has always looked the way it does today. It hasn't. Until surprisingly recently, psychotherapy was not primarily about managing symptoms or learning better coping strategies. Its aim was much more ambitious.

It asked a deeper question: How does a human being become more fully themselves?That question gradually gave way to another: How do we help people function well enough to return to everyday life? Those are not the same project. Same idea. Much easier to enter. Then you earn the stronger language later.

Not that long ago, this distinction was so obvious, it did not need to be said. What changed?

Psychotherapy was conceived as a revolutionary, non-dual platform for the radical reclamation of human autonomy. The pioneers transmitted lineage, a Western attempt to enter the field of Prana and Xi. I will share more about what that was like. In dense urban areas, those kinds of practices still exist and clarity still exist about what they offer. That is not the case in areas without a long history of psychotherapy culture.

Over the last three decades, a slow, insidious erosion has occurred. The field has traded structural integrity for convenience, safety, and external optimization. That turns it into a radically different experience, with radically different results.

The Shift

• The Historical Platform: A fierce, deep-diving crucible where the ego-defenses were dismantled to reveal the unconditioned self.

• The Modern Way Station: A temporary pit stop for symptom management, corporate coping strategies, and superficial emotional venting.

• The Cost of Convenience: By optimizing therapy for comfort, brief timelines, and behavioral compliance, the industry has severed the discipline from its alchemical and philosophical roots.

What Psychotherapy Has Lost

Part 3: The Architecture of the Container — What Was Lost

Over the last thirty years, the mainstream mental health industry underwent a massive, quiet retreat from the depths of the human psyche. To fit into the rigid templates of corporate managed care, therapy had to become predictable, measurable, and above all, sterile. The industry achieved this through a process called "manualization" — reducing the wild, non-linear mystery of human consciousness into standardized, step-by-step booklets.

What Was Traded Away for Convenience

• Symptom Suppression vs. Alchemical Transmutation: Modern therapy is obsessed with "coping strategies." Modalities like standard CBT treat your anxiety, grief, or existential dread as faulty wiring to be corrected or quieted. They teach you how to manage the smoke while leaving the fire in your basement untouched. We do not suppress the symptom; we use the symptom as the exact portal to enter your somatic and archetypal core.

• Linear Data vs. The Wild Spiral: Corporate systems require progress to look like a neat, upward-trending line on a graph. But true psychological maturity moves in a spiral. It requires periods of collapse, fertile voids, and the dismantling of old ego defenses before a new way of being can sprout. Mainstream therapy panics at collapse; our platform welcomes it as the necessary prerequisite for rebirth.

• The Loss of the Labyrinth: True psychological transformation requires structural friction — a highly boundaried, intense container where your ego-defenses cannot simply find a comfortable exit. By prioritizing maximum client comfort and emotional hand-holding, modern therapy has removed the heat from the furnace. Without heat, the raw metal of your suffering cannot be forged into medicine.

Why This Happened — the Corporate View
Modern "healthcare" has become entirely a reflection of who pays for it: the insurance industry. That was not the same experience I knew for much of my life, and I still don't participate in it — I use a Direct Primary Care membership model, the same route many doctors are taking to extract themselves from that system. Everything in our culture mirrors the needs of whoever is paying. Because insurance is a financial product designed to respond to disaster, modern healthcare is really a sick care system. Marketing is going to sell you a picture that's convenient to it — that's just good advertising. We know the difference between what someone is trying to sell us and what something really is.

As a result of over a decade of mass insurance conditioning, we now view healthcare through the lens of convenience, cost reduction, and corporate standardization — and services get reshaped to fit that system. When the well-intentioned but dualistic Mental Health Parity Act mandated that "mental health" be treated exactly like "physical health" — when the two behave very differently — what it takes to be a responsible steward of your own consciousness got hijacked by the already-objectified model built around the body. That introduced a structural poison into the delicate architecture of deep psychological and spiritual work.

When Healing Became a Product
Once healing enters a corporate model, certain values naturally rise: predictability, efficiency, compliance, measurement. Those aren't evil. They're just different values than the ones healing actually requires: mystery, relationship, meaning, transformation.

Reclaiming the Revolutionary Platform
We refuse to participate in the flattening of your human experience. You are not a broken machine that needs its cognitive gears realigned to be dropped back into a toxic economic engine. When you step into this practice, we restore what the last three decades have stripped away: depth, mystery, somatic truth, and the fierce, unyielding integrity of a true evolutionary crucible.

How the Nervous System Uses Arousal to Support Life

Experience Shapes the Nervous System

It’s much deeper than being “triggered”

Our nervous system is shaped through experience. Like all living systems, it works according to the principle of homeostasis, constantly seeking stability and efficiency. One way it does this is by learning from what has happened before.

When we encounter a situation, the brain records the sequence of stimulus and response. Over time, repeated experiences become organized into neural pathways that make it easier for the nervous system to respond in the same way the next time a similar situation occurs.

This is an efficient design. It allows the body to conserve energy by relying on patterns it already knows rather than starting from scratch each time we encounter something new.

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Why do our nervous systems repeat the same patterns?

Organic Learning Trains the Brain

A natural example can be seen in how animals learn to navigate their environment.

When a deer repeatedly encounters a particular path through the forest, it gradually learns where food can be found, where predators might appear, and which routes provide safety. Over time the path becomes familiar, and the animal moves through it with increasing ease and efficiency.

The nervous system works in a similar way. Experiences that repeat themselves become well-traveled pathways that shape how we automatically respond to the world.

When our experiences involve safety, curiosity, and exploration, the nervous system learns patterns of engagement with life. But when experiences involve overwhelming stress or threat, the system may learn patterns of anxiety, avoidance, or shutdown.

These patterns are not signs of weakness; they are simply the nervous system doing what it was designed to do — learning from experience and conserving energy by repeating what it knows. That means it can get stuck when you do not experience sufficient restoration.

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NERVOUS SYSTEM ACTIVATION

LOW VOLUME BALANCED HIGH VOLUME

🟡 Rest & Restore 🟢 Engagement 🔴 Survival Activation

Recovery Curiosity Fight / Flight

Calm awareness Motivation Anxiety / Avoidance

Restoration Connection Overwhelm

(Dorsal) (Ventral) (Sympathetic)

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Nervous System Volume

Low Volume → Rest and recovery

Moderate Volume → Focus, motivation, engagement

High Volume → Protective survival responses

You can think of nervous system activation like a volume dial.

Low volume supports rest and recovery.
Moderate volume supports focus, engagement, and connection.
Very high volume activates protective survival responses.

Healthy nervous systems can adjust the volume as needed rather than getting stuck at one level.

Many of the practices described above help the nervous system rediscover this natural flexibility.

Nervous System Training: Restores Flexibility

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Human experience is organized around the level of activation in the nervous system — what psychologists call arousal. This activation is what allows us to focus, act, connect with others, and engage with life.

When arousal is balanced, it supports energy, curiosity, motivation, and connection. When it becomes dysregulated through chronic stress or trauma, the same system can become stuck in patterns of anxiety, avoidance, or emotional shutdown.

Polyvagal theory describes how the nervous system shifts between states of rest, engagement, and survival depending on whether we feel safe, supported, or overwhelmed. Healthy nervous systems can move flexibly across this range.

Many people, however, find that their nervous system has become stuck at one extreme or another. The goal of nervous system training is to restore flexibility and responsiveness so that energy supports life rather than survival reactions.

Our nervous system— all of us really— is trained through experience. Our system works through the principle of homeostasis. us to do what we’ve done before so it conserves energy by recording the pattern of lived experience: stimulus-response into neural pathways. They make it easier to act on the stimulus next time you encounter it. Organic example:

Neurofeedback works by helping the brain gradually shift these learned patterns of activation. Rather than forcing change, it gently encourages the nervous system to rediscover more balanced and flexible states.

In this way, neurofeedback supports the same process nature already uses: learning through experience.

The brain receives feedback about its activity and begins to reorganize itself, forming new pathways that support regulation, engagement, and resilience.

By intentionally training the brain, we use our organic pathways to develop the flexibility we need.

The goal is not to eliminate arousal or override the nervous system, but to help it rediscover the natural flexibility that allows energy to support curiosity, connection, and meaningful engagement with life.

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A Stepwise Approach: Polyvagal Training or Neurofeedback

For individuals who are highly sensitive, easily overwhelmed, or simply curious about working with their nervous system more directly, there are several entry points.

Many people begin with gentle regulation practices that help the body rediscover its natural rhythms.

These may include:

Heart Rate Variability Biofeedback
Using tools such as the HeartMath system, individuals learn how breathing, emotion, and attention influence the nervous system. This helps develop awareness of internal signals and the ability to shift physiological states intentionally.

Polyvagal Listening Programs
Auditory programs such as the Safe and Sound Protocol (SSP) and Rest and Restore Protocol (RRP) stimulate neural pathways involved in listening, safety, and social connection. These programs can help the nervous system shift out of chronic survival activation and toward states of engagement and restoration.

These approaches often serve as a robust entry point for individuals who want to work directly with their nervous system before considering neurofeedback.

I’ve offered the polyvagal oriented training— a form of biofeedback— for many years now and it has been very effective, although different, from the experience of neurofeedback training.

Neurofeedback

Neurofeedback works more directly with the brain’s patterns of activation. By gently guiding the brain toward more balanced states, neurofeedback can help the nervous system reorganize itself and regain flexibility across the full range of activation.

For some individuals this becomes the next step once the nervous system has begun to stabilize through other practices.

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While the nervous system automatically learns patterns through experience, we also have the capacity to become aware of these internal signals. This ability—called interoception—is an important foundation for conscious embodiment and self-regulation.

Simple Relaxation Breathing Exercise

Breathing with conscious awareness is grounding and centering for the whole being. If done properly, research shows that it can provide the following benefits: normalizing the stress response, helping regulate your emotions, reducing anxiety, insomnia, post-traumatic stress disorder, depression, and ADD, as well as lowering heart rate and reducing blood pressure.

Trauma Treatment in Rapid City, South Dakota encourages patients to practice mindful breathing as a way of coping with stress and anxiety.

The process is simple and doesn’t take too long to learn. Anybody can do it almost anywhere as a quick exercise to get your stress levels in check. Patients can choose to combine this technique with other elements, such as trauma therapy, aromatherapy, and music.

Here’s how you can start.

• While sitting down - back straight against the chair - put one hand on your chest and one above your stomach.

• The hand on your stomach should rise as you breathe in through your nose and slowly exhale through your mouth.

• Try and push out as much air as you can while contracting your abdominal muscles.

• Keep breathing in through your nose and out through your mouth. Make sure to inhale enough, so your lower abdomen regularly rises and falls. Count slowly as you exhale.

If you find it challenging to breathe from your abdomen while sitting up, you may try lying down.

Black Hills Center For Healing and Advancement of Psychotherapy provides patients with various approaches to healing through trauma treatments and EDMR in South Dakota. Contact us here for more information.

Tunnel Vision: When you can’t see a way to live anymore

This post is dedicated to survivors of suicide and those who may be suffering. Tuesday, September 10, is International Suicide Awareness Day.  You can break free and live again. Keep reading.

Suicide is mostly equated with depression. Depression is a common experience in our society. Its frequently diagnosed, sometimes in routine medical settings, such as primary care, where it is also usually treated with medication.  Aside from the strong body of research that shows medication alone is actually less powerful than placebo, the biggest problem with this monolithic view of depression is that not all depression is the same.  Depression that stems from unresolved trauma requires a different response than the  conventional treatments for depression. Trauma itself is not a monolith. We respond to developmental trauma differently than adult onset, single incident trauma. Of course, plenty of adult onset, single incidents can occur to someone who has experienced developmental trauma.  The rest of this article is based on my experience of hundreds of clients impacted by development, especially attachment related trauma. The opportunity for lasting impact is extremely high during these “formative” years. They are called formative for a reason. 

Let’s take a look at how these experiences can lead to a legacy for the adults who remain haunted by events, feeling much like the proverbial unwanted gifts that “don’t stop giving”. Let’s take a look at how you may not even realize when you are in the process of getting gifts. 

For ordinary experiences, we have ordinary memories. The experiences that matter more to us will be translated into memory. If they are particularly meaningful they may possibly become part of one’s narrative, one’s “story”. No matter how meaningful, ordinary memories fade. Take old photographs, for example.  With enough time, it becomes hard to remember details. The experience isn’t as vivid, perhaps its even fuzzy. It may not even feel like “you” anymore.  You may not even be able to relate to how you were feeling in that  photo.  Other times, you may feel something completely contrary to what the picture capture. Just ask any divorced person who looks at his or her wedding photos!

Remember the last time you felt like that? How about the time before that? And the time before that? Is it still true?

Now, let’s compare this with how chronic trauma gets captured (Keep in mind, this is a very simplified illustration. )  Remember trauma lies in the experience, not in the event. By knowing “what happened” to a person, you don’t really know what someone’s actual  experience of it was like, unless they choose to share that with you and you happen to empathize strongly with their experience.  Even still, your empathic experience won’t be an exact replica of anyone else’s. It’ll be your experience superimposed upon theirs. We are all uniquely alone in our subjective experiences. 

Imagine a fresh roll of photography film; yes, we are going old school here. The nervous system sets the lens speed for the photograph. Traumatic experiences require a particular setting, which captures it differently.  The lens freezes a particular moment, zooms in, and  captures the affective and somatic aspects of experience, and snaps the photo. Like ordinary photos, that moment is isolated from the continuous whole experience. 

In ordinary memories, the brain functions involved are associated with language and other abstract capacities. Traumatic events inhibit those functions in order to be able to use  areas of the brain reserved for managing core survival needs. Therefore, the sense of time, as well as the ability to create your own “story”, to interpret and to make meaning from it, is offline. The brain functions connected with somatic and emotional experiences store those experiences in a manner that is immediate, I.e., not affected by time, or space, or symbolic functions associated with interpretation or meaning.  The effect of this on the subject of this experience completely identifies with the snapshot taken of that moment in time, as a true reflection of “me” and “mine”, without being impacted by perspective or context. 

The manner in which these images are captured determine how they are stored and later retrieved. Unlike ordinary experiences, the memories aren’t processed once and for all. That would make them be as vulnerable to erosion as ordinary memories. Instead, they remain a negative on the subconscious.  Somatic sensations,  including emotions and affects, are retrieved as they occur:  in the flesh. Rather than “looking at a photo”, that seems separate from you in time. the memory is re-experienced in your very body. Its the only way to reencounter somatic experience: on an immediate level. It’s not abstracted. The imprint remains there like a negative. You can move on, even forget about it, and there it stays like a ghost. 

When conditions (aka triggers) in the here and now resonate with the feelings or sensations stored in that negative, the original experience is “released”, like a hologram.  The 3D experience of the negative gets superimposed upon current reality.  What’s most effected is the sense of self of the subject. If you felt small, helpless, vulnerable or if you felt angry, rageful, even, or if you felt shame, humiliated, then angry but unsafe too, so you dare only to turn it against yourself. All these experiences are captured in a separate negative, like a glint of stars in the lights, and when the negative is released in the moment, you step into these experiences, as if you put on a  pair of glasses in which you can only see through those eyes, those old prisms that you now interpret reality through. 

If you live with a particular set of glasses on for a while, you may forget what it used to look like. Sometimes that looks like chronic depression. Other times, long term body image issues. Other times, its acting out behaviors, like binge eating, drinking, using drugs, cutting. Other times, it can be a dissociative response, leading to a sense of depersonalization, like who you see in the reflection isn’t you. You may be unable to relate to parts of your life, to feel certain things, or to feel numb, or shame and disgust may intrude on particular experiences. 

After a while, it may feel like the only escape from this one dimensional hell is to kill yourself. The person who wants to die feels that death is less painful than living. Living is painful. There’s loss and pain, physical, emotional, psychological. However, the defining characteristic is that life is a constant state of flux. Its a process of change. Nothing lasts forever, even what we most want to hold onto. When a state of being seems to last forever, something has gone wrong in how you relate to experience. That is not living. It is not natural. So give yourself an opportunity and seek services from a qualified person, someone who has had experience working with experiences similar to yours. Keep searching for the right person to help you through the stuck experiences you have living within you. The past is not past yet. It needs to become past, in order for you to have different and new experiences.

A New Face: Change in Spring

( Post-traumatic Growth is PTSG)

Spring is about life, growth, change, the ceaseless cycle of life and death. Endings make way for new beginnings, or better put: beginning anew. In the spirit of Spring, I invite you to join me in an exploration of what’s come to pass and what you see on the horizon. An inventory of sorts. What have you learned from the past year?

It seems to me that the New Year concept falls entirely in the wrong season. Don’t you think? Each season has a primary purpose. To fulfill that purpose, each season has qualities that are strong and others that are weak. The particular constellation of energy patterns that we experience in a given season is attributable to the balance of the elements. Elements are: Earth, Air, Fire, Water, and the fifth, Space, enables the other’s to form. Space creates the context by which all else occurs. Each session has, at it’s heart, dominant element(s). Thanks to those elements, summer expresses itself in that familiar way we tend to love. As does winter, even when we don’t particularly love it.

In CAM (complementary alternative medicines) such as TCM and Ayurveda, each individual possesses a dominant element, or set of elements, as well. We are part of the fabric of life, so what’s out there, also finds itself in us. The dynamic interaction between the elements provides us the ground of our strengths and weaknesses. Of course, experiences will ultimately shape any raw material. Thankfully, we have control over our experiences, even when we think we don’t. (Some of the elements have different names in TCM vs Ayurveda but the principles are consistent).

When you align your purpose with the larger purpose unfolding in nature, you are far more likely to be successful. The New Year, in my world, would accompany the crucial practice of “Retrospection”. First you need to really understand what’s transpired and what that is showing you you need to address. Then you can begin to make resolutions, or better yet, plans to make it happen. The dead of winter is appropriate for January through February. It is not the right time to try to make changes. Instead, take the opportunity of the quiet and still energy around you to introspect and retrospect. Then, come March, you’ll have a good idea of what you need to focus on the rest of the year.

Since I do not preach what I don’t practice myself, my end of year review led me to change the face of this blog, to bring it more in line with BHCHAP’s mission: to promote Post-traumatic Growth or PTSG.

I’d like to introduce the Bodhisattva, Ksitigarbha, best known as Jizo, a prevalent feature of Japanese culture. Jizo will be guiding us on our journey. (You’ll see why in just a moment).

Little Jizo statues seen at a park in Japan.

But first:

What is a Bodhisattva? Good question.

A Bodhisattva is very much like a Patron Saint in other religions. A practitioner of dharma, the wisdom practices taught by the Buddha, upon “awakening”, realizing enlightenment, dedicates him or herself to aid sentient beings until the very last one has also attained enlightenment. Bodhisattvas represent different aspects of Enlightenment. Unlike other religions, they are not seen as individual “entities” or “figures” but faces, or elements, of what is essentially “whole”. Just like the interplay of elements gives rise to our world. Without “Air” for instance, we have nothing. There’s air in water. There’s air in fire. There’s air in earth. Everything is interdependent. Nothing is missing. Such are Bodhisattvas, they are elements of Enlightenment: a particular Bodhisattva may represent any facet of the path, such as wisdom- realizing how things really work; others may focus on compassion; others on overcoming obstacles that are extremely tough.

Some, like Jizo, focus on particular kids of human experience, particular kinds of human suffering. Jizo is the Bodhisattva of Lost Souls, of Travelers, of Children and Animals. Travelers does not refer to vacationers, rather to the recently departed. The photograph shows a Japanese custom: parents of deceased children will offer clothing to Jizo statues, much like Christians in this country might light a candle.

Jizo is the perfect Bodhisattva for my clients. Among the feelings I hear people share about is that of feeling “lost”, “unseen”, “unheard”, “not recognized”, “afraid to be authentic”, among many others. Among the experiences of abuse, neglect, or other violations or injuries my ears are entrusted with hearing, I see how suffering in childhood (beyond what can be supported), causes a rupture in the unified field of their sense of self. And as they grow up, that rupture grow up within them.

PTSG is the experience of reclaiming your sense of self, of wholeness, and all of what that means: your strengths, resources, and ultimately your whole hearted ability to love, without reservation or apprehension: unabashed.