Episode 4 of Point of View with Barry Boyce, Editor-in-Chief of Mindful Magazine, and Heather Hurlock, Senior Editor-Digital at Mindful.org, explores how mindfulness can be used to help people deal with trauma.
Twenty Two. It’s a number many people associate with veterans these days—That’s because it’s the number of veterans who commit suicide every day according to a study done by the Department of Veterans Affairs. The suicide fact sheet on the VA website says that going through trauma or suffering from PTSD makes people more likely to commit suicide.
Just last week, a study just came out in the journal Depression and Anxiety suggesting that mindfulness practice actually changes the way the brain responds to traumatic memories.
HH: Barry, let’s start off looking at trauma. That word means something slightly different to everyone.
BB: So, I think the interesting thing to do before looking at trauma is to consider our situation as human beings. We’re out in the world and very vulnerable. We have our toughness, but we are also quite vulnerable, not just psychologically, but literally. If you are driving a car and somebody else hits you and your body gets thrown about, the body is going to get broken. And we experience, first a lot of pain, but then, our reaction to that pain. Because as human beings we like security, and because of that security we like to ignore our vulnerability—And when we get hit hard it pushes our psychological buttons.
HH: So trauma is not just a physical thing, it’s also a psychological thing. And both physical and psychological trauma lead to emotional reactions that you might not even be aware of, but need to be part of the healing process too.
BB: Yeah, it’s really interesting. I’ve talked to various teachers who have done mindfulness training in corporate settings, sometimes with leaders, like CEOs, and the CEOs come because they want to increase their performance and effectiveness, and then after they practice some mindfulness for a while, and start to get in touch with their thoughts and emotions a little bit more, they discover that there are deep-seated traumas down there that are unacknowledged and that have a big influence on their thinking and way of being, and bring along with them a lot of stress.
For example, maybe their father yelled at them, or maybe even beat them constantly when they were a teenager. This formed their whole way of being and they begin to uncover that. So, many of us will have traumatic events that not only happened once, but may have been repeated. And that’s something I want to talk about. There’s having a one-time traumatic event, like a car accident. But then there’s the damage the we suffer from repeated traumatic events, and there’s a scale there from verbal abuse, to physical and sexual abuse, to the threat of death, and to war and chaos. And when those events get repeated over and over again they cause an extremely deep level of trauma.
“If you’ve been in war…and you’re in the midst of a threatening environment that has you hypervigilant 24 hours a day, every day, for months and maybe even years on end—There’s nothing disordered about the reaction you’re going to have to that.”
It’s interesting, we talk about it as PTSD, post-traumatic stress disorder, but that’s tricky in a number of ways. First off, many people believe, and I am among them, that it is not technically a disorder—In a sense that, if you’ve been sexually abused or violated, if you’ve been in war where you’ve seen people killed, you’ve been maimed yourself, perhaps you’ve been responsible for taking other’s lives, and you’re in the midst of a threatening environment that has you hypervigilant 24 hours a day, every day, for months and maybe even years on end—There’s nothing disordered about the reaction you’re going to have to that. That’s more than our gentle vulnerable human body can take on board. So, all sorts of things start to happen. So, first off, it’s not a disorder. I think that’s a very important point. If someone who’s suffering from PTSD feels it’s a disorder, it’s a double whammy, because they’re already feeling disoriented and bad about themselves, and now they’re being told that there’s something wrong with them.
By saying it’s not a disorder I don’t mean to imply that it’s not a mental health problem. It is a problem of your mental health and wellbeing, for sure. Most people go through an undiagnosed period where they self-medicate, and they have extreme difficulty with anxiety, and they can’t regulate their emotions well, they can have fits of anger or sudden bouts of depression, they can have manic phases, hyper-vigilance, you know, just sitting in a cafe and then hearing the clink of a coffee cup across the room can cause you to jump.
These kinds of symptoms, if one is in the middle of the situation, the traumatic event, it becomes the environment that you are used to. And then when you get pulled out of that, such as you’re in a war zone and then you leave, or you’ve been going through years of abuse and you leave your abuser, there’s usually a period of adjustment to the new reality. You’re now in post-traumatic stress, but you don’t recognize that. You have all the symptoms and you get very scared—You’re hypervigilant, your emotions are all over the place. Also, people in your life may not be able to handle it, and not know what to do for you. And very commonly people contemplate and succeed in committing suicide.
I think one of the first things to recognize to come back to what I was saying earlier is that trauma is something we all know and understand. We are highly sensitive beings, and as safe and secure a world as we’ve managed to create for ourselves and our climate-controlled comfort, we are still incredibly vulnerable. And lots of us end up being damaged or abused and the rest of us tend to ignore that until it happens to us at that level. But we all share in this world where our vulnerability meets various kinds of dangers. So it’s not just something for a select few .
HH: Lots of people think about the word vulnerability as a negative but you seem to be talking about it as a collective human gift that mindfulness can protect.
BB: Yes. Very much so. Vulnerability is something that’s inevitable. It’s just simply physically true. At any moment we are vulnerable. We are not made