psychology

“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.

“Unlocked” by Gerald Zaltman

August 12, 2018 by Sonia Connolly Leave a Comment

Recommended to me by: Received a copy from Asakiyume who edited it

Gerald Zaltman is a marketing consultant for corporate executives and a professor emeritus of business administration at Harvard. The idea for this book came out of interactions with his young grandchildren. I do not belong to these target audiences, and the book did not resonate with me. I realized as I read the first few sections that the author had not won my trust, so I was engaging with the thought exercises warily, waiting to be tricked and tripped up.

The book starts off with a couple of ethical dilemmas, and then the rest is about many ways our thinking can be influenced that we might be unaware of, and unconscious assumptions we might be making. There was no mention of racism, sexism, or any other -isms that lead to unconscious biases affecting our thinking and responses.

While there is a section on embodied cognition, it is more about how, for example, holding a warm drink can make us perceive a person more warmly, rather than about how our bodies and minds are integrated. The rest of the book is very much disembodied, based on the premise that, “You are how you think.”

There were links to a couple of interesting related videos:

Selective Attention Test: Count the number of passes between players dressed in white.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vJG698U2Mvo

A Portrait Session with a Twist: 6 photographers, one subject, 6 different stories.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F-TyPfYMDK8

The ebook contains live links and color illustrations. In one exercise, color names are printed in non-matching colors and the instruction is to say the color of the text rather than read the word. The gray-scale illustration in the printed book does not do the exercise justice.

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.

“Your Resonant Self” by Sarah Peyton

May 24, 2018 by Sonia Connolly 5 Comments

Subtitle: Guided Meditations and Exercises to Engage Your Brain’s Capacity for Healing

Recommended to me by: Amy Bennett

This book hooked me with, “The inner voice can be a constant flow of emotional warmth.” Yes please! Where do I sign up? It did take me a couple of months to get all the way through it, and would have taken longer if I hadn’t decided to finish reading it and write an article about it for May.

The book has a lot of detailed information about different parts of the brain, how they work together, and how trauma isolates them from each other. It’s not clear which parts of this are Interpersonal Neurobiology, but that’s in there. There are lots of TLAs (Three Letter Acronyms). Also lots of NVC (Non-Violent Communication), guessing about feelings and needs, which is one way to express empathy, but not the only way.

Emotional warmth is defined as being met or meeting others with affection and welcome, with a feeling of being cared for, nourished, and nurtured.

Resonance is defined as sensing that another being fully understands us and sees us with emotional warmth and generosity. Resonance is a two-person relational experience, being a “we.”

“We are social animals created to live in groups, like honey bees, ant colonies, or parades of elephants. Our brains are meant to be soothed by other human brains.”

The Default Mode Network (DMN) is the part of our brain that talks to us when we’re idle. It can be warmly kind, neutrally factual, or viciously negative.

We can choose to speak warmly to our attention as we watch it in meditation. We can begin to be warm toward parts of ourselves. We can find a part called Resonating Self Witness (RSW), and have that part resonate with other parts that need hearing and healing.

There are chapters on the inner critic, anxiety, editing old trauma narratives, anger, fears, dissociation, attachment, self-hate, depression, addiction, and community. There is a huge amount of material in the book, and I’m barely touching on what’s there and my responses to it.

The guided meditations that go with the chapters can be downloaded from yourresonantself.com. You get added to a marketing-heavy mailing list, but it’s easy to unsubscribe.

The way that criminality is associated with disorganized attachment sounds like the way some people say abusers abuse because they were abused themselves. No, plenty of us were abused and don’t go on to abuse anyone. Plenty of us had disorganized or disorganizing attachment and don’t end up in prison.

The Resonating Self Witness is similar to Self In Presence from Inner Relationship Focusing. That system’s way of listening and reflecting feels like a better fit for me than the questions about feelings and needs that this book suggests. Perhaps for people who do not yet have words for their emotions and needs, the NVC approach is more helpful.

I like the model that healing from trauma is about getting isolated parts of the brain back into connection. After working through all the guided meditations, I feel like I did learn more about how to be warm in relation to myself. I like the idea that resonance is available inside us rather than being dependent on finding it externally. I continue to be suspicious of the idea that internal resonance is just as good as interpersonal resonance, or even good enough, but I’m sure it’s better than nothing.

Recommended if you’re curious about interpersonal neurobiology and want to spend some quality time investigating and changing how you relate with yourself.

Available at bookshop.org.