healing

“Nurturing Resilience” by Kathy L. Kain and Stephen J. Terrell

October 27, 2018 by Sonia Connolly 1 Comment

Subtitle: Helping Clients Move Forward from Developmental Trauma, An Integrative Somatic Approach

Recommended to me by: Taking a class from Kathy Kain

I took a 3 day class from Kathy Kain last year and learned techniques that I use every day in my practice, so I was excited about this book. It turned out to be dry to read and only talked about a couple of techniques at the end, which I had already learned in the class. On the positive side, the extensive client examples include gay parents and genderqueer clients.

The first part introduces attachment, polyvagal theory, and neurological development. Interoception is perception of our internal state. Exteroception is perception of the external environment through vision, hearing, touch, etc. Neuroception is the perception of safety and threat. Interactions with parents and other caregivers help an infant make sense of incoming stimuli and assess safety vs. threat. Without playful and caring interactions, the infant develops a strong sense of what is a threat, but does not develop a sense of what feels safe.

They discuss the ACE study and the health effects of early trauma. The Window of Tolerance is the nervous system’s comfortable, functional, social state. Threats result in hyperarousal (fight or flight) and hypoarousal (freeze, immobility). Someone with a dysregulated nervous system has a very small window of tolerance. They may have a faux window of tolerance, where they manage to function despite being under physiological stress.

The second half of the book more directly discusses clinician interventions for clients with developmental trauma. The emphasis is on teaching the nervous system how to stay more regulated, and to offer co-regulation, where the client’s nervous system is steadied by the clinician’s regulation. The authors emphasize that developmental trauma is largely non-verbal, patterned in the body, so interventions need to address the body directly.

Interventions they discuss: gentle touch on the kidney area of the lower back, and helping the client practice noticing same/different around their triggers.

Recommended if you want a lot of information about developmental trauma, and don’t mind a somewhat uneven presentation.

Available at bookshop.org.

“Belonging” by Toko-pa Turner

October 7, 2018 by Sonia Connolly 4 Comments

Subtitle: Remembering Ourselves Home

The gorgeous, inclusive cover and introduction/dedication to this book grabbed me.

For the rebels and the misfits, the black sheep and the outsiders. For the refugees, the orphans, the scapegoats, and the weirdos. For the uprooted, the abandoned, the shunned and invisible ones.

May you recognize with increasing vividness that you know what you know.

May you give up your allegiances to self-doubt, meekness, and hesitation.

May you be willing to be unlikeable, and in the process be utterly loved.

May you be impervious to the wrongful projections of others, and may you deliver your disagreements with precision and grace.

May you see, with the consummate clarity of nature moving through you, that your voice is not only necessary, but desperately needed to sing us out of this muddle.

May you feel shored up, supported, entwined, and reassured as you offer yourself and your gifts to the world.

May you know for certain that even as you stand by yourself, you are not alone.

With poetic language and myths and Jungian dreamwork, Toko-pa Turner tells her own story of not-belonging and weaves a wider net of strategies to belong better. There is an Outcast archetype who can visit our dreams, and whose patterns we can follow. We can open our hearts to our own pain, and be willing to be more vulnerable (“woundable”) to others.

Her Black Sheep Gospel resonated for me. Adopt your rejected qualities. Venerate your too-muchness. Send out your signals of originality. Go it alone until you are alone with others.

In a lot of this book, I heard, “Try harder! Work harder! Get out of your own way!” While that may be valid advice, I’ve tried a lot of things it advises. It does also touch on fallow time and letting go of connections that no longer work well.

The author is writing from a place when things are going well for her, so she describes her steps in that direction and then prescribes them for others. While I’m glad she landed where she did, I’m not sure it’s so deterministic as all that. She talks both about divine guidance and about taking action on your own behalf. Yes, when things go well, it looks like a mix of those things led you there. A mix of those things can lead people to any number of places, not all of them positive.

The book was published in 2017, so she does acknowledge increasing environmental and political disaster throughout the book. She advises living closer to the earth, returning to more indigenous ways, without noting that all 7.6 billion of us can’t do that at the same time.

Her description of the problem resonated with me. Her solutions, not as much. Recommended especially if you already do dreamwork.

Available at bookshop.org.

“Choosing Gentleness” by Robyn L. Posin, Ph.D.

September 3, 2018 by Sonia Connolly 1 Comment

Subtitle: Opening Our Hearts to All the Ways We Feel and Are in Every Moment

Recommended to me by: reading Robyn Posin’s website for the last 15+ years. Also I was an advance reviewer for this book.

This is a collection of line drawings and wise words that have appeared on Robyn Posin’s website over the years, along with some more recent essays. It was lovely to see the vibrant drawings of dancing, struggling, resting women and the encouraging words gathered in one place.

Robyn Posin’s work has been a big inspiration and support over the years. Most of her messages resonate powerfully for me. At the same time, I’m still arguing with a few of them.

The idea that our love-starved little ones inside can only get love from us, not from anyone outside us now that we are no longer children makes a lot of sense, and I still have a “Yes, but…” response. What about adult attachment? What about friendship, and care? I’m not saying she’s wrong, but something in me is still hoping.

I love the parts about accepting all our feelings, not just the warm fuzzy ones, and the firm rejection of the idea that acknowledging our anger just brings more of the same into our lives. Feelings are meant to live and move through, not be shoved down and frozen in place.

In this book, I found a message that I had remembered all this time, but not been able to find again on her website: “It does not matter whether how we are in the moment is born from our woundings or our wholeness.” What a revolutionary, liberating message! Even if we are “broken” in some way because of abuse or trauma, that’s how it is. We still have to exist in the world, with both our damage and our wholeness.

Living in the thinnest slice of now and trusting that my future self will be able to handle my future circumstances has also been a liberating idea.

Another idea I struggle with is that the Grandmothers (or other higher/deeper powers) are guiding my life. I’d love to feel so cherished and protected, but life seems too random, and too catastrophic for a lot of people, to believe that someone is in charge of what happens to each individual.

Highly recommended as a comforting and thought-provoking compilation of Robyn Posin’s many years of healing and helping others heal.

Available at Amazon.

“The Wild Edge of Sorrow” by Francis Weller

July 21, 2018 by Sonia Connolly 1 Comment

Subtitle: Rituals of Renewal and the Sacred Work of Grief

Recommended to me by: Kristin

This is a wise, kind, perceptive, affirming, healing book about grief. It warmly includes childhood triggering, shame, and shared grief for the planet among the burdens that we all carry. It emphasizes the importance of both a village to share our grief, and the capacity to turn toward our grief with compassion when we are alone.

“Turning toward the suffering and into the marrow of our grief with the attention and attunement of a caring adult helps to dilute and transmute the trauma and shame into the kind of sensitivity that can inform our compassion for others.”

The writing is lyrical, poetic, and includes well-chosen poems sprinkled through the book.

Francis Weller recommends group rituals, or perhaps solitary ones, as an anodyne for grief. One simple one is to put a small stone for each grief into a large bowl of water. When everyone is done, the water is given to a plant for nourishment, and the stones are returned to a river or lake or ocean, or buried in the earth, to be washed clean again.

A central part of grief work is to have a daily practice in meditation or something similar that allows us to hold space with ourselves rather than becoming overwhelmed.

Highly recommended.

Available at bookshop.org.

“Trauma and Memory” by Peter Levine

July 15, 2018 by Sonia Connolly 4 Comments

Subtitle: Brain and Body in a Search for the Living Past. A Practical Guide for Understanding & Working with Traumatic Memory

The first part of this book is a thorough introduction to different kinds of memories. There are explicit and implicit memories. Explicit (conscious) memories include declarative (like the times table) and episodic (stories with emotional content). Implicit (subconscious) memories include emotional and procedural memories. Implicit emotional memories are “flags.” Procedural memories are impulses, movements, and internal body sensations. Procedural memories can be further divided into skills like riding a bike, hardwired emergency responses, and basic approach/avoidance.

The writing is warm, engaging, informal, and filled with anecdotes.

The second part is an introduction to Levine’s trauma healing method of Somatic Experiencing, with several case studies, some including stills from videos of the sessions.

The third part is rants against more cathartic modalities of trauma healing, including support for the idea of false memories being induced by the “wrong” kind of trauma healing. I have only tentatively recommended Levine’s first book “Waking the Tiger” because it includes a section about false memories, and unfortunately I have to make the same caveat here.

Yes, false memories occur, just like false accusations of rape occur. Neither occur with enough frequency to deserve being addressed at length in a healing book, and both topics do a great deal of harm by undermining survivors’ already fragile hold on their truth.

Levine’s deeper point is to support trauma survivors to listen to their own bodies, and that is a message I can get behind.

Available at bookshop.org.

“The Deepest Well” by Nadine Burke Harris, MD

July 10, 2018 by Sonia Connolly Leave a Comment

Subtitle: Healing the Long-Term Effects of Childhood Adversity

Recommended to me by: listening to Nadine Burke Harris’s TED talk

This is a skillful blend of memoir and scientific information about the effects of trauma, presented for the layperson. Nadine Burke Harris shares how as a newly licensed doctor she founded a pediatric clinic in Bayview, the poorest section of San Francisco with the most at-risk patients, and how that clinic came to focus on trauma as the underlying cause of a lot of medical issues, especially for children. Later she founded the Center for Youth Wellness, also in San Francisco.

She does not dwell on the effects of being a Black woman, but she does not skip over them either. She notes the benefits of networking with other women and offering each other support. While marginalization and racism contribute to people’s load of trauma, trauma is not only a “poor, Black issue.” Privilege does not exempt people from trauma or its long-term effects.

There is a strong correlation between Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) and health issues caused by the body’s ongoing stress response. The stress response can be buffered by strong relationships with caring adults.

Nadine Burke Harris developed a screening tool that asks a parent about the number of a child’s ACEs, but does not ask them to disclose the stories involved. She advocates for this screening tool to be used everywhere, just as infants are now universally screened for hypothyroid and jaundice.

The treatments for a body dysregulated by trauma are sleep, mental health, healthy relationships, exercise, nutrition, and meditation. Schools that help children regulate their nervous systems rather than punishing them for “acting out” enjoy both a more peaceful atmosphere and higher success rates by every measure.

(While screening is catching on in medical offices, I hear from nurses that treatment is catching on less quickly, leaving them in the frustrating position of knowing that people’s issues are caused by trauma, but not having the time and resources to help them.)

Highly recommended both for the information about the effects on trauma, and the memoir of a groundbreaking scientist and doctor who is radically improving how we care for both children and adults affected by trauma.

Available at bookshop.org.