Next Level Practitioner

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Malcolm Walton
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Next Level Practitioner - Post-Traumatic

1 Next Level Practitioner - Post-Traumatic Growth Week 69 - Focus on Application - Transcript - pg. 1 Next Level Practitioner Week 69: How Do We Characterize and Encourage Growth? Day 6: Focus on Application with Ruth Buczynski, PhD; Joan Borysenko, PhD; and Rick Hanson, PhD

Next Level Practitioner - Post-Traumatic Growth Week 69 - Focus on Application - Transcript - pg. 2 Week 69, Day 6: Joan Borysenko, PhD and Rick Hanson, PhD Focus on Application Dr.

2 Next Level Practitioner - Post-Traumatic Growth Week 69 - Focus on Application - Transcript - pg. 2 Week 69, Day 6: Joan Borysenko, PhD and Rick Hanson, PhD Focus on Application Dr. Buczynski: Hello, everyone. We're back. This is the part of the week where we're going to focus on clinical application. We're going to talk about how you can use the ideas this week in your work. I'm joined as I always am by my two good buddies Dr. Joan Borysenko, Dr. Rick Hanson. And let's jump right in guys and start by talking about what stood out to you this week. We'll start with you, Joan, and then we'll go to you, Rick. Dr. Borysenko: You know what stood out to me, of course, is that trauma is an opportunity for growth, as Ron Siegel was saying. Trauma is an opportunity for growth. About a week after my double hip replacement, I had four friends bring dinner over for us. And we were talking about trauma in our own lives because of the trauma I shared that had come up around being so vulnerable with the hip replacement. And it brought to mind, we were all saying, Who grows without trauma? If we look over at our life, where does the understanding come from? How do we reach out for more? And we all agreed that everyone is looking for the same thing the sense of interior freedom and greater understanding. It brought to me the work of William James, who, in 1904, published a book called Varieties of Religious Experience. And this was a compilation of lectures that he'd given at Harvard. And of course, William James was the first American psychologist, and he said people grow in two ways. He said they grow through crisis. That was number one. Something happens. Life as know it destructs, and we have to put it back together at some higher level of understanding that leaves us freer. Or secondly, through lysis, kind of a gradual, gradual wearing away. People grow in two ways: (1) through crisis (2) through lysis, a gradual wearing away. And for trauma, both things happen. And I think that for trauma, both things happen. There is a crisis. Hopefully we grow through it. And then there's a gradual period of lysis, the post-traumatic growth, that so many speakers have said is just a kind of natural outgrowth of

3 Next Level Practitioner - Post-Traumatic Growth Week 69 - Focus on Application - Transcript - pg. 3 trauma. The most natural outgrowth is that we will grow from it. Dr. Buczynski: Thank you. How about you, Rick? What stood out to you this week? Dr. Hanson: What stood out to me was the paradox of me. What I mean by that is how part of trauma healing involves really going into me how did it affect me; compassion for me; understanding Part of trauma healing involves really going into me understanding and normalizing my response, helping myself accept myself for my responses a necessary focus on the self. and normalizing my response, let's say, to what happened, even if later I criticized myself for it; helping myself accept myself for my responses me, me, me, me, me a necessary focus on self. And yet, ultimately, also that kind of freedom that Joan was talking about there comes from relaxing the sense of self, relaxing the preoccupation of self, seeing that what happened to self is part of a vast sea of causes. This particular wave really sucked, but it's part of a big storm Go forth from the rhythm, where we inhale into me and exhale out into we, into this larger focus, offering it as something of value to other people. that also had, maybe, a lot of other people, or has it, other people and common humanity in other ways. So that was really interesting to go forth from the rhythm, even, and maybe a little bit like breathing, where we inhale into me and how it was for me. And then in the second intertwining phase of trauma, again, healing again and again and again, we exhale out into we, into this larger focus, including taking our own healing. And then, as part of the reparative journey, offering it as something of value to other people. Dr. Buczynski: Thank you. Thank you. So, Joan, Ron Siegel framed post-traumatic growth as an opportunity to see reality more clearly and to have less of a narcissistic orientation. He described it as a journey toward greater wisdom and compassion. How do you help someone see that journey as a worthwhile goal when they're simply wanting to have the pain stop? Dr. Borysenko: Absolutely. Such a great question, Ruth. And it brings to mind a couple that I met when I was running mind-body groups for people with cancer at Beth-Israel Hospital back in Boston. The couple, very interesting; the woman came in, and she was actually in the cancer group. But for the first

4 Next Level Practitioner - Post-Traumatic Growth Week 69 - Focus on Application - Transcript - pg. 4 session, we always have family members, and then stuff came up so that they came in a couple of times as a couple. Here's what happened in this case. The wife had been very, very supportive. Her husband had had quite a trauma history was highly abused as a child, and he was very proud of himself for getting as far in life as he had. He had become a lawyer. He was successful in that way. And nonetheless, he was the one who was traumatized. She was always the caretaker. She was providing for him a really wonderful, listening capability. But what neither of them had realized until the point that she needed something because she had cancer, was that their life really revolved around him and that it was a kind of a narcissistic preoccupation. Always like, he needs the healing. This came up. He did that. And what came out of this is she had actually realized and said to him in the session, "I feel very alone with you because I feel like you never listen to me. You're always so self-absorbed in what your own story is, how this related to your trauma, or how you overcame this, that there isn't any room for me in our relationship." And she said, "I have to thank having cancer for that because I have never really needed support before, and as it stands now, I see I'm not going to get it from you." Working that out between them and watching it work out was very tense and very difficult. And at the time when I saw both of them last, which was three months after that 10-week program, they were still working on it. But here's the thing: instead of working on their pain, they realized this was, indeed, a journey into wisdom and Instead of working on their pain, they realized this was a journey into wisdom and compassion, a journey into interior freedom. compassion, a journey into interior freedom. And it was a great privilege to watch that, watch that unfold. So it's not one thing that suddenly you say to somebody, "Hey, this isn't about your pain. It's about wisdom and compassion." It's about being with people as the organic unfolding of two people were really care comes together and reveals this kind of depth. Dr. Buczynski: Rick, staying with Ron Siegel for a bit longer, he talked about a shift in worldview about responding to pain from the perspective of being more awake and more aware rather than just seeking to diminish one's pain. How do we help people make that fundamental shift in their worldview or in their objective for why they're coming? Dr. Hanson: Right. I thought that was very interesting, including in his personal story that, if I could spin it a

5 Next Level Practitioner - Post-Traumatic Growth Week 69 - Focus on Application - Transcript - pg. 5 certain way, trying to chase feeling better or having less pain was often an exercise in futility. He couldn't do it. But he could always learn from the experience. He could always be more awake, more tuned into the totality of the experience, and he could steepen his own learning curve in dealing with it which is a kind of internal freedom, as Joan was getting at; and a fundamental self-efficacy or agency from the inside out, even if he was kind of helpless about changing the actual material conditions. I thought that was very, very cool. And of course, Ron's a bone-deep mindfulness teacher and friend, so he's going to mindfulness here, which of course, is, if you think of it, a fundamental kind of counter-conditioning in which we're aware of something painful let's say, such as the trauma memory or the pain in the body. We're aware of that. But what's also true is a space of awareness around it that is itself untroubled and undisturbed and untainted by what it represents that could be very disturbing. What naturally happens in the brain, neurons that fire together wire together; there are associational processes that start to link this spaciousness of untroubled, undisturbed, disidentified awareness with that problematic, painful, harmful, suffering material. And gradually, through association, that spaciousness of awareness can help ease and calm and relieve that material, even though we're not directly trying to influence the Trauma is experienced by the lizard, mouse, and monkey inside us all... material itself. So I think that's incredibly freeing. Then as a last little point about that, one thing that has really struck me physiologically is the ways in which, pretty much by definition, trauma is experienced at least by the lizard, mouse, and monkey, as it were, inside us all, as a raw threat to survival that we can't escape from. If we could escape from it, that would be adaptive coping. So, by definition, there's a kind of ugh! mortal threat. And so it's incredibly helpful, as people start to be able to be with the pain without needing to actively change it, to be aware simultaneously of the visceral sense of the ongoing-ness of living, the simple animal-ness of, There is one more breath. The heart is still beating. I'm still going on being, as were the communication of the body up into the brain, which really dominates inputs into the brain. It's like the calls of the night watchman or watchwoman saying, All is well. All is well.

6 Next Level Practitioner - Post-Traumatic Growth Week 69 - Focus on Application - Transcript - pg. 6 And as people tune into that simplicity of feeling alright right now, noticing that there's a going on being, as the great child psychiatrist Daniel Winnicott would talk about, that primal need to feel that you're going on being. Because people can track the fact of the going on being-ness of the animal life of the body. That then enables them to tolerate and be with traumatic material in a more peaceful and sustainable kind of way. Dr. Buczynski: Or just noticing that the sun is going to come up tomorrow and again the next day and the next day. Joan, let's talk about Rick. Dr. Borysenko: Right in front of his face. Dr. Hanson: Things were going so well. Dr. Buczynski: Yeah, right. Rick and I discussed the tendency for some people to look for someone to blame after experiencing a tragedy. Rick highlighted the distinction between justice and grievance. So how do concepts like blame and grievance factor into work with trauma? And how do we help people not get stuck in those kinds of patterns? Dr. Borysenko: This is a tremendous question with very far-reaching implications, Ruth. And I want to say a few words about the work of Robin Casarjian who you know well. And I've talked about Robin's work a couple of times before, but now it's in a different context, about justice, grievance, and blame. For our listeners who don't know Robin, she ought to have at least a MacAuthur Grant, if not a Nobel Prize, because she founded something called the Lion Heart Foundation, and that's for prisoners. What came out of that work is the development of an emotional literacy program for youth at risk, and what came out of that was the development of a program called Power Source Parenting for youth at risk who have themselves had kids. And these programs are available through social service networks all over the world. Houses of Healing, which is a program of healing for prisoners, is even available for people in solitary confinement, and they do it via mail with volunteers. But here's what stunned me first about her work on justice, on grievance, on blame. Robin was initially invited to give a lecture on forgiveness at a medium-security prison in Massachusetts, and she thought, God,

7 Next Level Practitioner - Post-Traumatic Growth Week 69 - Focus on Application - Transcript - pg. 7 what prisoner is going to be interested in forgiveness? And this one lecture gave rise to a lifetime of remarkable work on her part. And she started working weekly with a group of lifers. And what she realized is that a very important thing, first of all, was to answer a very basic question which is, Who am I? Am I the person who did these terrible things? Why did I do them? And really come to introduce people to that place inside themselves which was spacious and not tainted by what had happened. And then to look at their lives. And to look, she likes to use the Roberto Assagioli kind of method of the inner-self helper. And then the various kind of conditional selves that evolve throughout our life. And these prisoners, many of whom had had no education to speak of beyond maybe 8th grade, and were not a psychologically sophisticated group, could grasp this concept and accept, not blame for what they did, but understand how it was that how they were raised or their traumas or whatever had given rise to a conditional self that had very little degrees of freedom and that had committed a crime. And then they were really able to take responsibility for what they did, to grieve for what they did, to not only forgive themselves but... There's such a gorgeous piece I don't know if it's still of the Lion Heart website, but it used to be of a prisoner weeping and saying to the family that he had hurt, "I hope that you will be able to forgive me not for my sake, because what I did was wrong but for your sake, so that you can be free and not drag this pain around with you for the rest of your life." And I think it is in the development of the understanding that, yeah, we all have all these parts of ourselves. We all do things that are wrong. Some people do things that are very wrong. And yet, we can learn from them. We can grow from them. We can develop other We all do things that are wrong. Some people do things that are very wrong. And yet, we can learn from them. We can grow from them. We can develop other parts of ourselves. parts of ourselves. This is so important of a kind of really big container for holding what is justice, what is grievance, what is blame, and what is forgiveness. Dr. Buczynski: Thank you. Thank you. Rick, Steven Hayes shared an equation for growth. And the equation goes, pain plus willing to walk into pain

8 Next Level Practitioner - Post-Traumatic Growth Week 69 - Focus on Application - Transcript - pg. 8 equals growth. So how do we encourage people's willingness to walk into pain when it's probably the last thing that they want to do? Dr. Hanson: I totally relate to it. I remember many people telling me, "Rick, you need to feel your feelings." And I thought they were crazy because my feelings hurt. So, a couple of comments there One is, I think that is one way to grow a willingness to walk into pain. I think there are many other ways to grow as well, if we look closely. Most of them involve no pain When I think of people saying, open to your experience, it s like opening a trap door to hell. You re not resourced enough to go there getting resourced enough is really important. at all because in most pain, there is zero gains, as well as a cost. That's point one. Point two, when I think of people often saying, Open to your experience, it's like opening a trapdoor to hell. You're not resourced enough to go there, so getting resourced enough, I think, is really important. So that's what, to me, Steven is talking about, how to be resourced enough to walk into pain and grow thereby. I think first it helps to know why you're doing it. And that's why some psychoeducation can be helpful in terms of explaining things to people. What's the rationale for doing this? Why is it necessary? That kind of understanding is important. A second major resource for dealing with pain is under the general heading we know as distress. Do you have the ego strength? The blocks talk about this, to be able to step back from the experience and not be completely flooded and hijacked and overwhelmed by it. Do you have the mindfulness training, let's say, that lets you step back from the experience and witness it and disidentify from it? Are you able to calm and soothe the body? Do you have internalized resources of the ability to bring compassion to yourself? Things like that. There's a whole collection of resources that are directly regulatory of emotional pain and physical pain. In addition to that, though, I think there's a third really important resource that often gets left out. There s a whole collection of resources that are directly regulatory of emotional pain and physical pain.

9 Next Level Practitioner - Post-Traumatic Growth Week 69 - Focus on Application - Transcript - pg. 9 In other words, what is the sun that is rising elsewhere? What is the refuge that a person can take in their spiritual life or their sense of nature although? Or what is also true about things they're happy about or can take physical pleasure in, like that chocolate chip cookie? What's also true? There s a lot of research that shows that emotionally positive experiences are really helpful for people in terms of being able to walk through the valley of the shadow. There's a lot of research that shows that emotionally positive experiences and increasing trait positive emotion of various kinds, including the trait positive emotion of love, is also really, really helpful for people in terms of being able to walk through the valley of the shadow but know that there's still always already light somewhere else. Dr. Buczynski: Thank you. That's it for us for this week. We'll be back again next week where we'll again focus on clinical application and how you can use the ideas. But meanwhile, we'd like to hear from you. How are you going to use these ideas in your work, or what other ideas might you have had? We'd love to hear your experiences. So, take a moment, please, to go to the comment board and share some of what it meant to you and what happened for you. And maybe take a moment to read other people's comments and comment on those comments too. That kind of brings our whole family together. Meanwhile, we'll be back next week. I hope everyone has a great week. Thank you to the two of you. I'll see you next week. Bye-bye.

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