My psychological mentor, Dr. Eugene Gendlin, first drew my attention by saying that change doesn’t happen unless it happens in the body. As a yoga teacher, I knew this was true. That’s when I began to study Focusing with him. Focusing, as you know, is a sort of inner yoga.
One of the physical ways of releasing trauma held in the body is described below by guest blogger Ramona Ng. Here is what she has to say about her approach to the body. Read more
I asked Sarah Olson to be my guest blogger. Sarah, like me, has chosen to write a book in order to share with others her story of childhood trauma.
Sarah’s form of dissociation was particularly severe.
A child’s brain does whatever is necessary to survive trauma. First lines of defense are daydreaming, numbing, forgetting, going dead inside or floating out of body while looking down at “another child” being abused. When all these strategies are insufficient, the child’s brain creates “other children” to suffer the abuse. The “self” remains unaffected. All the bad stuff happens to others, known as “alters.” As new, intolerable abuses occur, more parts split off to form more alters.
Here then, is Sarah Olson’s message: Read more
I’ve asked a number of writers to provide us with guest blog entries over the next few weeks. I hope you find their fresh perspectives useful in guiding you along your own healing path or that of a loved one.
Guest blogger Sharon shares with us an insider’s experience of suffering from childhood trauma that was severe enough to cause her to survive by splitting off parts of herself into “alters.” Sharon, or Shen as she is known, is one of us women survivors of childhood trauma who chooses to write about her experience to educate and help others. Here is how Shen describes her recent integration:
The Adverse Childhood Experiences Study is huge and looks at the common stressful traumas that adversely affect the neurodevelopment of children.
These are the stressors:
-Alcohol abuse in the family
-emotional, physical and sexual abuse
-witnessing domestic violence
-growing up with substance abusing, mentally ill, or criminal adults
The studies were conducted with 17, 337 predominately middle class, educated, members of two large USA medical care programmes over a period of 10 years. Read more
Recently I attended the celebration of Women’s College Hospital’s 100th anniversary. Mellissa Fung, a journalist for the CBC, was the keynote speaker.
Mellissa recently published Under An Afghan Sky, her story of being kidnapped as she came out of a refugee camp where she’d covered the story of people who had fled their homes. Mellissa was nabbed be three armed men, thrown into a car that took her, bleeding from knife wounds, to the hole in the earth where she would spend the next 28 days. Read more
