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. . .
“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.
What do we need to do to start acknowledging our vulnerabilities?
I think we begin by examining each of the shame categories and trying to unearth the unwanted identities that cause us shame.
As I was interviewing both men and women, many of the same phrases kept coming up in the interviews—the ones that I heard over and over were “I don’t want to be seen as . . .” and “I don’t want people to think I’m . . .”
There were many variations on this including, “I would die if people thought I was . . .” or “I couldn’t stand people thinking I’m . . .”
As these phrases indicate, shame is about perception.
Shame is how we see ourselves through other people’s eyes.
When I interviewed women about shame experiences, it was always about “how others see me” or “what others think.”
And often, there is even a disconnect between who we want to be and how we want to be perceived.
For example, one woman in her seventies told me, “I’m OK when I’m alone.
I know I’m changing. I know things are slowing down and everything is not what it used to be.
I just can’t stand the thought of others seeing it and dismissing me as a person.
Being dismissed is shameful.
To help us begin to recognize some of our shame triggers, let’s look at the questions I use in my workshop sessions. We start with these fill-in-the-blank statements, which should be answered separately for each of the shame categories:
I want to be perceived as __, _____, _________________, ___________ and __________. I do NOT want to be perceived as ______, ____, ___, ______ or ___.
These are fairly simple statements; however, when you start to think about these questions in relation to the twelve shame categories, this can be a probing and powerful start to the process.
But it’s important to remember that it is only a start.
As I’ve said throughout the book, there are no easy answers or quick fixes.” . .
PTSD - A Way Out 