Week 7. All these factors pointed to the fact that we are actually hard-wired for, and develop successfully through, relationship.

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1 Week 7 Regaining our relationships by healing trauma The Jean Baker Miller Institute developed relational cultural theory and started to question the idea of the ideal separate self-achieved through autonomy and individuation. They found it to be inaccurate and started to suggest that factors such as: mirror neurons; (when I watch you experience something, the same part of our brains will light up, creating effective resonance and understanding - I know how you feel through experiencing how you feel) social pain overlap theory; (the pain of social exclusion registers in the same part of the brain as physical pain) the massive size of the human frontal cortex (the larger this part of the brain, the more advanced and more capable the animal is of existing in sophisticated social groups). All these factors pointed to the fact that we are actually hard-wired for, and develop successfully through, relationship. The frontal cortex - the hardware required for relationships For most people, healthy good connections with other people release endorphins (serotonin and dopamine) into the brain which creates good feelings from and around being in connection. For some people, life has been so traumatising that closeness to another person can be a very potent trigger and can re-traumatise them, flooding their brains with stress hormones. How we relate to others depends very much on the development of our frontal cortex, particularly in the first few months immediately after we are born, but also throughout our childhood and beyond. In fact, our frontal cortex only reaches maturity when we are 25 years old. As our wise, indigenous cultures around the globe have always known, it takes a lot of good nurturing, way beyond infancy to raise a well-adjusted human being who can be an asset to her or his community. Put simply, if babies and small children are held and feel safe, as we were in our last healing process: their frontal cortex is washed with good hormones they develop towards relating with others they become comfortable with relationships they know that relationships are nurturing and enjoyable. These conditions are ideal for developing a healthy frontal cortex with a highly connected network of positive neural pathways. Imagine being in a community made up of individuals that felt positive and safe in their relationships with other people.

2 Steve Porges (world renowned expert in healing trauma and the creator of Poly-vagal theory) says: if you want to make a better world, make people feel safer. If babies and small children are not held and regularly feel unsafe, or if they are neglected or abused: their frontal cortex is washed with stress hormones; they will have negative associations and internalised memories around relationships and relating to others; they will develop towards isolation. Their early experiences of life will also be reflected in the neurology of their frontal cortex, the master regulator of the emotional and autonomic brains. An under-connected frontal cortex makes an individual prone to diseases of dis-regulation - the diseases of trauma. New pathways can be developed and parts of the brain that were not connected can be brought into connection later on. Even if we have had traumatic experiences, our brains remain highly malleable and plastic into our adulthood. Donna Jackson Nakazawa, author of Childhood Disrupted This means we can build the necessary neural structure for resilience, particularly if we have what scientists have now identified as the sensitivity gene and / or the stress vulnerability gene. Our great challenge is to apply the lessons of neuro-plasticity, the flexibility of brain circuits, to repair the brains and reorganise the minds of people who have been programmed by life itself to experience others as threats and themselves as helpless. Bessel Van Der Kolk, author of The Body keeps the Score Video One: Why is childhood trauma so significant? From 1990 Vincent Felitti, MD and Robert Anda, MD were the co-principal investigators of the ACE study - a monumental investigation of Adverse Childhood Experiences. The ACE study found: The loss of a parent in childhood triples your chances of depression in childhood. Being raised by a mother who suffers from depression puts you at a higher risk of living with chronic pain as an adult.

3 A person with an ACE score of four or more is, statistically, 1,220 per cent more likely to attempt suicide than someone with an ACE score of 0. You can find out more about the ACE study online and it is also summarised very intelligently in these two books: Childhood Disrupted - by Donna Jackson Nakazawa The Body Keeps the Score - by Bessel Van Der Kolk In this video we focus in on two important phenomena that very often have their roots in adverse childhood experiences. The two phenomena are: Dissociation and Hyper- vigilance I have found they are both prevalent in the sensitive people I work with. They are essential to address to allow sensitive people to activate their magic through their realignment with Source. Dissociation Dissociation is how our powerless child shuts down and learns to comply with whatever is asked of them. (In some cases the rebel is activated and these sensitive children will fight with their parents - but the damage is still the same). Mostly sensitive children become accustomed to going into a trans-personal state in order to survive something that is too much for them and their central nervous systems to cope with. They learn to dissociate by learning to make themselves disappear. They learn to take up as little physical space as possible They breathe as little and as quietly as possible - not even feeling they have the right to a supply of oxygen is quite usual among the people I treat. They put their head in the clouds, begin creating a space to be in that is not connected to the physical world They float up to the ceiling and look down at the little girl or little boy that is going through the difficult experience that they have learned to dissociate from. Robert Scaer s (author and world respected expert on trauma) describes dissociation as a capsule, or a defined state which is composed of all the unconscious body or procedural memories that accompany the traumatic event - especially an overwhelming one or one that was repeated constantly.

4 An example would be combat in war where combat is repeated again and again and all the memories (the sound of the shells, the tastes and the smells etc are all assimilated and stored in unconscious memory in a very precise fashion. This includes the physical sensations, the autonomic state (fight, flight or freeze), and the emotional state (whether it was rage, terror or fear) that someone was experiencing at the time they became dissociated. All of this information is stored and can be cued (or recalled) the moment that someone is reminded of the original event that traumatised them. The effects of dissociation: Difficulty in experiencing safety in their own bodies and associating with their bodies; It feels as if their body is having a life but the dissociated person feels deeply disconnected from that life - as if it is happening to someone else; Trouble distinguishing between danger and safety, including the safety of their own bodies; Brain fog - difficulty in concentrating on anything outside their immediate survival needs. John Bowlby (eminent 20th century psychiatrist and the pioneer of attachment theory) described the effects of dissociation as follows: When children are forced to disown powerful experiences they have had, it creates problems such as: chronic distrust of other people, inhibition of curiosity, distrust of their own senses the tendency to find everything unreal. When you don t feel real, nothing matters, which makes it impossible to protect yourself from danger. Or you may resort to extremes in an effort to feel something - even cutting yourself with a razor blade or getting into fistfights with strangers. Bessel Van Der Kolk. Dissociation is particularly unhelpful for sensitive people Whether they are consciously aware of it yet or not, sensitive people are sufficiently attuned to the subtle and finer vibrations of living light intelligence to know, at some level, that something they find vital for their well-being is missing from their life experience. i.e. their ability to be connected to Source energy while being present in their physical body. Sensitive People can fall into deep sense of purposelessness, anxiety and depression when they are not in contact with the divine. It is a form of illness or malady that very few people in our culture speak about or understand, which compounds the sensitive person s experience of being a misfit and not being understood by anyone.

5 Becoming hyper-vigilant Children experiencing ACE also learn to live through their state of hyper-arousal - their lack of safety makes them scan their environment for danger -acute hearing may allow them to detect the first sounds of a fight between their parents, or the footsteps outside their room of an abusive carer, or any and every slight change in the energetic atmosphere that might detect the beginning of a well-known cycle of abusive behaviour - eg a certain look in their mother s eye. They are using so much nervous energy to scan their environment for danger all the time, they spend a lot of time on their own recovering from the strain that modern life places on them. They isolate themselves in order to recuperate. Being able to sense and see what Is going on underneath superficial appearances is a way that sensitive people can protect themselves as they can use it to know when they need to retreat, or try to make themselves invisible. Strong memories condition us to be on alert for similar situations in the future - which means we are always on alert, watching for the next adverse situation in which we might be made to feel the same way we felt as children. We re consciously and unconsciously looking for more information in order to reconsolidate a memory, continually updating our understanding of how and when and why such situations represent danger - survival mode. As Donna Jackson Nakazawa explains: That can be a real problem, because the brain s alert center, the amygdala (a cluster of brain cells that determine whether a sound, image or body sensation is perceived as a threat), operates much faster than the brain s cortex. It takes two hundred milliseconds for the amygdala to compute, based on our past memories, whether to trigger fight or flight, compared with three to five seconds for the cortex to make a more judicious decision and weigh what s happening - which means our memories can influence us to have a knee-jerk reaction before we think. Our brain is hyper-busy looking for confirmation that the world is a scary and dangerous place, and so are the people in it. We begin to over-generalise our fearful memories, which can lead to generalised anxiety, which worsens our set point of well being. This all makes recovering from childhood wounds very difficult. But research shows that we can develop ways of revisiting painful childhood memories so that they lose their power over us. In the next video we look at how we can recover from dissociation and hyper-vigilance and I explain why the time-honoured shamanic art of soul retrieval is still an incredibly helpful tool for exactly this job.