Embodied Trauma Conference - Free, Online, 3-10 Feb, 2020

[arale]

https://www.embodiedtrauma.com/schedule

There are some great names talking about a wide range of topics.

These sessions sound real intriguing:
Ariel Giaretto  - Pleasure Reactivated— Embodiment Basics for the Most Body Phobic
Raymond Castellino - Pre and Perinatal Trauma
Laurence Heller - Shame and Developmental Trauma
Karine Bell - Healing Lineages: Breaking Cycles of Developmental Trauma in Our Families

See you there!

[Hope67]

Hi Arale,
This looks really good.  I couldn't see how to join up though - I've sent them an E-mail asking them how I do that.  Not sure why, I couldn't seem to see how to sign up to attend the conference.
Hope 

[Snowdrop]

I couldn't find a link to sign up on that page either, but there's one here: https://www.embodiedtrauma.com/

[Hope67]

Thanks Snowdrop, that is great.  I have signed up for that Conference. 
Hope 

[Blueberry]

I watched one conference and part of a conference today. I took notes and want to write them here.

First Jane Clapp's Movement for Self-Regulation. I only watched part of this one and took sketchy notes. Still, might help someone.

In a feeling of overwhelm where victims of trauma will say "everything is too much", we move less. So, if you want to get your pre-frontal cortex re-engaged, what would help with that now? You need resources that feel accessible whenever you need them. That doesn't mean a 90-minute yoga session every week. In fact, different people may need wildly different exercises. Figure of eight movements are often useful for chronic pain. After about 2 minutes you can tell if the exercise helps you or not.

In general people have lost body intelligence especially hand and foot intelligence because we don't use them much in day-to-day life anymore. 'Embodiment' is explained as living in conscious something with body.

With a long history of trauma, the body holds trauma and moving wafts it back up to the surface, so traumatised people feel reluctant to move because they don't want to bring that back up.

She mentioned 'titration', but I didn't understand context at all. She also mentioned 'dual awareness' - paying attention to two things at once, e.g. observe feeling but realise you are not the feeling.

During self-regulation through movement one side of the body touches the other. She showed butterfly hug (right hand touching left shoulder and left hand touching right shoulder), removing and replacing one hand, then the other, and then expanding the exercise and making it a bit more complicated - touching back of head etc -. Playing music or listening to a metronome while doing this kind of exercise helps you not notice increased heart rate. Do a soft, effortless movement, e.g. throwing a small ball up into the air with one hand and catching it again while not watching it.
Fine motor skills are often good for panic, e.g. lift left pinky and right index finger, then replace them on thighs and lift fourth finger on left hand and right pinky etc. While doing this keep breathing lightly, especially nasal breathing.

In answer to a question: during overwhelm it is not a good idea to go into inner-body awareness (e.g. concentrate on breathing). Instead go into outer-body awareness e.g. touching and feeling along wall or concentrating on visuals in the room and counting e.g. the plants.

Focus on beauty and aliveness external to our bodies is something often missing in trauma recovery. She showed an exercise where she sat on a large piece of paper on the floor and drew circular movements around her body with both hands at once while listening to the metronome. Outside the conference she would  be listening to music instead. She said you take whatever colour you feel like using and in this way you are honouring whatever feeling is in you rather than purging it. The activity creates space around you and gives expression through movement. It's not necessarily cathartic, it simply allows full expression of that which is overwhelming instead of that getting stuck in your body. Sometimes being messy can be helpful e.g. dipping your feet or hands in paint and using them instead of a crayon. It can feel more releasing and less contained. When healing from trauma, you want to become more yourself / full spectrum instead of something contained.

If anybody here took more or better notes and want to correct something or add something, pm me so I can make the change.

[Blueberry]

The session I was particularly interested in and even watched parts of it twice: Nir Esterman's Intergenerational Trauma: How Ancestral Trauma Is Transmitted and Pathways to Healing

Nir Esterman knows intergenerational trauma first hand; he's from a family of Holocaust survivors. He's also a trauma therapist.

Intergenerational trauma consists of layers. He explained that generations ago everybody felt part of a tribe - either in their extended family or their whole village. Their lives were intertwined. They weren't alone and they were not completely individual. There was violence (dangers in the jungle...) but it was also a holistic (wholistic??) experience. At some point there was a counter-move where people were more aware of being individuals and some part of the holistic experience got left behind. This part was the feeling that 'something is greater than myself' not in a religious sense but in being connected to full inheritance.

He gave an example with immigration. Say, 80 years ago grandparents lived in the UK and then moved to the USA. Not such a big deal today but it was then. Immigration is difficult! Those grandparents left part of their heart behind when they moved. Maybe that part of their heart was their childhood or their national food or even a first wife. Or in the case of war or the Holocaust, you lost your entire family or your entire culture. Or maybe (C)SA happened to your grandmother. Trauma may or may not affect descendants, though some trauma does for sure.

There are different mechanisms for transmission and inheritance (of trauma).
1) Epigenetic - if you're female - the egg in your mother's womb when she was actually in her mother's womb (as a fetus) and say your grandmother suffered famine, then her stress hormones increased which would affect your mother and you, as a single cell in her body. It wouldn't change the DNA but the expression of genes is affected. Genes can be silenced or over-expressed or not fully expressed to RNA
Something about bonding to DNA prevents something or other...
Something stops the RNA, doesn't allow the expression of RNA from developing into proteins. Doesn't allow connection of MIRNA to RNA. Something also to do with 'in fluid of egg of mother'. This bit in italics is pretty unclear for me and I don't have time to even google it to try and understand better. If somebody does get it, pm me and I'll gladly improve on and alter this bit! Scientists used to think that changes to DNA wouldn't survive the birth of a child, or the child would be better prepared for life (positive attributes not the negative??).

If there is epigenetic transmission then the idea that a child will be ready to fight in a state of arousal but then stop when the arousal isn't there doesn't work. If I have hyper-arousal, my children and grandchildren have 30% greater chance of having that too than other people. The grandchildren of Holocaust survivors - these are children who didn't even smell the war - have a 300% greater chance of being in psychiatric care than the norm. It's in their cells.

Hyperarousal of small child  - the child is more likely to have problems (partially due to acting in a non-helpful way) and stay hyper-aroused. The child gets stuck in that state. The mechanism isn't understood (yet).

2) Psychological transference:
If my parents were traumatised, then I grew up in a traumatised context. What my parents can't handle, gets handed to the next generation. My normal experience didn't receive a normal response, it wasn't necessarily properly met.

3) Energetic transference:
This is something that can't be proved but there are examples of it. This is the carrying of information of the experience of ancestors. In the speaker's experience there certainly seems to be something going on. A person now 'feels' there was something in the family and asks their mother who says "Yes actually your uncle did die of TB. How on earth did you know? We don't talk about your uncle."

With intergenerational trauma, issues feel bigger than ourselves. They feel like black holes pulling me into them and I can't help it. Depression often has to do with a missing person in the family, who died in a tragic way, possibly, and is not acknowledged. Miscarriage and abortion are not acknowledged culturally but they are still a loss of life that was in the family for a short time. Women often suffer lost-birth depression after these. Often their mother or grandmother had it happen too.

My own traumas feel manageable, with help, with therapy I have the feeling I'll get over it. Intergenerational trauma doesn't feel manageable.

A family may not even directly lie about the past, they may just do their best to avoid a topic. Inside ourselves we know that somebody in the family was lost or abused or... or.... The family likes to avoid the grief. So tendency to say "grandma had a hard life - lost 5 husbands - but just look at the life she led after!!" Lost 5 husbands - what a massive amount of unacknowledged trauma. Further generations feel this in their bodies and souls but can't explain it. The speaker mentioned that his two children were always asking about a brother and sister. The speaker's wife had had 2 miscarriages and an abortion before the birth of the two children. The speaker's family constellation therapist told him he should tell his two living children about the other children and he wondered how on earth to do this without mentioning miscarriages and an abortion. He finally found a way after I think hearing of a case where somebody in a family had cancer and it cleared up after family constellation work on previous abortions or miscarriages.

The speaker mentions one specialist who refers to adhd as 'transgenerational ptsd'. If children fight like crazy over 'nothing' like whether or not they can have some chocolate then there might have been something like war trauma for an ancestor, which then left a scar in the family. Once this scar is acknowledged and given space and healing, then the child may give up this fight modus almost immediately. The child may cry instead but apparently that's easier for most parents to deal with than a fighting child. [In my FOO I had the opposite experience: crying was terrible, fighting would have led to less abuse for me, but I mostly cried anyway. But I think and hope the speaker means the fighting is one level of trauma and the crying a lower level that in time can also be healed through acknowledging the trauma a few generations back. ]

Trauma gets de-contextualised within families over time. Traumas affect us long after the trauma incident finished.

The speaker took some questions. One was one adopted children. Their first loyalty is to their biological parents. Adopted children have epigenetic stuff from their biological parents and in the 9 months of womb time, their would have been a lot of processes going on too so there's no point in denying the existence of biological parents to adopted children. A single mother where the father is not involved in bringing up the children at all or in any way not in contact with them should not tell the children they have no father. Because they do have a biological father! Secrets in families create problems. Children perceive things and have 'self-knowing'. What the parents put in the shadows, children put in their faces. Children also carry for their parents what their parents can't carry.

Part of resources can be a feeling of familial support, or life-force. In a generation somewhere above us (if you imagine a family tree) there was a feeling of horrible disconnect. The speaker mentioned a case during family constellation work where a representative stood in for the mother to give more support, but the representative felt disconnected and dissociated so a representative stood in for the grandmother who also felt disconnected and dissociated so they put in a representative for her as well and this carried on till the representative from 7 generations back said she'd been raped. There is no way to know the exact circumstances or even whether it's 'true' but (as far as I remember) in this instance once this secret had been aired during the constellation work the representatives all felt less disconnected and dissociated and were able to give a feeling of support to the representative of the next generation and on down to the person doing the family constellation work so that the process became easier.

Physical symptoms are often a result of generational trauma. Addiction is often connected to loss (through generational trauma), including loss through suicide. Suicide often feels like a black hole. The speaker himself did 12-15 years of healing and self-work before he was able to go into the inter-generational trauma.

The speaker led the participants through an exercise where you could try and visualise or feel ancestors and whether there was trauma.  You were not meant to go into it, but just observe. And also then to try and visualise an ancestor before the trauma who could give you support and strength. Because resources and healing are transferred, not just trauma.

_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _
I tried out the exercise and was 'connected' to trauma I know about 1 and 2 generations earlier than me on my M's side and her M's side as well as a vaguer feeling of trauma 2 generations back on F's side as well as multi-generations back on M's side. That's actually based on a historical incident and its aftermath where millions of people who come from or originally came from that region will carry this type of trauma. We were also to imagine the traumatised ancestor saying "I'm supported enough, you don't have to carry it for me" and then also try and visualise an ancestor even further back, from before the trauma. In the case of the trauma multiple generations back, the traumatised ancestor was able to say "I'm supported enough, you don't have to carry it for me" and I had an image of a woman who knew her healing plants being the non-traumatised person from a previous generation giving strength and healing. At the same time, being in touch with this healthier ancestor made my body go all cold. I hadn't been expecting that. The traumatised ancestor from multiple generations back is not my GM's ancestor though he is M's ancestor, on her F's side.

My M and her M were not able to say "I'm supported enough, you don't have to carry it for me".

I know that probably all sounds very weird. I have done a lot of family constellation work, both for myself and as representatives in other people's constellations. It's quite fascinating the way you feel things. My family's constellation feels terrible for other people, whether they're representing or sitting on the sidelines, or sometimes representatives just feel numb. But mostly they want to get out of there asap.

[Snowdrop]

Thank you for writing up notes on this session. It's one I was particularly interested in, but I didn't get a chance to watch it. Your experience sounds fascinating!

It reminds me of another summit starting 17th February that's on ancestral healing: https://ancestralhealingsummit.com/. I don't know how relevant it is to trauma, but I thought I should mention it in case it's of any help.

[Kizzie]

Great notes BB, tks so much for sharing them!        

[arale]

Thank you BB for sharing your hard work!

Focus on beauty and aliveness external to our bodies is something often missing in trauma recovery.

Absolutely!

Snowdrop, I followed some sessions of the Ancestral Healing Summit last year. There certainly were sessions relevant to intergenerational trauma, but I found some session titles rather esoteric and skipped those sessions.

On a similar topic, I found Thomas Hubl's Collective Trauma summit to be incredibly informative:
https://thomashuebl.com/collective-trauma-online-summit/

Much of what was in the summit is no longer available for free, but there are quite a few free talks by Thomas Hubl on the topic. Lots of wisdom there:
https://www.susancoleman.global/episodes/2020/01/13/ep-43-thomas-hubl
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mExBoPftp8I
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EHH7t_hsDfo

[Blueberry]

I watched a whole lot today too and may type in my notes tomorrow or on the weekend.

Thanks for your links, Snowdrop and arale. I haven't had time to look at them but maybe after the conference...

[Blueberry]

I took notes on a whole bunch of further sessions. It actually helps me to write them here because then I actually have to go through them again and see if I still understand the notes.

I did write notes on Kimberley Anne Johnson's Healing Sexual Trauma and although I don't think there was even anything really explicit in there or anything I'd need to give a TW to, I don't think I'm going to be writing up those notes. Her definition of sexual trauma was even wider, more inclusive than I've ever heard before - that's why no TW. But those notes and just listening to the session, they're faintly triggering to me anyway. I guess the whole topic is still.

Hana Pauls, Birth Trauma:
She's a midwife in the UK, training in Somatic Experiencing, who experienced trauma while giving birth herself.

Trauma leaves an imprint on the body, and so long as the imprint is still there and not healed, we can get triggered. [No wonder I feel so triggered by the Healing Sexual Trauma session. I just avoid the whole subject if possible. The healing I've managed to do is to batten down the hatches so to speak, so I no longer have images floating around in my semi-conscious on a day-to-day basis.]
If a person perceived a situation as traumatising, then it was, even if the perception from outside is - that wasn't traumatic. Previous traumas impact on how a woman can go into her body. One result of trauma is: your body feels like it 'is not a safe place to be in'. [This made me think of all my problems with self-care e.g. showering and washing my hair. Maybe they're connected to this 'this is not a safe place' so I don't want to have anything to do with my body or any actions to do with it, certainly not feeling it from within or being in it, being in touch with it.]

If stress has beginning - middle - end, then it feels manageable. I think that was to do with women in labour. The session speaker gets called in to difficult labours, especially where women don't feel in control at all, and she can usually get the woman back to feeling in control through breathing patterns and feeling empowered. I guess that way the stress has an end, and in the woman's memory it probably then has a beginning and a middle. [For myself, I was thinking beginning - middle - end is what the kind of traumas most of us have on here didn't have! All that childhood stuff feels interminable because you can't get out of the situation mostly, and even if you can, you'd be taking all sorts of psychological damage with you, unless you got into trauma therapy afterwards. That might happen these days to some children and teens, but not a few decades ago.]

Too much, too soon can lead to trauma.

For healing, or maybe not being traumatised during stress in the first place, a sense of responsibility and agency are important.

There was a question from a session participant about the affect of CSA trauma on giving birth, but unfortunately the speaker didn't have time to address the question.

[Blueberry]

Patricia Vicker, Indigenous Perspectives on Trauma and Soul Retrieval through Community and Ceremony
The conference organiser was very interested in having a speaker with a different perspective on trauma from the usual Westernised perspective. Patricia Vicker is a member of one of the First Nations on the Canadian west coast, has worked on her own healing from childhood trauma, has studied at college or university level, so that she draws from Western and indigenous knowledge.

Trauma changes the brain individually and for the collective!
Definition of trauma (from indigenous perspective): The soul is lost in a place of near-death experience, e.g. near-drowning. Spiritual and soul near-death experiences are recognised in indigenous healing, e.g. in Siska First Nation.

Soul retrieval involves going back to the geographical place of the near-death experience, possibly even physically. e.g. after near-drowning the person might go back into the water and yell for help and this time would be rescued and pulled out of the water by many hands. Doing it alone is not possible - it's a community healing. 

Description of dissociation: we had to leave essence in order to survive.

Where to begin with collective trauma? Respect and kind, honest, compassionate response and desire to bring truth so you can communicate and not dominate. It's not about judgement, blame, criticism because that continues the abuse cycle.

Impact of being wronged: the elders get together and talk of collective and individual trauma and then take person back e.g. to near-drowing.

Ongoing trauma leaves you with a sense of alienation and isolation.

The speaker on her own experience with trauma and healing: I have value to myself, coming back to my desire for love and light, to exist within me and for myself, to heal myself in connection with others (e.g. 4 children and 8 grandchildren) from that place of love instead of place of shame, isolation and alientation.

With developmental trauma - you believe things about yourself [that aren't true, presumably] Then you welcome parts (e.g. your 3 yo, your 5 yo) back to self the way you would invite a grandchild back (she even made a gesture with her arm to show this   )   There's not something wrong with you, it's just that a part of you isn't totally present in this moment so you invite the child back in. You're operating from a 3 yo's belief. With soul retrieval, you're welcoming the part back in and back to yourself and also recognising the distortion in your mind about yourself created by the wrong-doing, i.e. what was done wrong to you.

The community knows your inherent worth and wants to draw it out.

The speaker now knows that the supernatural was with her throughout the torture of her childhood. The supernatural is an antidote to the poison [in a figurative sense]. The Raven brings the light (or Light?) and is the saving grace.

The carrier of trauma 'volunteers' to carry trauma for his/her FOO. What is family? - rhetorical question [which I no longer understand]

This next bit is a bit triggering for me so I'm giving it a

*** TW for FOO stuff ***

A participant (also First Nation) asked about her adult son's trauma combined with the fact that she's not totally healed either but with her son in a much worse state. The speaker's opinion is that how adult children do their own lives is theirs to do; you have to let them go which is like letting go of the past and seeing you did the best you could. There's no quick about it! Heal yourself is very important. A lot of different modalities are needed. The speaker mentioned going to a psychologist with her own 7 yo daughter after she realised a FOO mbr had traumatised 7 yo. The speaker was holding 7 yo and crying and asking something like how to heal 7 yo and was told she was the one best to heal 7 yo.

As I said for me it's triggering tho the speaker has obviously acted quite differently from my FOO: she has confronted incest within her family, opened up the topic, not swept it under the rug, took her 7 yo to a psychologist, and has worked on her own healing, and now helps others heal. She came across as very authentic too.

Her metaphor for incest is angerphobia.

*** End TW ***

Approach to addictions in First Nations:
First you must understand the neurobiology because that allows you to step out of the shame and realise your brain is changed but can be changed back. You must understand how the change (or the neurobiology??) affects the individual and the community.
Neuro-feedback - working on the brain. What I can't access in my brain hinders me. EMDR was too jolting for the speaker but LENS (low-energy neural feedback system) was good for her.

In the speaker's opinion, trauma created a web in her mind. Revenge, retaliation, shame and other feelings like that are in the web. She doesn't choose to be on that web for ever. She wants to be not on it. Forgiving is an ongoing process.

She talked quite a bit about healing through different ceremonies in First Nation culture, but I didn't take notes on that.

[woodsgnome]

Thanks, Blueberry, for your review of the 'soul retrieval' process.

I experienced this myself some years ago. Though not an 'official' member of a First Nations group, I'm surrounded by many, and several years ago arranged for a process with a shaman who knew nothing of my personal story.

Going into trance and using his animal 'persona/guide', he traveled back to find 'me' amongst my FOO and identified some specific traumas that were part of that life -- even one particular awful one that I recalled in detail but he confirmed it as having happened. He also identified a part of me that went into hiding during that time; this 'deeper' part to my being I've since recognized as being 'returned' and playing a role in my current attempts to move beyond the past and find my way forward again.

My first reaction after the initial retrieval was perhaps too geared to relief at the validation and less on what I needed to do in continuing with building a real road on which to continue my soul recovery -- a shaman is like a therapist in that way -- they can only do so much before the individual needs to proceed on one's own effort. My inner critic is eager to call this a mistake on my part, but I think it's more about the relief on finding the strongest evidence ever about all that happened, some of it dating back to earliest infancy.

So perhaps I 'relaxed' a bit more about what I had to do on my own. I haven't tried visiting a shaman for a further retrieval process, as it felt complete the first time around. But, as said, I have lots of work I feel yet to do on this side of the retrieval. And, like all of this, it's tiring -- but I do feel the retrieval did at least provide some framework as to where my soul got lost, yet still survived/survives in my present being. It's still my hope to fully activate this into how I can go forward. The hope wanes periodically yet it still sparks my realizations that even I was never wholly lost, like it once seemed.

I guess my experience could be compared to a vivid dream, directly received by the observer/shaman, who then shared with me. Normally a 'skeptic' per paranormal sorts of experiences, this soul retrieval remains one of the most powerful and meaningful parts to this journey.

Thanks again for posting this, Blueberry ... 

[Blueberry]

Thank you woodsgnome for sharing your first-hand experience with this process. 

[Blueberry]

I also took notes on Ale Duarte's talk on Child Trauma during Natural Disaster.

This healing from trauma due to natural disasters can also be used for healing children with 'smaller' non-natural disaster trauma. Some of the work is based on Peter Levine's methods.

The perception of the suffering child and what is in their nervous system is what counts. Children are more susceptible to trauma but they also have good adaptive skills. They can recover especially well through play. The speaker gave earthquake as an example. 80% recover immediately. 10% of children will be crying and trembling and 10% will turn to violence. Those two groups need to be re-centered with the other 80% of the children. The speaker regularly works with groups of children in different countries, so his stats are based on this rather than just theory. He was shown working with children where there had been a tsunami. The children were grouped around a parachute which was 'imitating' a wave. The children were playing with it and so were exposed to the trauma in a controlled way and learning to self-regulate.

In a country like Syria, there is ongoing trauma and also a human-made disaster, so there is much more frustration than in a natural disaster.

Children have natural resilience skills; often it is adults (parents) who don't see this. Children self-regulate through play, so definitely let them play and/or run around.

The speaker sees a child with their conflict and wonders what in their experience makes conflict-solving difficult. Being able to solve the past conflict creates self-regulation and allows child to keep on going solving day-to-day conflicts which creates more and more self-regulation. You then get emergent patterns of resilience in the child. otoh if the parents are unregulated in their response and/or don't show a constructive mindset, a child may take the lead and try and take care of the parents.

In a case of non-man-made trauma, the whole community takes care of each other. Good to teach the family about central nervous system instead of therapising the family.

When is it the right time to intervene? Some children react with overly high energy and others with overly low energy. Overly high energy means their nervous systems are over-stimulated and they turn this energy into aggression / fight. Overly low energy their nervous system is under-stimulated, they go more towards depression, feeling powerless, "I give up". Neither reaction is necessarily immediately apparent. On the contrary, it's more that the energy of the over-stimulated goes up and up and they can't bring themselves back down again to the middle road of resilience. Also generally people reach a point where they feel optimism and gratitude and they hope to stay in that feeling, but they don't. After the gratitude/optimism phase come blame, rage, sadness, grief etc. If you can come back up out of that, then you reach acceptance and resilience. So it's actually immediately after gratitude/optimism where you have to be on the lookout and not assume that that stage is equal to healing. Children who go the low-energy route might show symptoms like feeling weak, feeling a loss of power, stomach ache. Generally a fear of their own reactions and sensations.

Some people feel immortal, invincible, immune before a traumatic event while others may feel vulnerable, unsafe, fearful.

Rushed children cannot communicate so adults need to get out of their sense of urgency.

Behind games, including totally normal ones like hide-and-seek there are hidden skills for the adult world, e.g. ability to go in and out of a situation or in and out of inner and outer world. Children re-enact through play.

_______________________________
During the discussion on the right time to intervene, I thought quite a lot of my experience in FOO because B1 went the high energy route including the aggression and fighting and I went the low energy route. This part of the discussion was also more geared to non-natural-event trauma. I see myself still very much in the low energy symptoms and I see FOO generally in the non-constructive mindset, e.g. I was very often rushed as a child, I wasn't given a chance to communicate. I wish I'd written my notes on here closer to the time, I would have been able to make better sense of them for others and for myself.