Restoring the Spirit After Experiencing Trauma

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

The Language of Awareness – Lingua Franca

Lingua Franca is defined as a language that is adopted as a common language between speakers whose native languages are different.  It came out of merchant interactions in the Mediterranean ports where many different cultures were represented and many languages were spoken.  It allowed people to build enough trust amidst their diversity to do business together.  This is an interesting concept with regard to common awareness.

The language of awareness emerges as people begin to trust themselves and experience trust with others.  It starts with small transactions and develops over time.

Much like learning a new language, awareness takes practice and attention.  It requires that the individual relax the brain enough to let go of attachment to knowledge (the native tongue) and welcome in the rhythm and idiom of a new way of communicating.  The language of awareness opens your internal channels so that you can open the best external channels available with others.

It does not come easily.  I took six years of Spanish in school but didn’t really become comfortable or conversant with the language until I travelled to countries where it was spoken and I needed to dig deep inside myself to get places and interact with others.  I had to let go of my attachment to English and allow the flow of this new way of communicating (and feeling) in order for my fluency to emerge.

It is a process, sometimes halting and awkward, to learn a new language.  Learning the language of awareness is no different. 

While sitting in stillness, focusing on the breath, we let the brain relax enough to welcome in the new language - the language of the true self.  In this space, we experience all the struggles of learning a new language: confusion, inadequacy, fear, anger, frustration, and sadness.  But with practice, these feelings dissipate and awareness starts to flow naturally.   By sitting quietly with this emerging language, the breath helps to build a vocabulary of awareness.

With the language of awareness emerging parallel to the other languages we speak, we find new ways of understanding others.   The language of awareness is very much a Lingua Franca that allows us to interact more gracefully and effectively with others, even amidst conflict and initial distrust. 

As awareness grows, so does empathy and compassion.  This trio makes for powerful energy with others.  It becomes a kind of “awareness of awareness” where tough situations and unhappy feelings can be objectively witnessed and acknowledged.   New channels open up that help with solving problems and building stronger relationships. 

“I see you,” said the one to the other.  And the other felt seen.

To be or not to be… Happy

Why is it important that employees in an organization be happy?  Can’t they just get their work done?

They can get their work done, but it will not be without strife.  Unhappy employees tend to set the tone for teams and the workplace.  It’s a tone that makes others not want to be there.

Happiness matters because people matter.  An organization’s people drive the culture and the culture determines if customers or supporters feel a sense of loyalty and want to come back.

So what makes people happy?  Well, mostly a sense of internal well-being, self-esteem, a sense of belonging, a feeling of being safe and a physiological state of healthfulness or at least coping.  People are happy when they feel appreciated and recognized for what they do and who they are.    But more than anything, happiness rises as we find meaning in the things we do.  While making money is important for paying for the things we need to survive, it is not a true source of happiness.

This is a complex mess of stuff, but if we unpack it and look at each element on its own and then in relation to the other elements, we find that there are some basic and fundamental ingredients.  Internal well being, for example, is something that requires a lot of stillness and calm.  We have to let the foam settle in order to see more clearly to the bottom of the pool inside ourselves. 

This is why Mindfulness is so effective.  It allows the self to experience calm amidst the clutter of thoughts and feelings.  It builds awareness of those thoughts and feelings and allows them to be there without all the drama.

When we start reacting to stuff, it usually is because of untended thoughts and feelings that swirl around from past experiences, usually negative, that condition us to think and feel the worst when we are triggered by something someone says or does.  The great neurologist Viktor Frankel said, “Between stimulus and response there is space and in that space is our power to choose our response.  In our response lies our growth and our freedom.”

A lot of what makes people unhappy has to do with their frustration over a lack of control over others and inability to make things turn out the way we want.  This dynamic affects self-esteem.  Frankel again:  'When we are no longer able to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves.'

As for feeling a sense of safety and belonging, critical elements of happiness, people who can access internal awareness on demand are able to strengthen their ability to cope with awkward and challenging dynamics. When we get closer to mastering our internal stuff, it makes it vastly more attainable to face the external stuff and respond appropriately.

At the base of all this is the state of health and wellness that we experience.  When I feel lousy, I don’t function very well.  I may show up for work and go through the motions, but it isn’t pretty and I am not a happy camper.  This is where Mindfulness can produce the most dramatic benefit. 

When we still ourselves once or preferably twice a day and focus on relaxing the body while deepening breathing, we give our physiological systems a terrific boost.  At first, we experience all the discomforts that are there in our minds and bodies and the mind tells us how awkward it feels and how much we need a pain reliever or a stiff drink.  Stillness is much harder than it appears.

But once we sink deeper into stillness and allow the breath to do its work, the pathway to healing starts to reveal itself.  By focusing the mind on only the act of breathing, while allowing random thoughts and feelings to come and go, the mind gains access to channels for soothing pain and promoting critical connections between the mind and body.

From Strategic Thinker to Strategic Awareness

As I continue to examine what this concept of Strategic Awareness is, I am looking back at my role as an executive director in various organizations. Often and E.D. is responsible for wrangling the board and staff and other stakeholders through a strategic planning process and therefore becomes an accidental "strategic thinker."

These strategic planning processes often went longer and became more arduous than anyone anticipated and produced plans that few people ever read. Some of the reasons that the traditional strategic thinker process does not generate the desired results are that basic stuff gets lost along the way.

Trust, for one thing, gets overlooked as the foundation of any good team process. But building trust is not easy. It requires people to pay attention to each other in ways that tend to make people uncomfortable.

A couple of other key pieces that get lost are shared purpose and accountability. People who don't feel trust have a hard time feeling a sense of shared purpose or holding each other accountable for achieving the goals associated with that shared purpose.

So what to do?

If we take a step back.  Each of us.  And allow ourselves the literal and figurative breathing room to become more aware internally of what’s going on inside, it sets us up to approach others with greater awareness and likelihood of connection.  That connection can build trust and help us feel that critical sense of shared purpose.

It’s popular in workforce culture to say “people just need to feel heard.”  It used to be: “everyone just needs to vent sometimes.”  Well, this is a good starting point except that a better starting point is hearing yourself first. 

Get uncomfortable with your own pain points first.  Sit silent and listen to your breathing.  Hear the chatter of your super ego telling you all the sadness, anger and fear that swirl around pretty much all the time.  And just breathe.  Let yourself drop into an awareness of those thoughts and feelings.  And just breathe some more.

So what this is about is a mindfulness path to hearing and healing some of your stuff so you are better able to raise your awareness of what other people are about (and ultimately develop and awareness of awareness – but that’s another story).

Strategic thinkers can evolve into someone with strategic awareness when they develop the ability to:

1. detect when emotions, feelings and thoughts are running rampant inside
2. create space, a pause button if you will, that gives them time to choose a response
3. pivot from a reactive mode to a relaxed intensity grounded in kindness, respect and grace

It’s not easy, but the process is worth exploring. 

Leading and Following

During a yoga class today I was reflecting on my experience as a leader of nonprofit organizations.  Something about yoga makes me focus on all sorts of things from the past that need to be reconciled or processed.   One of the realizations that came to me was how, in the midst of lots of success with fundraising, board development, strategic planning and implementation, I had failed over and over to connect with and inspire many people on the staff.  Somehow I missed the trees amidst my soft focus on the forest!

The lesson is more complex that the forest and the trees, though.  It is really about the interconnected nature of leading and following.  I had missed the nuances of the dances we need to do with our teammates, colleagues and employees. 

If you lead in a traditional way, you may learn to be a pretty good listener, use a variety of methods to show appreciation for people you work with and generate a pretty healthy organizational culture, but if you as a leader fail to see the value in following as part of your leadership, you lose an important opportunity to create a truly powerful dynamic.

Some people refer to this as "leading from behind."  Recently there has been focus on conscious leadership and wisdom in leadership in books and articles, so I am not forging new territory except that it is an important revelation for me.

There is something here.  I look forward to exploring it more by myself and with others.

Purpose Process

 We all want to  experience a sense of purpose in our work and in our lives. Along the way, we want to experience physical health and mental emotional well-being.  But there's so much that gets in the way. We react to things all the time. We dwell on the past and fret about the future.  

If we can slow down and develop awareness of our thoughts and feelings, we have the opportunity to explore the sense of purpose we all seek. It starts with examining what's blocking creativity in work. Opening up creativity allows more space in our lives to discover purpose. 

Power in the Moment

Our memories of the past and anxiety about the future tend to dominate our lives from moment to moment.  The logical side of our brains work nonstop to reconcile the whirl of thoughts and feelings that soar through.  It's exhausting.

Taking yourself to the least-excited state of stillness you can find allows you to rest from all that.  Even five minutes will open up the other side of your brain ever so slightly so that you may experience a burst of creativity, openness or compassion. 

If you can train yourself to access this quiet on a more regular basis, the cacophony of the world becomes more manageable.  You can be in the moment rather than living last week's catastrophe over again.  And you can feel a sense of ease and lightness, perhaps even joy, in the face of fear and anxiety over what's to come.

Softly launching

Finding the right space for expressing your truth is not always easy.  We are more aware of the sensitivities of others, really what others will think of us, than we are of our own deeper thoughts and feelings.  Mindful awareness is a powerful thing that can help us navigate to that space where truth can be revealed gracefully and without harm.  Or if there is harm, it can be managed and healed in real time.  Say what you really think and what you really feel.  I will listen.  I will allow and accept your truth for what it is: your truth.  I will acknowledge it as your truth as genuinely as possible, even if my reactive self is repulsed, saddened, afraid or angry. 

Stillness amidst the noise

As life becomes more complex and hectic, we are more likely to react to things, carry unhealthy attitudes and experience stress at home and in the workplace.  We feel tightness and rigidness that makes us more susceptible to breaking. We are blocked from doing the work we want to do and being the people we want to be in our lives.

Doing and being are two different things but they are inter-related. When we can step out of our busy lives for a moment and just settle on being, we have the opportunity to reset our clocks and reboot our systems. The more time we put to being and settling, quieting the cacophony of thoughts, the more we are able to proceed gracefully to the doing.

A retreat, whether it’s a walk around the block or ten days in Bali, can open things up so that we appreciate the world around us in new ways.  Openness helps us imagine what is possible and tolerate the viewpoints of others around us as we go about the doings of our lives. 

Openness is a good predictor of creativity. Openness stimulates brain activity that might be stuck. For now, try this:

Close the door. Stand or sit up straight. Let your breath exhale and relax.

Now breath in threw your nose on the count of six. Hold for one count.

Exhale with a “Haaaa” sound, as loud as you want, as if you are fogging a mirror.

Repeat ten times. You’re welcome.