I've blogged a lot about some really awful trauma here, and will again -- but there's something I've been meaning to tell you about the healing part, aka "resilience."
It has to do with Mindfulness and Emotional Object Constancy.
Mindfulness meditation has been one of the main keys to my recovery. That's why I'm posting this video about the Dhamma Brothers, who discuss the impact of their Vipassana practice in prison six months after the first program at the Donaldson Correctional Facility in 2002. This is an amazing project which I'd like to be exploring in more detail in future posts -- unless someone else with more experience in prison work could do so instead, which I'd seriously welcome (just let me know) !
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6Ufgg-HOtA&list=PLA6FDE13FCFA996C5&index=4
Mindfulness, to be direct with you, is being Present with God.
To be specific, it's when we are Present with the little fact that there is a divine spark inside every human being. Which means that a spark of God is living inside me. That is why in many parts of the world, we greet each other by saying "I see the Divine within you," a rough translation of the little-understood word "Namaste."
So no matter how traumatized I became as a child, if I can experience this Living Presence as being inside me - then I am no longer so "alone and afraid in the dark."
At least not as much as I used to think I was.
Mindfulness has been documented by very recently invented brain scans to change the brain and our feelings. Please try it for least a few months and see...
And there's a reason it works which has everything to do with trauma and Attachment Disorder.
Emotional Object Constancy
In my blog "Hole in my Heart," I posted a Dan Siegel - Goldie Hawn video on Anderson Live which shows, that we can re-train our brains using compassionate therapy, meditation and other “brain gym work” to change the neural structures that hold painful old memories. It was thought that nerve tissue, if damaged, could never heal, but recent science shows the reverse. “We’re hard-wired to heal,” say doctors Henry Cloud and John Townsend.
Later in that same blog, I explained Emotional Object Constancy:
Humans require “face time,” face to face work with other “Safe People,” human beings who actually care enough to be present with us. Because it was face time, or lack of it, which damaged our developing brains in the first place.
Face time is what develops a baby’s brain into an adult brain. An emotionally attuned mother, who feels her baby’s internal states, shows it how to sooth and feel better. She does it wordlessly, with a lot of eye contact (tech term “limbic resonance”). The emotional lobes of the mother’s brain and the baby’s brain actually resonate to each other, as attachment specialist Dr. Allan Schore has shown.
This is my neighbor and her son, whom she’s carried pretty much constantly for a year in a face-to-face carrier, not because anyone told her to, but because, she says, “it feels natural.” I see them several times a week and I have never seen this baby without a glorious smile.
Like any newborn, he would have cried non-stop at first if she weren’t always there; again, babies don’t have the neural hardware to sooth themselves. But gradually over weeks and months, this baby could be put down for a longer and longer time without getting upset.
“Why should that be?” asks Dr. Henry Cloud. What’s the baby got now, that he didn’t have before? The mother’s love comes from the outside, then literally goes inside her baby, via limbic resonance. She gives the gift of feeling loved inside to her baby, called “emotional object constancy.”
This is a deep knowing, that we have so warmly attached to mother, the love object, that even when she is absent, we do not feel alone or lonely. We instead feel constancy: we feel that we carry around mom’s love inside us 24×7. This is the source of the strength which allows a healthy child to be dropped off at school and feel so secure inside, that he’s eager to try something new and play with strangers.
The way out of attachment disorder is to create more emotional object constancy, that feeling of deep attachment and safety the baby in the photo has. The reason we feel bad, anxious, depressed or have chronic emotional pain, is usually that this did not develop well when we were kids.
We do need other human beings to attach to us this way, to start the healing process. That's why I talk about Recovery Partners all the time. I needed them, they were "There" for me, and it worked.
But we can greatly accelerate this healing by Mindfulness Meditation and related Mindfulness practice - because this practice simulates the "love inside" experience of a loving attachment with Mom and other humans.
Now that is a huge statement to make and this is supposed to be a short blog, so I invite you to think this over and study the Dhamma Brothers videos which are a true eye-opener.
Then see for yourself by trying the practice of Mindfulness Meditation.
And we'll explore this further in future posts.
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