Creating a safe environment

It is the therapist’s responsibility to create a safe environment and to keep the client from going into overwhelm.  Trauma occurs when an organism encounters a harsh environment, which he or she is unable to handle.  The normal strategies of coping—seeking help, fighting back, or attempting escape—are ineffective and the organism becomes overwhelmed.  In overwhelm, we resort to our most evolutionarily primitive defense: we freeze, shutdown, and collapse.  We retreat inward, and the flow of life comes to a halt.

 

Overwhelm has a quality of both intensity and speed.  A safe environment begins with a slow and manageable pace—one that respects the individual’s unique process and need to begin defended.  A safe environment is one, which is attuned to the needs of the individual—especially as these needs change.  Finally for an environment to be safe, it must not only recognize the individual’s needs, it must provide for them and nourish the individual.  When the therapist manages the safety of the environment, the individual is no longer tasked with defending himself or herself and new experiences become possible.

 

Rebuilding relationship

Trauma always involves a breaking of relationship.  This includes our relationship with ourselves and our bodies, and our relationships with others and the world.  Trauma also involves a fragmenting of experience.  The elements that comprise an integrated experience—memory, thought, emotion, and sensation—are not linked.  This results both because our systems could not process what was happening to us, and also as a defensive measure to protect us from have an experience that seemed unbearable and might destroy us.  Numbing and dissociation are actually methods of coping and surviving.  The resolution of trauma involves re-linking the elements of experience and rebuilding the broken relationships.

 

The first relationship to be rebuilt is the relationship to one’s body.  This is not painful or scary.  It begins by finding a sense of peace and well-being within one’s body.  The body becomes inhabitable.  We then use the senses to reconnect to outside environment.  We relearn to orient to the here and now rather than to continue to live through our past experience.  We also learn to orient towards pleasure rather than pain.  Once this is accomplished, the body and environment become a ground and a resource to work with what happens in the mind and heart.  When allowed, the elements of experience come together in an organic and natural manner.  All along the way, working together, we are re-negotiating trust and intimacy in relationship.  This work generalizes to all the other relationships in our life.

Unwinding protective patterns

 

When we encounter a threat in our environment, a natural sequence of biological processes ensues.  Our sympathetic nervous system (the body’s energy mobilization system) is activated.  Our minds become hyper-alert and a large amount of energy is aroused in our bodies to prepare us to either fight or flee the situation.  If we are successful in negotiating the threat, then our bodies expend their energy, our minds settle, and the fear aroused by the threat disappears.  

Sometimes the threatening event happens so fast or intensively that it disrupts our active protective responses and they are not able to complete.  Or, if the situation turns from one of danger to one of doom—where escape or defense is not possible—another biological system is activated.  A part of the parasympathetic nervous system (the body’s energy conservation system) takes over.  We go into immobilization—where we are actually frozen and paralyzed.  Our bodies release natural opiates that numb us from pain and sensation, and our minds dissociate and go offline.  These responses are another form of protection from having an unbearable experience.

 

The result of this is that our bodies are stuck in a continually activated state (stress); our minds remain vigilant looking for a threat (lack of concentration); and our aroused fear becomes a dull and persist state of unease (anxiety).  This becomes our habitual way of being in the world.  We never move through the experience and return to relaxation. It’s like taking an in-breath and never exhaling—which is exactly what we do when we experience shock.  The physiological essence of trauma is this disruptive pattern in the nervous system.  Our protection and fear also inhibit us from approaching the situations, which provoked us, thus preventing from discovering if there is still something to be afraid of (avoidance).

 

The work of trauma healing is to help the nervous system return to regulation.  We do this by identifying and working through protective patterns in the body.  These often occur as small movements or patterns of tension.  As the incomplete protective responses are resolved, the energy held by them is released.  We also work to uncouple the fear from the experience (whether it is activation or freeze).  We can then return to the experience that was not had.  The experience is not of an outer situation, but actually of the sensations in the body that were associated with the event or events.  When these are uncoupled from fear, they become simply sensations.  In feeling them/re-experiencing them in a safe environment in a measured way, we have a chance to process them, digest them, and integrate them within ourselves.

 

Coming back to life

Once we have worked through a trauma and healed a broken connection, there is a natural movement to engage with the environment.  Our desires return and our senses connect us to the outside world.  As we engage with life, our nervous system still responds—but in a regulated fashion.  A healthy nervous system is one that goes up and down through cycles of activation and settling.  Similarly a healthy psyche is one that can come apart and then re-organize—this is how learning and change actually take place.  We know we have healed when we are driven by curiosity rather than fear.  Curiosity naturally draws us out and into the world, whereas fear causes us to retreat.