DailyOM: What motivated you to create this course?
Eric: I wanted folks to better understand not only what trauma is, how it affects us, and what we can do to heal from it but also to deeply understand how anything can be experienced as traumatic — that trauma is a personal, subjective experience that cannot be discounted just because someone else, like a mental health professional, does not think that we are entitled to call that experience traumatic.
Trauma is a personal experience, not something on some checklist somewhere. I want participants taking this course to understand they have real permission to call their personal life experiences trauma if that's how they feel. Only you get to say what has proven traumatic to you or what may prove traumatic for you.
This is a big concept because we have been trained to believe that it is the size of the incident that determines whether or not trauma has occurred. But that is not what determines whether or not we will experience some event as traumatic. It is our inner reality that determines it, our precise idiosyncratic makeup, not the magnitude, so to speak, of the event.
DailyOM: How does unaddressed trauma affect our day-to-day lives? Are there side effects that we may not easily recognize?
Eric: Let's say that you have trouble concentrating. You (or a mental health professional) might dub that a symptom of a mental disorder. But what may well be going on is that you are experiencing the effects of unaddressed trauma. What might a better explanation sound like, one that takes trauma into account?
It might sound like: "I grew up in a violent household and never felt safe, and now, what with the stress of my job, the added challenge of them demolishing the apartment building next door, and my child's serious sickness, the past and the present together have created this fractured state where I just can't concentrate on anything."
You should suppose that there are reasons for whatever it is that you are thinking or feeling. Say that you are a novelist unable to work on your current novel. You could say that you are blocked, but that adds nothing to your understanding of the situation. Or you could ponder the situation and admit, "Not being able to find a publisher for my first two novels amounts to a pair of traumatic experiences. Those experiences have left me in real despair and without any motivation to work on my third novel."
You may not be happy to learn what you just learned, but that hard truth is the first step to healing and to the restoration of novel writing as a meaningful pursuit. Trauma leaves its marks. We do not need to like this, but we must accept that we are seeing intimations of the traumas we have experienced — in the way that we handle or fail to handle a situation, in the way that we speak up or fall silent, in the way that we avoid repeating a mistake or repeat it. Starting today, please begin looking for these hints and intimations.
DailyOM: Tell us about the healing journey students will experience in this course.
Eric: In this course, you will learn skills required for healing: (1) how trauma lives on in the body, (2) trauma triggers and (3) what you can do about them, (4) how to access your healing freedom, (5) the hidden consequences of trauma and (6) how to spot them, and a (7) complete program for healing from trauma.
Trauma creates a sort of shattering. What gets shattered? Sometimes it is our sense of safety; the world no longer feels safe to us. Sometimes it is our self-esteem and our self-image; we drop down many pegs in our own estimation and no longer see ourselves as competent, loveable, or worthy. Sometimes it's our basic relationship to life; one moment, life was our oyster, and the next moment, life is a cheat. Trauma is shattering. In this class, you'll learn how to heal from that shattering.
DailyOM: You teach a tool kit of mindfulness skills. Please tell us about two of those skills.
Eric: Mindfulness is the word we have come to use to stand for many positive traits with names like awareness and thoughtfulness. It is a stance that a person decides to take: the stance of a person who has decided to become aware rather than remain defensively blind. This stance is the key to healing trauma.
No tactic, strategy, method, or practice will make that much difference if you have not committed to getting a grip on your own mind and decided to live mindfully. However, this is no easy task. One of the ways that we deal with trauma when it is occurring is by dissociating, that is, by not being aware and by separating ourselves from the situation. This is a natural safety measure, which means that it is part of our evolutionary nature to make use of a lack of awareness to protect ourselves.
You want to pay attention to what you ought to be paying attention to. This stance of attentive mindfulness will help you with every aspect of your life, including recognizing the effects of trauma. It helps you notice that you are reacting to a family situation, not as you would really like to react but as your formed personality is pressuring you to react. It alerts you to triggering situations, to those situations that are somehow connected to past traumatic experiences and that are going to flood you with powerful, terrible feelings. This bold, rare stance, of being thoughtful and aware rather than reactive and defensive, is a gift that is in your power to give yourself.
DailyOM: How important is having a support system in place when addressing trauma? What advice can you give?
Eric: In one sense, we must go it alone in life. In another sense, we can make the choice to go it together: to love, to have friends, to seek out peer support, to not isolate or withdraw. Going it alone is an existential given. Being in it with others is a choice. The experience of trauma can make it much harder to opt for that choice. Trauma can feel shaming and humiliating, causing us to withdraw and hide. Trauma can make the world feel that much scarier, causing us to mistrust others. Many of the consequences of trauma push us in the direction of isolation and away from relationships.
Still, we can strive to override that push toward isolation and make the choice to connect. We can join a support group. We can make new friends. Best of all, if we are lucky and if we make the effort, we can share our life with one intimate other who is on our side and who can make life feel much less alienating and burdensome.
Trauma can harm our ability to relate. Since love, warmth, and human support are excellent things, we don't want to give up on relating just because we've been harmed by trauma. Rather, we can mindfully choose relating and actively work on creating the healthy relationships we crave.
DailyOM: As Eric mentions in this interview, trauma comes in all sizes, and it is important to give yourself permission to accept your experience as one that counts — and deserves your healing attention. He offers highly effective strategies and tools that are based on a holistic, mindful approach that anyone can learn and put into immediate practice. Until next time, be well.
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