Posts Tagged ‘Thought’

13 Oct

Part 2: Combining Neuroscience with Meditation (Mindfulness) Practice

Posted by Marty in Assorted. Tagged: , , , , , , , , .

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Rick Hanson from “Neurodharma”

“Further, what is not compassionate and kind–such as hurt, resentment, or contempt–can loom large and persist in a persons mind

The Brain is designed to be shaped by our experiences–and especially those in childhood…...particularly if they were painful and involved other people.

The traces linger and can shadow your days.

These physical changes in your brain are not reversed just by watching your mind.

It takes deliberate practice to heal and to find new ways of being with others.

So let’s see how we can grow compassion and kindness for others–and ourselves.”

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My two cents: Our childhood abuse has built strong negative neural networks of suffering for us.

I have healed twice but have not changed my negative neural network.

My mind lacked kindness,approval and support as a child, it is prone to worry, doubt, anxiety and worthlessness.

I can only imagine how constant criticism from my father wired during childhood.

We need to alter our neural networks, well I do!

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16 Jul

Intense and barely controllable urges and emotions make people feel crazy

Posted by Marty in Assorted. Tagged: , , , , , , , .

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The Body Keeps the Score:

Still others may shut down emotionally and not feel any obvious changes.

 

However, in the lab we have no problem detecting their racing hearts and the stress hormones churning through their bodies.

These reactions are irrational and largely outside people’s control.

Intense and barely controllable urges and emotions make people feel crazy—and makes them feel they don’t belong to the human race.

Feeling numb during birthday parties for your kids or in response to the death of loved ones makes people feel like monsters.

As a result, shame becomes the dominant emotion and hiding the truth the central preoccupation.

They are rarely in touch with the origins of their alienation.

That is where therapy comes in—is the beginning of bringing the emotions that were generated by trauma being able to feel, the capacity to observe oneself online.

However, the bottom line is that the threat-perception system of the brain has changed, and people’s physical reactions are dictated by the imprint of the past.

The trauma that started “out there” is now played out on the battlefield of their own bodies, usually without a conscious connection between what happened back then and what is going on right now inside.

The challenge is not so much learning to accept the terrible things that have happened but learning how to gain mastery over one’s internal sensations and emotions.

Sensing, naming, and identifying what is going on inside is the first step to recovery.

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My two cents: Sensing, naming, and identifying sounds like being aware.

Being aware of our inner world as we let the storyline fade is our goal.

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30 Jun

I have absorbed the body trauma meditating yesterday

Posted by Marty in Assorted. Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , .

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Yesterday, I meditated five hours total in one hour increments. A past Trauma popped up with all its emotional terror, being trapped inside my body.

Trauma is stored at the time it occurs and with the ability at that age. My 19 year old self is much different than this 68 year old self.

The power, the intensity, the sheer anger and hurt shocked me.

All my skills had not stopped this trauma from taking over for a week.

Yesterday during my meditative sets, I brought the event to the surface, then observed all the fear, shame, anger and confusion without reaction.

I learned this as titration, you bring your trauma up for a couple minutes of thought, then meditate. The goal is to settle the nervous system back to normal.

Yes, I triggered myself, so I could integrate the fear. It is the road less travelled for sure.

That’s how healing happened originally. Triggers always caused me to avoid until I realized healing goes directly through the center of our fear (trauma).

The goal is not to squash the danger, it is to do nothing, accept and surrender from a distance.

This process integrates the stored trauma from the body and amygdala.

It is a very simple process, however it takes a strong ability to focus and courage to face our fears.

As long as our trauma has these strong negative emotions to reinforce its storyline, we lose.

For a couple of days, I was a victim, experiencing the tragedy in its full power.

It takes me a while for the mind to grapple with the demon.

Today, my system has absorbed most of the stored trauma, settled closer to my normal existence. I have separation of my 19 year old ego and my 68 year old ego again.

I forgot the intensity, the confusion and the outright terror PTSD wields when aroused. It’s been five years since anything like this has happened.

What seemed overwhelming last week, has shrunk to very unpleasant.

Settling the nervous system makes PTSD much easier to handle.

Thoughts?

Writing a few post with me suffering with PTSD, was difficult sharing the last couple of days. I knew everyone would be watching to see how I would handle it.

Do I just talk the talk or walk the walk. I have an added responsibility to not feel sorry for myself or be a victim. That actually adds to my motivation to never give in, never give up.

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27 Jun

Urgency, urgency, urgency

Posted by Marty in Assorted. Tagged: , , , , , .

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Something I never experienced in a chiropractors or therapist office is urgency.

Many times someone would say, I have been in therapy for 17 years, feeling proud of the effort, I think.

Their mouths drop when I ask, why they never thought 17 years and no improvement was a failure.

Many believe the therapist is responsible for healing, so we keep going, waiting for them to heal us. It will never happen.

Urgency starts with taking responsibility for your healing.

I was a pro athlete, we trained in the off season to improve our weaknesses for next season. If the new season does not bring improvements, we will change our program.

We put in the work and we expect results.

No matter the path you choose, expect results.

Have the courage to change, to adapt, to add urgency.

I expect my therapist to care and want me to heal as quick as possible.

My healing had the highest level of urgency.

If yours is not, better rethink your path.

Have a purpose, feed it urgency with daily work.

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19 Jun

Quickest way to improve from PTSD!

Posted by Marty in Assorted. Tagged: , , , , , , , , , .

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My healing lacked direction, wasted precious time everyday. Confusion, fear and intense anxiety placed me in survival mode again and again.

Now I would approach healing entirely different. The sequence of what to address first, would be changed.

I looked for help inside and outside the box. Intuitive, holistic healers were used along with many therapies.

The one constant that I relied on was aerobic exercise. Pushing myself to near exhaustion brought exhilaration to my body and mind. This practice would stay.

Next, all effort would be invested in calming the nervous system. Stop the fight or flight mechanism from firing erroneously.

Our triggers firing give PTSD the mirage of power, potency, the ability to cause harm. That huge jolt in the solar plexus (cortisol) can freeze us, numb our bodies in terrifying fear.

This is survival mode, we need to fix this, our broken nervous system first. Yes, our adrenal stress response is out of whack, spotting danger everywhere, even in mundane situations.

Meditation/Mindfulness can be simplified, the big connotation and complexity dropped.

If I were helping someone improve from PTSD today, all effort would be directed at mastering focus on ten breaths.

Ten slow, focused breaths, where thought has faded, can calm that trigger exploding.

Ten breaths can Escort us out of survival mode, relieve the biggest fear PTSD brings us.

Avoidance, hyoervigilance, flash backs, anxiety and fear lose massive power. Symptoms weaken, PTSD loosens it’s grip when we calm down.

If our triggers fail to ignite the fight or flight mechanism, not much left to fear.

In my opinion this is the fastest way to heal and quickest way of having some peace of mind.

Ten slow, focused breaths can change your life.

Simple, specific, concrete and bulletproof.

I have done this, have helped others sit still and focus when triggered.

It is scary and having a mentor to encourage and reassure your safety are very helpful.

Can you master ten breaths?

You can practice anytime, anywhere.

What stands in your way?

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8 Jun

Healing Pain from the Past: “The Self Compassion Skills Workbook”:

Posted by Marty in Assorted. Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , .

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If we imagine a 100-year-old tree, we can see that the 50-year-old tree is contained within it. We could count the rings and point to the exact place where the 50-year-old tree is present in the 100-year-old tree.

We can see that the 20-year-old tree and the 10-year-old tree are all concretely present in the 100-year-old tree. It is the same with us.

Every experience we have is recorded in the shapes of connections in the neural networks in our brains.

If a past experience is still impacting us in any way, it’s because the connections that were made during that experience are still concretely present in our brains.

Someday brain imaging technology may become so accurate that we will be able to identify the exact place where our brain stores the experience of our 5-year-old self being humiliated by an older sibling, or our 10-year-old self being bitten by a neighborhood dog.

This is why healing the past is possible. We cannot change what happened in the past, but we can change how it impacts us.

The metaphor of the rings in a tree illustrates how the past can be accessed in the present because its marks remain within us.

We can access how those experiences are stored in our brains and change them.

In fact, neuroscientists have demonstrated that the key to transforming pain from the past is to get in touch with that pain while experiencing compassion at the same time.

This triggers a process in your brain called memory reconsolidation that literally rewrites your emotional response to a past experience.

The memory isn’t erased; it is simply changed so that it doesn’t cause distress anymore.

For this type of deep transformation to occur, all we need to do is to get in touch with pain from our past as well as our compassion for ourselves—both at the same time.

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4 Jun

Part 1: narrative based and immediate based selfs

Posted by Marty in Assorted. Tagged: , , , , , , , , , .

Pixabay: ToNic-Pics

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“Living with your Heart Wide Open” by Steve Flowers

“The hunger from unmet needs can form a central theme in the story you repeat to yourself, creating a narrative of a wounded self.

As described above, the narrative-based self exists across time and continuously creates itself through the stories it repeats.

We mistakenly believe this “self” is a somewhat permanent entity that endures through the constant changes of life.

(my two cents: this self is our created “Ego”)

Psychologist William James characterized the narrative-based self as a construction of narratives woven together from the threads of experiences over time into a cohesive concept we reference as “me” to make sense of the “I” acting in the present moment (James 1890).

The immediacy-based self, in contrast, is a creature of the here and now.

It is grounded in the experience of who you are in each moment.

This sense of self exists only in the present moment and therefore is ageless and timeless.

It is the primary orientation from which awareness is experienced and thus is not characterized by concepts such as gender, race, religion, and personal history.

As such, the immediacy-based self is not a thing but rather an active center of awareness from which you can acknowledge moment-to-moment experience.

From this perspective, Descartes’s famous dictum becomes “I experience what’s happening, therefore I am.”

Neurological research using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) has shown that these two forms of self-awareness—narrative-based self and immediacy-based self—are located in two separate areas of the brain (Farb et al. 2007).

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28 Apr

Simple Repetition can program our Complex Mind

Posted by Marty in Assorted. Tagged: , , , , , , , .

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“I fear not the man who has practiced 10 000 kicks once, 

but I fear the man who has practiced one kick 10 000 times.”

Bruce Lee

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My two cents: The Breath is the minutest of action we humans undertake.

How can the tiniest grow to the most formidable.

The superstar meditators, these monks, supposedly the happiest humans on this planet, follow the tiniest thing, our breath for over 30,000 hours.

Must be much, much, much more than we perceive going on.

How can this lead to contentment, joy or happiness?

Related post: https://ptsdawayout.com/2020/03/05/focused-and-fearless-the-breath/

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24 Apr

Healed, a word I refrain from using!

Posted by Marty in Assorted. Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , .

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To many connotations around healed, healing, to use that word. I thought I was completely healed at one time and then PTSD erupted around a stressful situation.

Healing is different for each of us, I will never be happy go lucky with all the healing in the world. My abuse during childhood damaged me, isolated me from attachments with others.

A loner was the only thing my father allowed me to be. Crowds have never felt safe for me.

Trust, not something I am very familiar with. My happiness is not carved out of the things, normal people think constitutes happiness.

My needs are much different than others. Now, they are minimal and that solves many issues.

It was mandatory for me to know my inner world if I wanted to heal.

PTSD has led me down a path, a spiritual journey, a daily meditation practice, a life with gratitude, giving and kindness.

Changes abound.

Approval is needed in small amounts now.

Negative thoughts die from a lack of attention.

I can stay neutral, focused, for days while my trauma wants an audience to power up.

I just do not spend time worrying about my worthiness or unworthiness, anymore.

My life has 90% less worry, doubt and fear. There must be some happiness in so much alleviation of suffering.

However you classify me, healed, still messed up or better, I have taken my life back.

The past finally is the past and my feeling is, I have gained strengths from surviving.

I have wasted enough time on trauma and refuse to waste another breath.

It takes a daily practice to change a 24/7 disorder like Complex PTSD.

The biggest change, I am not a victim, my father has no power over me, I am free and content with me.

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17 Apr

Creating an affirmation that works

Posted by Marty in Assorted. Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , .

https://pixabay.com/users/bearinthenorth-2960032/

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No one affirmation fits all of us.

Certain words connect on a deeper level than others, depending on our life experience.

This is a followers (Browneyedgirls) process.

“I create my own affirmations by looking inside of myself and thinking about what my fears, worries, and concerns are. Once I know what they are I create an affirmation to fill in that space, and eventually I am whole again in that area.

For example, about my fears regarding my abuser, I feel trapped, threatened, and hurt. I explored those feelings further as they came up anytime HE came up in my head, and eventually, I created this affirmation,

“ I forgive you for what you have done to me and I am safe.”

When I say this to myself, I usually end up imagining I am on an island, with a willow tree and a small cottage. For me that image provides a sort of sanctuary for my spirit and soul.”

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For me, “In this moment, right now, I shower myself with approval, I accept all of me, I wrap myself in a warm blanket of kindness”, resonates.

I have been lax and stopped reciting my daily affirmation. We all get complacent and forget some of our core wellbeing skills.

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