Mindfulness, Childhood Trauma and Denial

The hot new concept in psychotherapy these days is "mindfulness".  At least the word is new.  Most concepts are just old concepts revisited with new jargon.  This concept is an important one and I'm glad it has been resurrected.  Many of us grew up learning to be out of touch with our bodies, our senses and our emotions.  People who experienced trauma as children and those who lived in repressive households are especially susceptible. 

Being out of touch with your body is a great loss because our bodies serve as very, very sensitive radars which alert us to things going on in the world around us.  They warn us of dangers, allow us to experience pleasure and provide us with a sensory rich experience of the world around us.  Our bodies communicate stress, discomfort, pleasure, pain, grief, happiness, wariness, fear, contentment and more.  What deprives us of this rich store of information and how do we tap back into it?

Trauma(s) during childhood

A primary defense mechanism of children who are traumatized (physically, verbally, mentally, emotionally, or especially sexually) is dissociation.  Dissociation is the process of separating your awareness of what's going on from your body's signals.  Mind you, everyone dissociates a bit.  I usually do it in rush hour traffic traveling a familiar route.  I realize I have passed 3 exits on the interstate and don't remember how I got there.  This is dissociating.  Some people call it daydreaming or spacing out.  A certain amount of dissociation is normal.  But people who have been abused do it to the point that they they are totally out of touch with their bodies and miss important signals and events.  This is especially typical of sexually abused children who often "space out" or "leave" their bodies while they are being molested.  As adults they are often still dissociated from their bodies and the messages their bodies receive.  This dissociation leaves them floating through life feeling disconnected and out of touch.  It deprives them of the comfort and pleasure their body is able to provide.  Most importantly, it cuts them off from the vast wealth of sensory information their body provides them about the world around them and the people with whom they interact.  They are suddenly having a panic attack and don't know why. 

Repressive families

Another source of disconnection is living in a family which represses its members.  If you were raised with Cleopatra, Queen of Denial, you may have grown up being told you didn't see what you saw, you didn't hear what you heard and things weren't happening which you thought were happening.  I grew up in a house where things "didn't happen".  I thought I saw anger and heard yelling and deduced a fight was occurring.  However, I was told that "nothing" was happening.  Growing up this way I learned not to trust my bodily sensations and impressions.  I did not trust my sight, my hearing, my feelings or my judgment.  I disconnected from my sensory impressions and my instincts.  If I sensed that something was "not right" I ignored it and stayed in the situation by denouncing my instincts as "irrational".  After all, this is what I had learned.  My instincts obviously misguided me as a child since they told me things were happening which the adults said were not, so they must be flawed and untrustworthy.  This is what happens when a child's perception of events is denied and replaced with fabrications.  When their instincts tell them that dad is not really "sick" but drunk, that mom does not really "have a headache" but is fuming and angry they are corrected and told their instincts are wrong.  They learn to distrust their feelings and perceptions.  They learn to rationalize that everything is "lovely" and to distrust anything which tells them otherwise.

Turning yourself back on

In order to be healthy, happy and whole you have to get back in touch with your body and listen to its messages.  It has a wealth of information if you are willing to listen.  How do you do this?  Simply by asking and listening to its answers and relearning that they can be trusted.  When my clients start intellectualizing about something, agonizing over which way they should "logically" go along a path I often ask them what their "gut" says about it.  When they stop and listen to their own bodies, they often find they already know the answer, they just weren't listening to it or honoring what it said.  When clients ask me what I think, I refuse to answer them.  They don't need me to tell them what to do.  I will not always be there.  They need to learn to listen and trust their own intuitions.  That will serve them for the rest of their lives.

Learning to listen to yourself

Take the time at least once a day to sit quietly and commune with your body.  Start at the top of your head and move throughout your entire body.  How does it feel?  It is tight here?  Loose there?  Queasy?  Fearful?  Calm?  It is warm?  Cold?  Just right?  Does it have pain?  Where and how much?  Is there some way you can move or stretch to make it feel more comfortable?  What does it need?  Is it hungry?  Tired?  Thirsty?  What emotions does it feel?  Boredom?  Stress?  Sadness?  Contentment?  What does it see?  What does it hear?  What do you smell around you?  What do you feel on your skin?  What can you taste?  What is your body trying to tell you?

Take your body out and walk it around.  Take it to a museum, to a park, for a walk along a garden path.  Pay attention to how it feels from your head to your toes.  What emotions come up?

Become more aware of your body throughout your body.  The more you practice, the more tuned in to your body you will become.  How does it feel right now while you are reading this?  What does it need? 

And when you experience a disturbing emotion.  Don't try to shut it down.  Listen.  What is happening?  What is your body trying to tell you?  What is wrong?  Or right?  Experience your emotions and learn to value them.  In the American culture we learn that emotions make us weak.  This is so wrong.  Emotions make us strong.  They give us clues about what is happening around us and how we need to react.  Are you feeling fearful?  Stressed?  Sad?  Wary?  Listen.  Something is happening that you need to attend to and perhaps protect yourself from. 

With age comes wisdom, sometimes

The older I get the more attention I pay to my instincts and my body's messages.  In my 20's I used to intellectualize and "outsmart" them.  I was also running much too fast to stop and listen to my body's signals. Because instincts didn't speak to me in concrete, rational ways I tended to discount or minimize their messages.  My instincts don't tell me that someone is lying, they simply say, "hmmmph".  They do not tell me that someone is a sexual predator, they simply say, "yewwwwww".  My skin cringes and my stomach tightens.  Because they do not produce language they can be easy to dismiss. Yet they have their own language and it is the most important language we possess.

In my 40's I hope I have grown wiser.  I've learned to listen to these visceral, wordless feelings.  The more I listen, the more I realize they are very astute and very wise.  What initially feels like a "???" turns out to be someone whose information tends to vary slightly from the truth.  The person who causes a deep sense of wariness in my gut turns out to be someone who is emotionally dangerous.  Paying attention to when and where my body tightens up tells me when I am stressed and where I am carrying it.  Listening to my body also helps me make healthier choices.  My body doesn't actually crave a Diet Coke.  It is thirsty.  And I have found that hydrating it with water actually satiates that thirst where Diet Coke only causes it to crave more Diet Coke.  I noticed the other day that my mouth wanted more chocolate, but my stomach was saying it had had quite enough, which tipped me off that I was now feeding something other than my body's needs, perhaps an emotional need.  My body doesn't actually need a drink at happy hour or a muscle relaxer, it needs to stretch those tightened up muscles.  30 minutes of yoga actually works out the stress and relaxes me instead of merely numbing me to the discomfort. 

Listening to my body and its messages not only gives me a fuller sense of living, but protects me from things long before I can detect them intellectually.  I feel more connected to myself and to the world around me.   It also teaches me that I can be trusted.  My body and its signals can be trusted.  And that makes me feel safer and more grounded as I move through life.  It gives me more confidence in me.  And that makes me feel better in general.

Comments

[Ethereal Highway]

Oh, Kellen. Where to begin...

I can tell by reading your post and knowing your attitudes from previous posts, that you consider the term 'mindfulness' as an alternative to dissociation and that you understand how painful and disruptive dissociation can be. You seem like a very nice person. I just want to share something with you while you (and I) are on the topic. It has been my experience, and that of many other trauma survivors, that many therapies do not use 'mindfulness' in the same way in which you mean it in this post. The problem is so bad, that like the word 'forgiveness', the word 'mindfulness' has become meaningless to me (except as a PTSD trigger). There are a lot of therapists out there who really misuse this word and use it beat people back INTO dissociation (DBT is a good example of this). The logic gets twisted into something like this: Mindfulness means focusing only on the present moment. If 'your' present moment contains bad memories, then that is not the present. Get rid of that and 'be mindful'.

A therapist actually told me once that if I could not focus on the present moment, then that meant I needed to be medicated. He said it because I was crying and very upset and scared over having had a flashback from a dissociated rape. I didn't need to be medicated and I didn't need to 'mindfully peel an orange'. I needed it to finally be okay to scream. I needed it to be okay to cry without being diagnosed as being defective. Instead I was rejected and treated coldly because I could not just go on with my life a week after a very formidable dissociative wall finally exploded one night in my living room. The things that happen in a lot of therapies are just not right and people get hurt. Sadly, it's often the people who have already been hurt so badly that they can't afford to take on any more damage. I hope your own honest attitude toward these things catches on, Kellen. I really do.

-- No Longer Anon

[Kellen]

Hi Ethereal,

I cannot tell you much I appreciate your words or how sorry I am that you have had these experiences. I know this is done because I have seen therapists do it. They do not mean to cause harm, they are just afraid of your emotions. But that is their deficiency, not yours. We seem to think that everyone should be happy and that anyone who is unhappy should be made happy, even if we have to medicate them. I'm sorry your feelings were not honored. That is the entire point of trauma therapy, to get in touch with those memories and feelings and to have them. I'm sorry you were let down at a time when you were extremely vulnerable. I'm pleased to hear that you know this is wrong and that you honored your own feelings and hung onto them.

In my humble opinion, mindfulness is not about being in the "present", it's about being - period. Sometimes our present is being ruled by things in our past which we have not resolved. In this case, "being in the present" means stopping in the present time to go back and deal with our past. I have heard it said about history, "He who does not learn from his past mistakes is doomed to repeat them." This is true with humans as well. If we block out our past, refuse to remember it, ignore the feelings caused by what has happened to us and fail to learn from those experiences, we cannot be fully in the present. Our brain is very self respecting. It demands that it be heard. If you refuse to listen it will makes itself known in nightmares and panic attacks. But then your nightmares and panic attacks are running your life and you don't know why. Then your past is messing up your present.

You cannot get into the present fully until you have experienced the past - fully. That means you have to feel the feelings of what happened to you, not imagine them away or distract yourself from them. I'm glad you realized that you needed to scream (or cry or rage or whatever) and that this did not make you "defective" or mean that you had a "disorder" or mean that you needed to be medicated like a mental patient. Trauma is a normal reaction by a normal person to an abnormal situation. Everything you are describing sounds like the normal trauma process and I'm glad you held on to it.

Oh dear, I'm preaching to the choir aren't I?

I am honored to meet you Anon and have a real name to go with a very real person. You are truly a courageous survivor and if anything I say here helps you on your journey then my work here has not been in vain.

[marjakathriver]

It's a whole new world for me now that I'm listening to my body and feeling the feelings. When we do this, we really can make much healthier choices. Thanks for this excellent, informative post. And thanks for allowing us to use it for THE BLOG CARNIVAL AGAINST CHILD ABUSE. I'm glad you could join us. BTW: I just found you on Twitter and I am now following you there.

[Kellen]

Hi Marj,

I'm pleased to hear that you found this article valuable. I am a very big fan of the Blog Carnival Against Child Abuse. Other readers can find it at:

http://survivorscanthrive.blogspot.com/

You folks do a terrific job providing information for child abuse survivors. Keep up the good work and I hope to see you Twitter!

[sudden memory loss]

Great article, although sati/smrti is the primary term that is usually invoked by the word mindfulness in a Buddhist context, it has been asserted "in Buddhist discourse, there are three terms that together map the field of mindfulness, [in their Sanskrit variants] smrti (Pali: sati), samprajanya (Pali: sampajañña) and apramāda (Pali: appamada)."