Note: for anyone that is suffering from PTSD, the book I reference in this post The Body Keeps the Score, can be a possible trigger for some readers. For Aaron and I, it was a crucial roadmap for our recovery. We are grateful for its existence and for the many decades of research behind it. For others we know, it was too overwhelming to read.
When I was in my 30’s, I experienced quite a lot of anxiety and depression. Most people who know me would say I’m extremely social, outgoing and confident. I guess that’s true, but at the same time, I have also spent years inside of a shell that used to be occupied by a life-adoring 25-year-old. Back then I was really going for it. I got out there, I soaked up knowledge, made bold choices and fully engaged.
What happened to the excited and expansive me? Somewhere along the way, I grew scared. I don’t think it’s one thing that happened; it was a slow burn. Certain people scared me, possibility scared me, other people’s success stopped me in my tracks, I compared and silently despaired. I developed a dominant inner voice that says outrageous things to me. Then, I started living smaller and smaller. Life tends to do this to everyone a bit. Once you get through our early 20’s there are bills, jobs, kids, career. We aren’t the same as we used to be because we have to deal with responsibilities.
By my early 30’s I had an overabundance of negative thoughts running through my mind. I remember feeling desperate one day, just dying for someone to pick me up, turn me upside down and shake me out.
At age 34, I ended a nine-year relationship ten days before Sept. 11th. This is when I returned to Al-Anon and began a search for a personal connection to a “Higher Power” instead of finding my worth in other people.
The other day, I was deluged by a series of bad thoughts. “You’re really bad at this. You’re not a good leader. You’re scattered and disorganized. You don’t follow through. You don’t know what you’re doing. Really.”
Then I imagined myself sitting in an office where a co-worker said the same things to me. “You really suck at your job. You don’t even know what you’re doing.”
The difference was not lost on me. I will say all kinds of negative things to myself, things I would never allow someone else to say to me. They’re awful things to say. So mean. If someone treated me that way every day, I would quit.
And yet I allow myself to say these same things.
Ugh! This explains so much! These are the voices I have learned to live with all these years – totally and completely unfettered. How long I have been talking to myself this way without even being aware of it. The slow burn of my diminishing 25-year-old.
August, 2017
Back in June of 2017, when Aaron and I heard from four different people that we should read The Body Keeps the Score, I found myself in a bookstore in Chicago with my step brother Steven. They had one copy left. By the time I got back to LA, I had bought Aaron a copy too. I was underlining truths on every page and it was like finding a language that described what we had been through for the last 13 months.
The Body Keeps the Score, pg 213
Reading The Body Keeps the Score set the course of our recovery from trauma, by creating a jumping off point for us. It’s how I learned that I had some of my own ties to trauma through the family disease of Alcoholism.
Page 1, The Body Keeps the Score:
One does not have to be a combat solider, or visit a refugee camp in Syria or the Congo to encounter trauma. Trauma happens to us, our friends our families and our neighbors. Research by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has shown that one in five Americans was sexually molested as a child’ one in four was beaten by a parent to the point of a mark being left on their body and one in three couples engages in physical violence. A quarter of us grew up with alcoholic relatives, and one out of eight witnessed their mother being beaten or hit.
Countless people like me that I have met over the years have alcoholism in their family tree. Van der Kolk goes on to explain that “trauma affects not only those who are directly exposed to it, but also those around them.”
Later on in the book I learned that there is something called “secondary trauma”, that Aaron’s experience was having a profound effect on me. That supporting him, loving him, helping him stay alive is recognized as something so difficult, that it requires treatment and can cause a form of PTSD in the supporting individual.
A while back I heard the a woman say that there was a “rolling trauma” across the globe and as natural born skeptic, I thought she sounded overly dramatic. But a part of me was also unclear what she really meant. As I was reading The Body Keeps the Score, I started seeing bits and pieces of trauma in everyone. As I walked down the street. The way people look away as you pass them by. The way I look away.
Then I thought of my own family. My grandmother, notoriously strict, experienced trauma too. During the Russian revolution she stopped her own brother’s execution by screaming bloody murder. And then my mother was raised by her along with an alcoholic father. I recall emotions were highly criticized and shushed in that household. And so the trauma continues.
Over the years, I have found many ways to cope—many of them I still use (except the bad suburban weed we smoked in the 1980’s). Books such as The Nature of Personal Reality, A Course in Miracles, The Disappearance of the Universe (which helped me further interpret “The Course”), The Power of Neuroplasticity. Thirty-three years of Al-Anon meetings. Movies like What the BLEEP do we Know? (a somewhat cheesy film but a brilliant concept).
Even a small dosage of Lexapro. For me, the downside was binge-eating chocolate and ice-cream (for a while, I assumed this behavior was how dealt with someone’s PTSD. That behavior vanished when I reduced to 5 mg.) I have weaned myself off this medication to see if I can do without it. For me, this is the right decision.
Aaron is still taking Luvox, and we are closely monitoring. Our friend Cindy Rosenberg puts it this way: “we all need to be on guard when our loved ones are starting new meds or changing doses.”
Other things I have spent time and money on are all coming together now. 12-Step meetings, Vedic meditation, CBD oil, a serotonin balancing spray that is very interesting (am checking it out), Arbonne’s peppermint essential oil (amazing for PTSD) and Doterra’s orange oil.
Talking to my amazingly supportive sisters and following my favorite leading edge thinkers online like Bruce Lipton, Joe Dispenza, and Gregg Braden has also played a huge role. I’m also deeply moved by the work of Marianne Williamson and think she is one of the greatest orators of our lifetime. Her 30+ years of lectures based on the principles of A Course in Miracles have been the gateway to the only spiritual practice that ever felt personal (and truly non-denominational).
But the one thing that has had the greatest and most immediate impact on how I feel right now, is HeartMath. It’s the most powerful and singularly effective thing I have ever done. I can and do practice it anytime and anywhere I can remember to. So does Aaron.Your Content Goes Here
Last summer I had the crazy idea to audition for an advanced level acting class after 17 years away from the craft. I was extremely nervous for weeks as I prepared and imagined myself panicking when I got to the audition. However, a few days before, I had started doing this breathing thing while driving around in my car. When I left the audition, I sat in my car and realized that I had not been nervous before, or after the audition.
Years ago when auditioning for theater gigs, I remember feeling a lot of panic (stage fright). But on this day, my heart had not been pounding like it I had expected. The only explanation for this was that breathing exercise Aaron and I had learned a few days prior during a trauma therapy session.
Milena Lukic and Joshua Beckett, our amazing team of trauma specialists, were seeing us as a couple to support Aaron’s individual work. During one session, Joshua hooked us up to a biofeedback mechanism (a small clip attached to our earlobes). “The heart does much more than pump blood,” he said. “In fact, the heart sends more information to the brain than the brain sends to the rest of the body.”
I recognized the information he was sharing from a book I had been given 16-years-ago by a doctor in my family. The Heart Math Solution is one of the most fascinating books I’ve ever read. The book demonstrates that we are designed as human beings with the ability to impact our autonomic nervous system. We can control the information that our heart sends to our brain.
After a few minutes of gathering biofeedback, Joshua taught us a simple breathing technique. We saw the difference in our heart rate variability and the level of “coherency” between our hearts and brains in real time. This was after just a few short minutes of this slow, deep and consistent breathing pattern.
The dominant force in the whole body is that guiding principle which we term mind or intellect. This is firmly lodged in the mid-region of the breast. Here is the place where fear and alarm pulsate. Here is felt the caressing touch of joy. Here, then, is the seat of the intellect and the mind.
Although the power and intelligence of the heart have been recognized for thousands of years, it’s only within the last 25 years that evidence has accumulated for the presence of a functional heart brain—first described as the “little brain on the heart.” From a neuroscience perspective, the nervous system within the heart contains 40,000 neurons capable of processing information. This is in conjunction with the heart’s ability to produce crucial hormones.
The heart’s electro-magnetic field is 100 times greater than the brain’s and its energy field reaches virtually every cell in our bodies. It’s so powerful that it is measurable three to eight feet from the body and likely goes on forever – we just don’t have the technology to measure its true reach.
When it comes to the anxiety and depression I felt earlier in life, I have always wondered which comes first? Are my thoughts creating my feelings, or are my feelings creating my thoughts? It’s really neither. Emotion is generated in your heart. When the brain gets that information, it responds with perception, thought and feeling. I learned that I can activate a positive emotion that changes the quality of the signal going to my brain.
The thing is, I have known the power of positive thoughts for years. I’ve read about this over and over again. But HeartMath taught me how to create and experience emotions, not just think about positive things. Practicing them over and over again, has given me the opportunity to begin to rewire the habitual patterns that have not been serving me.
Practicing HeartMath almost daily for the last six months has been a game changer. It’s been the real deal for me and it doesn’t require endless training and understanding. I chose to really learn it and use the HeartMath institute’s technology to train myself to self regulate my emotions. I’m really aware of when I’m not feeling right and I have a method to bring myself back to normal.
My mental clarity is greatly improved, my ability follow through and be more organized and my decision making is better. I have a thought to do something and I do it without worrying about the things I’m not doing. I don’t procrastinate as much. When I’m practicing HeartMath, I enjoy the day so much more than when I’m not and I love the feeling of being present while life is happening.
Now that I have learned how to do HeartMath, I have the skill for the rest of my life. It’s not like therapy where you have to keep going for years and years. This is important especially for people in recovery. It’s maddening to us that it is so wildly expensive to save yourself.
I am so proud of this next thing. I followed my passion and became a Certified HeartMath Coach and Mentor. (This is my brand new website!) Practicing HeartMath connected me with the 25 year old me again and it’s so good to be back.
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