Attending to Trauma

Psychological Trauma is a type of wound to the mind that occurs as a result of a distressing event.  Trauma is often the result of an overwhelming amount of stress that exceeds one's ability to cope, or integrate the emotions involved with that experience.  Trauma is profound and shapes our way of encountering life and responding to its challenges.  When there is a history of trauma a person can grow accustomed to living in emotional and psychological pain for many years without awareness that there is something disturbing their sense of well-being. Dr. Muller refers to this condition as unconscious suffering, or trauma-informed pain lying in wait.  A person with trauma is prone to experience heightened levels of stress during life events involving loss and change setting off remarkable turbulence to the system.  The turbulence is often experienced as something bad or wrong flooding the system with feeling states of fear, hurt, confusion or shame.  If unchecked the flooding can render someone numb, (dissociated from feelings), or obsessed or enraged, (possessed by feelings).  This describes a traumatic response to an event during which one is cut off from themselves and their ability to access internal resources of strength to successfully process, grieve and move through crisis.  

A person may reach for substances or engage in behaviors to change their feeling state to numb what they are hopelessly experiencing as unbearable pain.  Dr. Muller upholds that a person struggling with addiction or other maladaptive coping behaviors is attempting to resolve trauma by seeking an outer world fix for inner world pain.  Ultimately, numbing or acting out behaviors deepen the suffering most profoundly by requiring disconnection from the self and from others.  Days can turn into months and months into years of not feeling anything outside from the urgently pursued manufactured moments of relief. 

Dr. Muller is passionate about helping patients to begin to view labeled deficits and disorders as expressions of pain. She understands such a shift in perception can erode the stubborn grip of shame allowing a felt sense of peace to expand in it's place.   She upholds an expanding sensation of peace towards the self is an integral and important gain in therapy, strengthening and energizing the patient as they learn to provide for themselves the love and care needed to move through their pain during therapy and beyond.  The therapy involves an empowering process of embracing one's wholeness and completeness...perhaps for the first time in one's life. The striking personal encounter often ignites courage to engage an open heart for powerful healing and wellness beyond suffering.

The mind naturally develops and organizes itself entirely according to relational experiences with others throughout life. Therefore, each person has a signature way of experiencing relationships in the world. This can explain why a person may feel they are in a repeating style of painful relationships. The interface with significant others can create conditions to which the individual becomes painfully strapped. Anxiety, depression, dissociation and other psychological conditions are outcroppings of painful relational experiencing. These conditions are also known as responses to relational trauma. Resolving such anguishing conditions can be frustratingly elusive, especially because we cannot go back in time to prevent or change relational experiences and events.  

Within the course of therapy, a search will be facilitated for an understanding of how the individual’s mind organizes itself around experiences of their significant relationships.  This informs an individually tailored treatment design.  Dr. Muller is known for her tenacity of spirit and heart energizing and strengthening the client as they work through their urgent pain related to loss or change in a relationship.  Attention to the deeply personal and nuanced experience of loss powerfully moves a person forward on their course towards recovery and a sense of peace. 

So many are frustrated and exhausted striving to hold steady a positive mood and hopeful outlook throughout their days and weeks.  That "grateful to be alive" feeling, random and fleeting, provides just enough energy to push through the next segment of time.  An expansive mood drifts in and it begins to feel as if you've turned a corner.  The awakened senses ignite confidence as you begin to sense you are on your path.  You feel as if you finally have your "stuff" together.  Then, within the span of a moment something occurs that frightens the heart and halts all momentum. You begin to think, "Who was I fooling to think I had found happiness?" 

Certain events, people, or circumstances can set off such a trauma response, often in scenarios wherein it seems unreasonable to have a strong emotional response.  In an attempt to escape fear and shame engaging in self-defeating behaviors can ensue.  Hope, vitality and wellness lose their strength... and this isn't the first time. It can feel as if the hard fought progress towards wellness was imaginary. Doubt floods the system... "What about the courage I gained and finally embodied allowing me to use my voice,"  "What value is there in the tears I wept staring down my false self in order to act with integrity in all of my affairs," "What about that most difficult climb learning to trust that I have a good mind for creating and manifesting my dreams," "What happened to that life force reminding me that I know courage and have embodied the energy of possibility,"  "Why can I not remember how to embrace myself when fear and emptiness knocks?"  

The concept of self-sabotage is a popular and seemingly "useful" way to describe the emotional and behavioral fall-out of a trauma response.  It fuels shame which perpetuates a downward mood spiral.  It is important to view the shift in feeling states as caused by significant pain to be compassionately grieved with care and love. Through the experience of self-compassion, developed and practiced in therapy and through a mindfulness practice, chronic stress of self-doubt would recede.

Self-compassion is a powerful healing agent, drawing a person near to themselves wherein a more forgiving and loving relationship with themselves is allowed.  Their internal environment receives nurturance stimulating the system into natural balance.  With balance comes flexibility and strength to courageously confront and bear hurts.  

Through the intimacy of self-compassion a direct line to one's own wisdom and intelligence for healing becomes accessible and actionable.  A desire to engage in life with presence becomes a natural draw.  Repelling urges to numb or act out when encountering stress becomes the natural response to stress. Unproductive and debilitating coping behaviors begin to fall away. The person grows interested and energized towards creating connection and growthful experiences with others.  Days become infused with interest, passion and adventure.  Purpose and meaning is felt causing the person to begin to value and rely on their own presence for others and for themselves. Mindful and purposeful ways of living become the new norm. 

Breakthrough emotional or physical pain during a traumatic response is framed in the therapy as a person's natural intelligence powerfully signaling to the body and the mind a potent opportunity for the healing of trauma.  The platform for healing presents as a moment when one may lean forward to embrace and steady one's self in the face of unbearably painful turbulence.  It is this harrowing feat of contrary action, of caring for the self, that feelings of empowerment may be experienced, strengthening and energizing the patient for a momentous journey towards healing. 

"We have to face the pain we have been running from.  In fact, we need to learn to rest in it and let its searing power transform us." --Charolotte Joko Beck 

The healing journey in therapy involves co-designing a specialized mindfulness practice that is reachable for the patient in moments of crisis to combat the fight, flight or flee response that renders a person powerless and terrorized.  A mindfulness practice combats habitual resistance towards entering a domain of present moment awareness, a state feared because it is unknown.  Engaging a mindfulness practice at the moment of perceived emotional crisis, when one typically slips into a dissociative state, ushers in clarity and strength to move through fear.  Profoundly, this effort grows connection with the authentic self. The feelings that develop towards the self would involve warmth, comfort and loving kindness.  The greatest gift in this novel experiencing of loving connection with the self is the emergent desire to deepen connection and relationship with the self and the world.  Healing, wellness and feelings of joy await. 

"What a long time it can take to become the person one has always been!  How often in the process we mask ourselves in faces that are not our own.  How much dissolving and shaking of ego we must endure before we discover our deep identity-- the true self within every human being that is the seed of authentic vocation." 

"Let Your Life Speak: Listening For the Voice of Vocation", 

Parker J. Palmer 

The experience of self-compassion is empowering, mobilizing a person towards the starting line of their lives.  As a person comes into intimate contact with themselves, a life course begins to come into view --perhaps the course is one once known and since forgotten, or one so awe-inspiring it formerly seemed unimaginable. As hope begins to expand throughout one's being, fragmented and perceptively missing parts of the self begin to reassemble and become visible. It has been described by several clients as suddenly seeing and feeling themselves as REAL.  Sometimes we watch the world outside of us and have a sense that others are real, and we are not. The moment one sees and feels themselves in this way, an insurgence of strength can present empowering one to create, to make choices, to act responsibly, to love and to be loved. The world opens up as the person feels alive and that he belongs just as everyone else belongs. Harsh and chronic demands of anxiety, depression, mood dysregulation, obsession, compulsion, or addiction, which require total focus and attention, begin to lose their grip. A new paradigm of needs, wants and desires emerge in accordance to feeling the importance of their existence.   

"SHE THINKS I'M REAL"

"A family settled down for dinner at a restaurant. The waitress first took the order of the adults, then turned to the seven year old. 'What will you have?' she asked.

The boy looked around the table timidly and said, 'I would like to have a hot dog.'

Before the waitress could write down the order, the mother interrupted.  'No hot dogs,' she said, 'Get him a steak with mashed potatoes and carrots.'

The waitress ignored her. 'Do you want ketchup or mustard on your hot dog?' she asked the boy.

'Ketchup.'

'Coming up in a minute,' said the waitress as she started for the kitchen.

There was a stunned silence when she left.  Finally the boy looked at everyone present and said, 'Know what? She thinks I’m real!'   

                -Anthony de Mello, The Heart of the Enlightened 

Contact

Phone: (310) 383-3040

Email: drmelissamuller@gmail.com