Healing is An Inside Job
The human body is an amazing and complex system, and understanding how it works is essential for true healing. Most people are beginning to understand the importance of physical and emotional health, but few understand the connection between the two. That connection is fascia, the connective tissue that runs throughout the body and hold every blood vessel, bone, nerve fiber, and muscle in place.
Fascia is also responsible for the transmission of neurotransmitters (e.g. serotonin, dopamine, acetylcholine) throughout your body. This connective tissue transmits hormones such as adrenaline and oxytocin throughout your body as well. What does this all mean? The long and the short is that your fascia is deeply intertwined with the nervous system.
Fascia plays a major role in how we physically experience stress, including traumatic events. When the body experiences trauma, it creates tension in the fascia that can cause pain and limit movement. This tension can become chronic and prevent the body from healing completely. When emotional trauma occurs, the body also responds by creating tension in the fascia. Lack of moment, emotional stress, physical injury, and previous unresolved trauma can lead to physical and physiological changes to the fascia, which is often then associated with the symptoms most frequently seen in patients with fibromyalgia, chronic fatigue syndrome, chronic pain, and inflammation.
If you scroll throughout this blog, it is apparent I frequently refer to the vagus nerve in my posts. To briefly review what the vagus nerve is, the vagus nerve plays a key role in communicating changes that occur within the fascia to your brain. The vagus nerve assists in maintaining the channels of communication between the brain and body that helps regulate your autonomic nervous system (ANS). The sympathetic nervous system (SNS) which is associated with fight or flight will increase the speed at which your body wants to respond or react to stimuli and the vagus nerve provides a steady brake to slow things down. In situations that are traumatic or life threatening, this “emergency brake” can kick in abruptly, bringing you to a sudden and hard stop. Sometimes this may result in physical symptoms including nausea, dizziness, or fainting.
Fascia is the largest sensory organ in your body and its primary role is to communicate information about what is happening in your body to your brain. When we experience trauma, we either move into freeze (immobility) or faint. If this trauma response does not resolve we can feel stuck and over time, lose our connection to our bodily sensations. We may feel more disconnected or dissociated.
When working to heal trauma, it is so important to understand how these vital physiological and anatomical structures play a pivotal role in not only recovering from traumatic events, but to also understand how we can work with these structures using mind-body sensory awareness. The key is to progress slowly on the path towards reconnecting with your body and restoring a relationship to your body after trauma.
Me, Myself, & My Gut Feeling
Do you ever have a gut feeling that you know you need to listen to? Our bodies are part of our minds and they speak to us every day. And when you pay attention, it can improve your life.
Sometimes your body knows what is right for you. It sends you signals. When your feelings are in a spin, the message from your body becomes very clear. However, the message or messages can become difficult to interpret when our mental health is in poor shape.
Anxiety and inner conflict arise if our inner compass is cloudy and if our mind is at odds with itself in a constant state of cognitive dissonance. In my practice, I both encourage and educate my patients to learn how to listen to their own insides and actively tune into the sensations they experience in their bodies. By doing so, we can identify what is right for us and and feel empowered to take the small, safe steps towards healing.
This type of somatic awareness can help us to become aligned in our thoughts, feelings, and actions. The gut feelings we experience are not just for emergency "fight or flight" situations, they are present all the time. Just as you are reading this blog post, if you focus your attention on the heart and gut regions of your body, you will begin to notice a response to my words. Just notice if any part of you feels my words to be true, or perhaps you feel "no that can't be true". Perhaps you notice your attention going elsewhere? Like reading ahead to see how much longer this post is? Just notice how quickly or slowly your body is able to take a complex situation and summarize it quickly, or moment by moment.
There is to come on this topic, so stay tuned!
I am sharing this video clip for the athlete in the back who may just miss this important message.
I firmly believe that each time an athlete speaks up about mental health, they are helping to lay a foundation, brick by brick for the future of mental and physical wellness in sports. And just in this moment, two successful athletes came together, showing the rest of the world jut how powerful vulnerability and openness about mental health can be.
This takes good sportsmanship to an entirely new level and I am hopeful for the future of sports and mental health.
With Eye Movement Desensitization Reprocessing (EMDR) therapy becoming popularized as a mental health treatment, I would like to spend some time with you today talking about the various mechanisms of trauma and how it affects our brain and its functioning.
A primary question I often receive centers on the question of "what is dissociation" and "will I dissociate during EMDR?". Dissociation is a survival oriented process. Dissociation is the way the brain has the ability to take something that is so overwhelming when a patient cannot escape a stressful event and/or is caught in the freeze response.
So for example, there might be a child being hurt by a caregiver. Children are often too small to run away or fight back. They are the victim of the grown up. What the brain does during this type of scenario is that it allows the child to be there and not be there at the same time. In other words, the dissociative process of the brain is protecting the child so they can survive the experience.
EMDR therapy helps patients move through the dissociative process, which is inherent in any kind of trauma. EMDR helps the patient move through the experience with a much reduced rate of emotional arousal.
For the previous thirty years when trauma and Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) were added to the Diagnostic Statistical Manual (DSM), it only categorized trauma as specifically large or “Big T” events. However, adverse life experiences or “little traumas” can also have a major impact on social, emotional, psychological, and physiological functioning.
I personally choose not to define trauma by “little” or “big” events. What is significant to me in my professional opinion is how the smaller, more repetitive patterns of events become recorded in the nervous system and because of its repetition, these experiences gradually accumulate in the brain.
Where in the brain does this all get stored? Please allow me to introduce to you, if you have not already learned about the amygdala. The amygdala is within the right hemisphere of the brain, known for responding to a heightened sense of arousal. The amygdala translates information that it receives from the other parts of the brain into an emotional response. This type of response can manifest in a variety of ways within the body (e.g. heightened blood pressure, more rapid breathing, blood moving from the central part of the body to the peripheral, and the release of adrenaline).
In my next post, I will continue to discuss two key symptom behaviors that are congruent with trauma: avoidance and rumination. Stay tuned!
A Mental Health Slam Dunk for the NBA
I recently came across an article on the NBA's official website from March 12, 2019, describing a league-wide mental health initiative taking aim at addressing mental health and wellness issues for players.
This is wonderful news for athletes, the NBA, and families and loved ones of athletes as well! The battles professional athletes have with mental health issues shows that money nor fame can solve everything. More importantly, it shows mental illness does not discriminate. It can affect anyone.
Whether you are struggling with a mental health illness, or you simply want to perform better mentally, the first step to working on your mental-emotional health is to be unapologetically open with yourself and recognize the emotions you are feeling. Above all, don't feel scared to reach out if you need someone to talk to. I am here to support you in all areas of your health.
Mental health matters to everyone and I think this is an amazing step in the right direction for our athletes! You can read the original article by clicking here.
Certified EMDR Therapist!
So excited to announce that after two years of intensive training, I have been approved for certification as a Certified EMDR therapist!
What is the difference between EMDR trained and Certified? Clients will ask me, "what does it mean if I read that a therapist says he or she is Level 1 or Level 2 trained?". Generally speaking, EMDR basic trainings require a minimum of six days and a majority of EMDR trainings will break up the six day requirement by hosting two-three day weekend training events held on different assigned weekends of a specific month. When a clinician will state that he or she is "LEVEL 1 EMDR Trained", he or she has technically only completed the first three days of basic training. Subsequently, when a clinician states he or she is "LEVEL 2 EMDR Trained", he or she has completed the six days of basic training. Some therapists may find the basic training to be sufficient for what he or she is looking to add to his or her own practice. Once I completed basic training I immediately began applying the skills I learned and provided EMDR therapy in my sessions. I began to notice that my clients symptoms began to resolve almost immediately. How cool is that? People feeling better? I was hooked!
After completing basic training I was presented the opportunity to invest in furthering my knowledge of EMDR treatment even more and I went for it! I dedicated the next two years of my life utilizing EMDR and somatic processing in my sessions, attending monthly meetings with an EMDRIA approved consultant for case consultation, and learning even more about the history, mechanism of action, and function of EMDR. In my down time I spent hours studying the limbic system, neurobiology of trauma, and human anatomy so that I could truly understand the biology of stress on a cellular level. My training and certification was unique in that the founder of the Somatic Attachment Focused EMDR protocol (S.A.F.E) interweaved a concept of noticing and understanding how the body will tell us what the client needs and how a feeling, movement, or overall posture may be linked to the emotion(s) associated with a disturbing memory. Being an EMDR provider requires a great depth of understanding and dedication to understanding how the human body reacts to stress, perceived danger, and how to work with a client when he or she may be beyond a window of tolerance to keep him or her safe. As a Certified EMDR therapist, part of my intensive training focused primarily on safety. This type of treatment necessitates a high level of competency and should not be used as a treatment unless the clinician has the qualifications, experience, and training to do so. I understand the necessity of keeping my clients safe and closely monitor each session, ensuring a person does not leave the session until he or she feels grounded enough to do so.
So what's next? I look forward to continuing to utilize EMDR in my practice and would like to become an EMDRIA approved consultant. As a consultant, I would have the privilege of working with mental health professionals in the field who are interested in deepening his or her understanding of EMDR treatment. Regardless, the journey is far from over! If you have any questions regarding EMDR, Certification in EMDR, or would like to make an appointment, please feel free to give me a call: 904-280-8006
Do not let fear steer the wheel of your life decisions. You can accomplish a lot more looking at things through the lens of love rather than the lens of fear. Once we can acknowledge we are saying no with love instead of saying yes with fear, setting boundaries could become a lot less painful for some. Have a great start to your week!
Trauma can leave you feeling overwhelmed, anxious, or possibly shut down and it is incredibly beneficial to develop an understanding of where these feelings and responses are coming from inside the body.
You may be familiar with the body's acute stress response: fight-or-flight.. If you are not familiar with the terms, fight-or-flight are features of the body's built in protection mechanism that surface in the presence of something that is terrifying, either mentally or physically. There is an additional response to perceived threat to safety: Immobilization/Freeze/Submit. This occurs when fight-or-flight do not restore safety and can appear in various forms such as a high alert stillness, freezing, or dissociation.
You can probably think of a time when you experienced the fight-or-flight response. In the face of something that may have been frightening; perhaps encountering a growling dog during a walk or preparing to give a big presentation at school or work, your heartbeat began beating much faster, you could feel yourself breathing faster, and your entire body became tense. Maybe you felt a lump in your throat, felt dizzy, tired, you could feel your hands trembling, or felt serious urgency to use the restroom. Essentially, the physical symptoms you experienced were indicating that your body was gearing up to either fight or flee the threat (real or perceived). Your brain, and more specifically your nervous system, sent the signals to your body, preparing you to fight or flee, making it more likely that you would survive the danger. Cool, huh? Let's take a minute to discuss where and what this whole nervous system thing is about before going deeper into trauma.
Your Nervous System 101
A basic way to describe the very intricate and delicate nervous system is to point out the two components of the nervous system. One that is conscious (e.g. actively thinking to move your fingers) and another that functions without awareness (e.g. regulating body temperature). The main actor in the human nervous system that functions without conscious awareness is the autonomic nervous system (ANS). The ANS regulates organ functions such as heart rate, digestion and also responds to trauma or threat.
Also, the ANS either deploys energy (e.g. cortisol) or conserves energy through two primary systems: the sympathetic nervous system and parasympathetic nervous system. Why is this important? Our autonomic nervous system plays a significant role in our emotional and physiological responses to stress (trauma included!). The sympathetic nervous system releases a stress chemical (cortisol) in the body (fight-or-flight). The parasympathetic nervous system pumps the breaks on the sympathetic nervous system and instead allows the body to shift towards relaxation, digestion, and recovery. When things are going well and you are feeling great, chances are your sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems are working in harmony and you would be less likely to have issues with digestion, sleep, and feeling "run down". This is where trauma comes back into the story...
Trauma interferes with the harmonious dance between the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems. I should also point out that the parasympathetic nervous system is not only associated with recovery functions but is involved with dissociation and immobilization (freeze).
Dissociation is a biological protective mechanism deployed by the body when there is a perceived threat or danger. Dissociation separates you from conscious awareness particularly when frightening feelings or memories surface. I'm going to normalize dissociation here by saying we all do it or have done it at some point in our own lives. What does dissociation look like? Dissociation can appear in a variety of symptoms however, most frequently they may manifest as relatively mild sensations of fogginess, sleepiness, nauseous, or difficulty concentrating to feeling numb or cut off. In some of my more complex trauma cases, I have worked with clients who have reported experiences lapses of memory or feeling "lost in time".
When a trauma occurs and goes unanswered, a survival mechanism, either fight-or-flight will become conditioned into the nervous system. So if a traumatic event, death, abuse, accident, rejection, abandonment, chronic illness, sports injury, and so forth occurred in childhood, chances are a triggering event may produce anxiety and high arousal if there was a missing experience during and after the event. This I feel to be especially true if that person experienced a pain that was unanswered with love, connection, or attachment, particularly when he or she needed it most.
With just a slight shift in the lens of therapy, it's become apparent that a lot of the psychopathologies I treat as a therapist have at some point or another functioned as adaptive coping mechanisms for my clients, and that they were most likely developed as a response to a significant change (e.g. threat, loss, trauma, etc.). Whatever it is that they needed to do to allow him or her to thrive also became a symptom and limitation keeping him or her stuck. But you don't have to stay stuck if you don't want to! We will get to more on that in a future post ;) Stay tuned.
Take just one moment of your day to look around and intentionally look at each object in your surroundings. As you focus on one object at a time, see if you can just notice the shape, the color, the size, the texture, maybe even sound.
This is the fun part: as you look at each object individually ask yourself "how would I describe this object to a toddler or to a visitor from a foreign country who does not speak or understand my language?"
It can be an uncomfortable feeling not knowing how to show you care and support a friend or loved one when he or she is in a dark place, whether it be depression, PTSD, anxiety, or anything else.
It's important to point out that support can look different for everyone. However, sometimes support is simply listening and validating feelings. Telling someone what they feel isn't real or isn't important may help you feel like you're doing due diligence encouraging someone to keep going but spoiler alert: it doesn't.
Validating feelings, whether or not you understand them, is SO important. Let compassion, kindness, and awareness be your guide to responding.
Remember: being present is sometimes the greatest present you can give.
Amy Pope-Latham, LCSW is a board certified mental health professional in Ponte Vedra Beach, FL.