In the aftermath of the latest vehicle-ramming attack, this time in Toronto, I’ve been feeling a little more agitated and hyper-vigilant. Thank goodness, no one I know was injured or killed. Still, my brain can’t seem to fully let go of the horror. Most likely my reaction has a lot to do with post-traumatic stress disorder, a result of my own traumatic experience fifteen years ago, when an older driver confused the gas pedal for the brake and rocketed through the Santa Monica Farmers’ Market , striking dozens of pedestrians. Ten died; I was one of the survivors.  So, of course, each time I hear of yet another vehicle-ramming attack, my brain and body is yanked back fifteen years. And I can’t help but still feel the fear storm through all those who had been walking through Toronto’s north end when twenty-five-year-old Alek Minassian intentionally sped down a busy street in a rented van. I still taste the blood, hear the screams, hear the sounds of crushing glass and metal. For those who witnessed the attack – bystanders, rescue workers, family and friends of the victims – they too are likely suffering from PTSD symptoms. And imagine the grief stricken faces of the loved ones of the injured and dead when they received that unthinkable phone call, or saw the carnage unfolding on television.

For anyone who has survived, or witnessed (first hand or in the media) trauma of this kind – a car crash, terrorist attack, mass shooting – don’t be surprised if this latest tragedy has left you a little more overprotective of your children, fearful of crowds, or hype-aware of your surroundings each time you go for a walk. And maybe you’re experiencing a resurgence of nightmares. Though don’t be surprised if you’re experiencing hypo-arousal: numbed out and not present in the world around you. This kind of trauma rocks us at the core, gnaws into our sense of safety, cracks in half any sense of predictability.

For some, PTSD symptoms naturally resolve; for others it lingers. Studies have shown that up to five days after the 911 attacks, 44% of Americans noted at least one symptom of PTSD. Two to four months later, 11% of NYC residents reported persistent symptoms.

No matter how your PTSD symptoms present themselves, they are real, very real. So, please, talk to your family, your friends, your neighbors, to clergy, social workers, educators, to anyone who will listen.

Because

You

Deserve

To be heard

You

 Deserve

To be

Understood

I did it! After I spent the better part of four months working on an essay about how I found love after a deadly car crash left me wounded, and feeling ugly and unworthy, it has been published in the The Washington Post. This piece is not for me alone to read and remember how far I’ve come. It is for all of us who have been scarred and fractured by trauma – any kind of trauma. It is for those of you who still feel lost and alone and afraid. My essay, “After a freak car accident, I thought I was too broken to find love,” is my gift to you.

(Sorry if you have already seen the link to the essay.)

Are you resilient? Do you sink or swim when faced with obstacles or stressful events? Say you grew up poor, I mean really poor, and all you had to eat for lunch each day at school were saltine cracker and butter sandwiches. Because you didn’t want your more well to do schoolmates to feel sorry for you, each time you crunched down on your cracker sandwich and licked the butter from the salted edges, you smiled. Despite your chronic adverse circumstances – low socioeconomic status – you worked hard in school. In fact you excelled, and you continue to do so: maybe at work or as a parent, or both. That’s resilience.

If you’ve never experienced a life challenge (unless you have lived in bubble wrap for all of your existence, I find this nearly impossible), you’ll never know whether or not you’re resilient. Adverse events can be chronic, as in the scenario I depicted above, or acute, as in witnessing a trauma or being a victim of an accident.

To better understand what makes us resilient, one researcher has looked at what are called “protective factors,” the particulars of individuals’ backgrounds, including personality, that play a role in their success, regardless of challenges. In follow-up to his research, his students identified factors that fell into two different groups: psychological makeup, disposition, or environmental influences in one group, and pure chance in the other. Another, larger study attempted to decipher the factors contributing to resiliency. Though, similar to the former study, luck played a role in some cases, psychological constitution was instrumental in the majority of situations. They might not have been geniuses, but the more resilient children possessed a healthy sense of self. They were willing to seek out new experiences, take chances, utilize the skills they had to be successful. One researcher describes these children as having an “internal locus of control,” meaning that they believed they, rather than outside circumstances, had control over their outcomes. They believed they were the authors of their life scripts.

As with most things though, resilience fluctuates. We’re human after all: if we’re burdened with one stressor after another – divorce, death, a job loss, injury – we tire and lose resilience (think of an overstretched rubber band). But the good news is: we just might be able to learn how to be resilient. Another researcher has discovered that individuals who did not bounce back so easily as children were able to develop resilient skills later in life, enabling them to prosper.

If we have the capacity to create our outcomes, then why not say resilience is an offshoot of perception, another human element within our control. As a clinical psychologist at Columbia University says, “Events are not traumatic until we experience them as traumatic.” Because we’re the ones who label the event as traumatic, we also have the capacity to re-label it as something else – simply as an experience, for instance. In this way we become more resilient. Of course, it’s not always that easy. Because we’re human, we agonize over this and that, lose sleep over this and that. It takes re-training the brain, taming our unwieldy thought patterns, tying our worries and fears into a constrictor knot. Though this hackneyed phrase may cause you to roll your eyes (Yeah, yeah, I’ve heard this, how many times now?), I’m going to share it with you anyway: If we expect something to become true, it will become true. If we focus on an adverse event as potentially harmful, we sink. If we focus on that same event as a challenge, we swim – and win.

Do you enjoy drawing, coloring, painting? So what if you are not a Picasso or a Van Gogh.  What I’m about to share with you just might inspire you to head out to your local art shop for colored pencils and a drawing pad. Research suggests that creating visual art enhances memory, and improves interactions between certain parts of the brain. Based on feedback from a small group of retirees, improvement in brain functioning may also strengthen one’s psychological state of mind.  This seems logical. After all, as researchers say, “The creation of visual art is a personal integrative experience—an experience of ‘flow,’ in which the participant is fully emerged in the creative activity.” With that integration, brain connections are strengthened, which, in turn, boosts self-confidence.

For individuals with a TBI, art is a form of therapy. It restores connections in the brain damaged by trauma. This restoration process is called neuroplasticity: the changes in nerve pathways of the brain that affect behavior. Yes, we can actually re-wire our brains by intentionally changing the way we think and do things. Since 2010, therapists at the National Intrepid Center of Excellence (NICoE), at Fort Belvoir, Virginia have been using art as a tool in treating war veterans who have sustained TBIs.

Art therapy does more than help to heal an injured brain. Jackie Briggs, a therapist at NICoE says, “For service members who might already have trouble expressing themselves … art therapy gives them a chance to use free expression, allowing whatever needs to bubble up from below the surface to be seen and evaluated.” When thoughts “bubble” up, service members gain a better understanding of their symptoms such as irritability, anxiety, and depression. With that deeper understanding, their relationships benefit, because they are able to effectively unearth their buried feelings and thoughts.

At NICoE, service members decorate blank papier-mâché masks. The reasoning behind using this form of art therapy is based on how trauma works; it blocks the part of the brain responsible for speech and language. The image of the mask itself is tangible, a concrete method of showing how service members are feeling. As one of the therapists at NICoE says, “the masks have given service members a visual voice.” The added benefit is that they know they are not being judged, or critiqued. Making the masks affords them the opportunity to explore, engage in the process of creating something that encourages free expression.

The formof art doesn’t matter. Art is art. Juliet Madsen, a veteran of two wars who sustained a TBI when a roadside bomb hit her convoy, likes to doodle. In an email exchange with her this past fall this is what she had to say about doodling:

Doodling stimulates your creative side, allows your body to calm down, takes the active stresses and puts them on the back burner, can sometimes give you an artistic answer to your problems if you open to it, and gives you a time out… I am a big fan. Once you are an accomplished Doodle Artist take a set of colored pencils to your work or thin point sharpies, then you are really working it.

Juliet inspired me. I bought myself a sketchpad and sharpie and started doodling. I’m now a big fan too!

Are you a doodler, a painter, a sketcher, a creator of masks? If not, why not join in. Grab a sharpie, a pen or pencil, a paintbrush. As Juliet said, “Stimulate your creative side.”

Cheers to free expression, to an integrative experience – and to a healthy brain!

If you want to learn more about the masks service members have created, read the “The Invisible War on the Brain,” published in February 2015 by National Geographic.

http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2015/02/table-of-contents

Our bodies deserve to be treated with kindness. Right? If you are looking to do just that, whether you are living with post-traumatic stress disorder, a traumatic brain injury, chronic neck and back pain, migraines, or any other emotional or physical ailment, why not give cranial sacral therapy (CST) a try? Discovered in 1970 by osteopathic physician John E Upledger, CST is not as new-age as you might think.

I know, “cranial sacral” sounds nothing like new-age. You might cringe at the notion of someone messing with your neck and spinal column. But, with CST, there is no mess involved: back cracking, neck manipulation, muscle tugging. To help understand CST, I’ll interrupt here with a very brief lesson in Anatomy 101. More than most other parts of the body, the brain and spinal cord, which make up the central nervous system (CNS), influence the ability of the body to function properly. In turn, for the CNS to  function up to par, it relies heavily on a healthy craniosacral system: the membranes and fluid that surround, protect and nourish the brain, spinal cord, and the attached bones.

Since we endure stress every day – sitting at a desk for long hours, dragging a whining toddler through the grocery store, driving through bumper-to-bumper traffic – the body’s tissues tighten and create havoc in the craniosacral system. This can cause increased tension around the brain and spinal cord, interfering with the healthy functioning of the CNS, and even other systems it  interacts with.

With CST, the therapist uses her hands to evaluate the craniosacral system by gently feeling various parts of the body to assess for ease of motion, and for the flow of cerebrospinal fluid around the brain and spinal cord. Using soft-touch, she releases restrictions in the tissues, and mobilizes fluids around the spinal cord.

I’ve been curious about CST for a long time now, and, when I attended a workshop on CST at Vermont’s annual brain injury conference this past October, Kate Kennedy, the speaker, and veteran practitioner of the method, convinced me to consider it as an adjunct to alleviating my PTSD symptoms (hyper-vigilance, hyper-startle, nightmares) and a TBI (foggy-headedness, fatigue, poor concentration).

During the workshop, I learned, for CST to help heal our physical ailments, we need to let go of our emotions. Kate called them the “stuck places,” when she referred to the “emotions that take up space in our bodies” – in our muscles, tissues, bones. Vital to treating her clients, she asks them to talk about their individual traumas, as she feels for tight places, the places she senses being “over-charged.”  With the letting go of emotions, those tight areas also literarily let go.

Kate also reminded us that compensatory mechanisms influence the experience of the trauma. In other words, we possess layers upon layers of compensation before the trauma, and, for instance, how a migraine associated with a TBI heals depends a lot on what our past compensatory mechanisms were like. It’s not uncommon for people to hold onto the force of the injury – for example, neck tension.

The memory of trauma, pain, or any acute or chronic condition might very well be wrapped-up in your body. It’s true, our bodies hold our personal narratives. If we want to rid them of the upsetting narratives, or as Kate says, “The waste products of our central nervous system,” CST, with its gentle, listening approach can find those mucked-up places. I think of CST as empowering, as allowing you to gain access to your own body – the entire container of the self.

Are you ready to be empowered?

To find a CST therapist click here.