Soulful Healing

“Sticks & stones may break my bones, but words can never hurt me.”  This familiar children’s taunt may be a nice way to dismiss a bully, but you and I both know that it’s not altogether true.  In fact, I often think that social, emotional, and spiritual wounds are far more painful than anything a stick or stone can do.  In addition, there are often severe emotional wounds that come from living through violent experiences.  I see this as especially true for those who are living in areas that are currently at war.  While there are many people in many countries and communities living with violence of some type, I’d like to focus today on U.S. soldiers returning from active deployment.  Many of our soldiers are coming home with lots of thoughts, feelings, and actions that the rest of us civilians might have a hard time understanding.  Witnessing violence and death (an inherent part of war) has serious effects on the human mind.  In a military setting, one is essentially re-socialized to incorporate these experiences into one’s worldview to build up the capacity to cope, but those strategies don’t work so well when the soldier returns to her/his regular life.

What is Trauma?
For our purposes here, the term “trauma” refers to the serious physical or psychological harm of Self or someone else, whether actual or threatened.  The seriousness of the event is usually observed in the person’s  response of fear or terror.  Per the DSM-IV-TR, the diagnostic manual therapists use to categorize mental health diagnoses, the common emotional and behavioral reactions to trauma include:

• Re-experiencing the trauma
  • Flashbacks:  Feeling as though the trauma is happening again
  • Nightmares
  • Feeling very distressed when reminded of the trauma
• Avoiding reminders of the trauma or feeling numb
  • Avoiding people  or places that might trigger painful memories
  • Forgetfulness related to the event
  • Feeling detached from others
  • Difficulty experiencing a full range of emotions
  • Not wanting to talk about the event
• Increased arousal
  • Difficulty falling asleep or staying asleep
  • Feeling irritable, grumpy, or angry
  • Increased sensitivity to sound & movement – such as feeling jumpy or on edge
  • Difficulty concentrating

Trauma Responses as Helpful
These types of feelings and behaviors might serve a person well in a dangerous environment.  That might sound strange at first, but stay with me…  Feeling detached could be useful because a soldier, for example, needs to distance himself from what’s happening or he can’t do his job.  Difficulty sleeping is helpful when the enemy might attack during the night and a soldier needs to be fully awake & alert with little notice.  Developing an increased sensitivity to sound & movement is useful when a soldier needs to carefully observe everything going on around her in order to stay alive.  It is also not difficult to understand how irritability and anger develop under constant exposure to injury and death, especially since military units often function with the closeness of a family.

From Helpful to Unhelpful
So we see that certain trauma responses are useful in environments where danger is actively, and perhaps relentlessly, present.  But these challenges with sleeping, concentrating, irritability, and increased sensitivity are not useful when a person leaves that dangerous situation.  Nightmares and flashbacks cause the nervous system to be on high alert, which can lead to irritability and difficulty communicating.  Lack of sleep is physically exhausting and if insomnia is severe enough, it can  eventually lead to odd perceptual experiences and hallucinations.  Feeling numb and detached can lead to social isolation and failure to reach out for help when it is most needed.  Difficulty concentrating makes it hard to get work done and perhaps hard to hold on to a job.  Difficulty maintaining a job can create tension in one’s close relationships, leading to more social isolation, and self-blame.  Quite the vicious downward spiral.

Helping our Soldiers
If you or a loved one is struggling with the above feelings and behaviors, the good news is that there is help.  Taking that first step of asking for help can be really difficult and yet it the first step that is so important in the healing process.  It can also be such a relief to lay down the burden you’ve been carrying.  Here are some great resources for healing from the struggles of war and military conflict:

Give An Hour — Providing veterans of Iraq & Afghanistan, and their families, with free mental health assistance 
Heal My PTSD — A wonderful compilation of information and resources about Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder 
National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI) –Providing support, education, advocacy, and research on mental illness.  Broswe around the site or click the “Find Your Local NAMI” to search for a chapter near you.   
NAMI’s Veterans Resource Center — A variety of resources compiled by NAMI to support troops, veterans, and their families.

Stay mindful and be well!

I’ve been on a communication kick lately…  In both my professional and personal worlds, I’ve been observing what makes an interaction between people go smoothly and what makes those inevitable snags become waaaay bigger than necessary.  One of the most daunting challenges in communication is telling the difference between your thoughts and feelings, then sharing those with important others.  I truly believe that being aware of our thoughts and feelings is essential to effective communication, so I thought I’d go a little deeper into communication this week.  As you already know from your own experiences, communication is a tricky endeavor…  Being mindful of our own stuff, determining what is being asked of us, working through our automatic responses, and then stringing all these feeling-thought-ideas together in a cohesive sentence is difficult work!  In my experience, good communication requires that we S–L–O–W our internal reactions long enough to sort through everything.  We need to first create time-space between the internal reaction and the external response, then we are able to practice making our external responses match those of our highest Self.

This allowing for time and space in between urge and action is not easy.  First of all, feelings and psychological processes are powerful stuff…  The mind can either be a safe harbor for peaceful contentment or a mine-field of self-derision and negativity, as well as everything in between.  Our default way of responding to the world can be learned from our culture, our circumstances, and our families.  It can also be linked to our own genetic and neurological make-up.  Whatever the source of your automatic responses, the idea is to shift from automatic to conscious.  Often this process requires the help of a guide, whether that person is a friend, mentor, spiritual leader, shaman, therapist, or psychiatrist.  Regardless of your chosen guide, becoming more aware of your own internal process and communicating with others more effectively is a completely achievable goal.  As with so many things, it takes commitment and active practice.

One communication strategy that I and many therapist-types will share with others looks like this:   I feel ____________ when ____________.  You may hear this referred to as an “I statement,” because the idea is to get away from making assumptions about others in favor of discussing only your own feelings and observations.  The simplicity of this statement is deceiving.  This is because, again, you have to know what you feel before you let all the other junk racing through your mind just pour out.  Marshall Rosenberg, the creator of the Nonviolent Communication (NVC) method, adds another step to this statement, encouraging the speaker to identify what needs/wants trigger the feelings being expressed.  I really like this extended “I statement” because I believe it helps the speaker focus in on their own needs and how those needs create emotional responses.  So instead of saying, “It hurts my feelings when you don’t want to spend time with me!!” one might instead say, “I felt hurt when you said you have other plans, because I need to know that my interests are important to you.”  Yes, I know, this latter statement is longer and perhaps more tedious.  But this longer, more conscientious statement makes it easier for the listener to truly hear the speaker.  So instead of the defensive response, “Oh, get over yourself, you’re just being sensitive!” the listener will hopefully access her/his own compassionate nature and offer an empathetic response.  This is probably because “you don’t want to spend time with me!” sounds like a judgment at best and an attack at worst.  The NVC-inspired statement is simply an expression of the speaker’s emotions and thought process.  It’s the ultimate in honestly expressing what’s going on inside, without accidentally (or on purpose) attacking others.

If you are intrigued by this brief glimpse into the possibilities of Nonviolent Communication, here are some links:
– Center for Nonviolent Communication
– Nonviolent Communication: A Language of Life (Book)
– Nonviolent Communication Companion Workbook