When I became a social worker in 1998, I realized that the most important thing I could do was: help people learn how to navigate their world.
I still see many challenges as navigational challenges, but lately the navigation is as much internal as it is external. Recently, I started reading a book that explains the Integrative Restoration (iRest) program for healing Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. The book was written by Richard C. Miller, PhD and is cited at the end of this article.
As wild fires decimated huge swaths of Northern California, I started practicing the tools from a book about the Integrative Restoration (iRest) program for healing Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. The book was written by Richard C. Miller, PhD.
My 12-year-old son and I narrowly escaped one of the first fires that erupted just after I had put him to bed in a house on a remote dead-end road in the mountains above Calistoga.
So I am finding the iRest program tools particularly useful for delving deeper into a Mindfulness practice while navigating the treacherous waters of trauma. Some of the tools are common to meditation and guided relaxation, but the whole set of ten is quite powerful and unique. In the book, Dr. Miller suggests a variety of methods for using these tools, including keeping a journal, practicing focused thought, body sensing, breath sensing, meditation and ultimately something he calls “Being Awareness.”
At the risk of oversimplifying the program, I will interpret the ten tools explained by Dr. Miller.
1...Affirm your Heartfelt Mission. This, according to Dr. Miller, is “the energy of life within you that gives rise to and sustains your inner felt sense of purpose, meaning and value.” In the book, he outlines daily practices that will help affirm a heartfelt mission.
2...Affirm your Intention. “Like a compass,” Dr. Miller writes “intentions keep you on course so that you can accomplish your heartfelt mission.” They can be as specific as “I will stop smoking” or as general as I will be a good parent. Intentions act like the banks of a river on which you are floating and keep you going with the flow of your life.
3...Affirm your Inner Resource. Dr. Miller writes that your inner resource is “designed to empower you to feel in control of and at ease with every experience you have during your life.” It is a place of refuge. By integrating the tools in this practice, you will find your inner resource is a constant well from which you can draw feelings of being grounded and secure.
4...Body sensing. While body scans and focused mind-body meditation is common in many yoga and Mindfulness practices, Dr. Miller shows how it can activate the first three tools. One of the techniques he describes is “Progressive Muscle Relaxation.” From head to toes, this practice takes about 20 minutes and is most effective when it is done daily.
5...Breathing for Life. This is an often-practiced method for calming the mind and promoting relaxation through meditation.
6...Welcoming Opposites of Feeling and Emotion. This is a very interesting method for dealing with the aversions, distain, resentments, anger, sadness and fear that swirl all around us at various times – especially after we have experienced trauma.
This technique, as with the others that precede it, works well when it is practiced concurrently or in sequence with the others. Dr. Miller starts by describing feelings as physical sensations (e.g. cool/warm, rough/smooth) that make up our emotions. He likens feelings to ingredients cooking in a pot.
Emotions, like a pot over a flame, get heated up in response to circumstances and relationships and they cause the physical sensations, the feelings, to manifest. With PTSD, feelings and emotions get so intense that they activate the nervous system and seize control of the self.
This area is pretty deep and involves the role that chemicals play in your bloodstream once the nervous system is triggered. Essentially, it takes time to process these intense feelings and emotions that can hijack your inner resource. Rather than trying to evade hard feelings and emotions, though, Dr. Miller suggests we stay connected with and respond to them rather than run.
A similar approach can be taken with nightmares during sleep. Rather than turning away to flee, turn toward the nightmare and ask what it wants of you.
7...Welcoming Opposites of Thought. Where feelings and emotions are messages from your body (your heart, your gut), thoughts are messages from your mind. Dr. Miller says that this tool "teaches you how to become aware of and dis-identify from your negative thoughts and teaches you to break your connection to your harmful thoughts, beliefs, images, and memories.” This is critical for people suffering from trauma.
Trauma often comes with shame, sadness, anger and other emotions related to thoughts about failure of some kind – especially around what you could have done differently. Notice here that negative thoughts are usually ruminations on stuff from the past.
If we step back and view thoughts from a distance, we get a better view of them. In a very powerful practice of welcoming opposites of thought, Dr. Miller prescribes a closed-eye body sensing exercise that connects negative thoughts with specific feelings in the body.
Thoughts such as “I’m broken” “I’m powerless” “I’m not enough” or “I should have done it differently” can be taken in boldly and welcomed. He suggests a process of determining where and how these thoughts are felt (e.g. tense, closed, aching) and a realization of how you act or react in your life when these thoughts are running rampant in your mind. From there, you can write down words in a journal that describe how you feel when you take one or more of these negative thought to be true.
Before you dissolve into a crumpled mass of tears and self-loathing, turn your attention to imagining opposite thoughts for each of the negative ones you are experiencing. Now “I’m broken” becomes “I’m whole.” “I’m powerless” becomes “I’m capable.” “I’m not enough” becomes “I’m ok just as I am.” “I should have done it differently” morphs into “I did it the best way I know how.”
As with the negative thoughts, Dr. Miller prescribes the body sensing exercise to affirm the opposite (positive) thought. After this, he encourages us to experience both opposites at the same time and to toggle back and forth between the negative thought and felt-sense and that of the positive.
Welcoming Joy and Well-Being. “Joy is already inside you, waiting to be released,” writes Dr. Miller. It is a natural capacity that’s yours at birth*. In order to thrive, you need joy.
8...As with the body sensing exercise described above, Dr. Miller designed a subtle yet powerful practice that allows for alternating between experiencing joy and experiencing a negative emotion or thought or perceived stressor. This is very much like having a pleasant dream and then a nightmare. He asks the practitioner to “allow joy to spread throughout the body even as you’re feeling the negative stress.”
This chapter is particularly uplifting and includes a nice description of how taking a nap can be highly therapeutic and healthful.
9...Being Awareness. This is a marvelous open-eyed practice that allows you to bring your awareness to everything in your space. It encourages you to softly expand your awareness in a neutral, non-judgmental way to everything that comes into view or earshot.
In this chapter, Dr. Miller continues to delve deeper into the core of the self. “Your core identity,” he suggests “is awareness.”
10...Experiencing Your Wholeness. When you integrate the other tools and practices, it brings you to a place where Dr. Miller suggests you can “live your life from your felt-sense of your essential nature, or wholeness.” A big part of this tool is sensing you as the observer of yourself. It is an awareness that transcends the ego in a profound way. It is “just the wholeness of awareness”
Get The Book: The iRest Program for Healing PTSD; Richard C. Miller, PhD; 2015; New Harbinger Publications, Inc. www.newharbinger.com
Charles Higgins, MSW
www.practice.place