Mindfulness experts John Briere and Catherine Scott referred to this as the pain paradox—the observation that our natural tendency to escape, deny, or withdraw from pain only intensifies and prolongs the distress.
When he originally approached doctors with the idea of having patients meditate, Kabat-Zinn was advocating for a fundamentally different approach to suffering—one that lay at the heart of the Buddhist tradition he’d trained in.
“From the perspective of mindfulness,” he wrote, “nothing needs fixing.
Nothing needs to be forced to stop, or change, or go away.”
Perhaps not surprisingly, this idea raised eyebrows.
Western medicine was built largely on helping alleviate people’s pain, offering interventions such as medication or surgery.
Mindfulness ran completely counter to this paradigm. How could paying closer attention to one’s pain alleviate it?
Yet doctors were also open to the idea. Each of them had patients they couldn’t cure and who were resistant to conventional treatment approaches. Doctors and their patients had little to lose.
The first MBSR studies thus began with those who were suffering from chronic pain.
Kabat-Zinn wanted to see whether they could mobilize their own internal responses to the suffering they were experiencing. “We invited them, paradoxically,” he said, “to put the welcome mat out for whatever sensations they were experiencing, just to see if they could attend to them moment by moment and ‘befriend’ the actuality of their experience, even briefly.”
The results were successful. Patients found that their relationship to pain shifted positively when they practiced mindfulness.
At times, their pain even disappeared. Patients also reported discovering that the vexing sensations that lived inside them were transient and shifting.
Rather than being constant throughout their day, the pain was shifting over time—a huge realization for those who felt perpetually burdened by their bodies.
Mindfulness was helping people relate to their pain differently.
For some, it was even opening a door to a freedom they had forgotten or had previously not known. . .
Others see our fear (triggers) like this, they see no danger while our fight or flight mechanism explodes.
Ptsd fear: When a past event elicits fear, a deep, deep fear, a special memory is stored in a special place, beyond our cognitive reach.
We will have to learn skills enabling us to stay focused, calm and aware when the fight or flight erupts to access these memories
When fully activated by a current visual, a certain smell, maybe a confined space, or the backfiring of a car can fire our adrenal stress response, better known as the fight or flight mechanism.
It’s that sudden, paralyzing jolt in the solar plexus, we humans experience this as fear.
The fight or flight mechanism: Physiological Effects; Tunnel vision, hearing loss, fine motor skills disappear, time is distorted along with blood pressure, heart rate, and pulse spike, finally the stimulants cortisol and adrenaline are secreted.
Thinking can be many things from, unable to think at all, confusion and numbness, frozen unable to move or think, the proverbial deer in the headlights scenario.
I won this battle with Ptsd, the calming of my fight or flight mechanism. The emotional and cognitive healing still eludes me.
With daily practice and application, slowly I started becoming more familiar less afraid of the mechanism.
Over time I could sit in the middle of my triggers exploding.
This is only half the war, integrating the cognitive and emotional part are much easier with the fight or flight acting normal.
Use your strengths, adapt things to maximize healing. . .
The one thing I had an abundance of was free time.
Trying to heal replaced my career, every day I would invest in reading, meditating, exercising, and applying the learned skills (A minimum of eight hours a day).
My daughter tells me it was way too much, I have identified with my trauma. It is hard for me to deny her allegations.
The books I read have all been about trauma, neuroscience, war, and the spiritual side.
Not a one for pleasure.
I lead a mindfulness group and write this blog.
My life revolves around my Complex Ptsd and depression.
My decade of effort has not separated me from my suffering but connected me to it more.
Now, what direction is the correct pivot?
I am back to my meditation practice, focusing on my breath, calming my being, and opening my heart. . .
“When trauma emanates from within the family, children experience a crisis of loyalty and organize their behavior to survive within their families. Being prevented from articulating what they observe and experience, traumatized children will organize their behavior around keeping the secret, deal with their helplessness with compliance or defiance, and acclimate in any way they can to entrapment in abusive or neglectful situations.
Being left to their own devices leaves chronically traumatized children with deficits in emotional self-regulation. This results in problems with self-definition as reflected by a lack of a continuous sense of self, poorly modulated affect and impulse control, including aggression against self and others, and uncertainty about the reliability and predictability of others, expressed as distrust, suspiciousness, and problems with intimacy, resulting in social isolation.
Chronically traumatized children tend to suffer from distinct alterations in states of consciousness, including amnesia, hypermnesia, dissociation, depersonalization and derealization, flashbacks and nightmares of specific events, school problems, difficulties in attention regulation, disorientation in time and space, and sensorimotor developmental disorders. The children often are literally are “out of touch” with their feelings, and often have no language to describe internal states.
When a child lacks a sense of predictability, he or she may experience difficulty developing of object constancy and inner representations of their own inner world or their surroundings. As a result, they lack a good sense of cause and effect and of their own contributions to what happens to them.
Without internal maps to guide them, they act, instead of plan, and show their wishes in their behaviors, rather than discussing what they want. Unable to appreciate clearly who they or others are, they have problems enlisting other people as allies on their behalf. Other people are sources of terror or pleasure but are rarely fellow human beings with their own sets of needs and desires.
These children also have difficulty appreciating novelty. Without a map to compare and contrast, anything new is potentially threatening. What is familiar tends to be experienced as safer, even if it is a predictable source of terror.
Traumatized children rarely discuss their fears and traumas spontaneously. They also have little insight into the relationship between what they do, what they feel, and what has happened to them. They tend to communicate the nature of their traumatic past by repeating it in the form of interpersonal en- actments, both in their play and in their fantasy lives.
PTSD - A Way Out 