receiving a disapproving look from the one who you depend on for safety and security or being left alone to address your own vulnerability.
This infant will find a way to cope, either with frantic thrashing and furious wailing (sympathetic shock), or becoming frozen and still (parasympathetic shock). And a lifelong pattern has begun.
After being fortunate enough to study with many of the Humanistic psychologists in the 1960s, co-author Diane Zimberoff felt that she was ready to help others. Very quickly she became somewhat disillusioned when she began, as a young therapist, to discover the profound suffering and wounds that exist in many human beings. She knew deep down that there must be a faster, more effective method for helping people other than talking to them at length and so she was drawn to India to study and learn Eastern meditation and spiritual healing. When she returned, she also discovered hypnosis, which seemed to go hand in hand with the spiritual and meditative techniques she learned in India.
A combination of Western Humanistic Psychology and Eastern spiritual practices came together for Diane in the psychological healing technique that emerged from this synthesis. She named it Heart-Centered Hypnotherapy (HCH). The results were astounding as she began using the HCH with trauma victims, domestic violence survivors and sexually abused family members. Many of her colleagues were aware of these healing results, became as excited as Diane was, and requested that she develop a training program.
When she first began this training over thirty years ago for other mental health professionals, she had no idea where it would lead. The one outstanding revelation for her was all the therapists who were and continue to be attracted to this deep work. Diane soon realized that one of the reasons for their attraction, besides wanting to help their clients as she did, was their drive to understand and heal their own pain and dysfunction.
Over the years she has become convinced that the fields and the specializations that mental health professionals choose are definitely correlated to the personal healing work they as human beings are seeking to achieve. In the beginning of establishing The Wellness Institute, Diane generally was the one to answer the request for training. Whenever someone would call to take the training, she would always ask what his or her “area of expertise” was. The answers were quite revealing.
An example is people who called and said they worked in “crisis management.” Once they began the HCH, it very quickly became apparent to them how, as children, they had to manage one crisis after another in families where the adults were not only creating the crisis, but then were unavailable to clean up their messes.
Diane’s own awareness is that she was drawn to get her degree in Marriage, Family and Child Therapy because, as a teenager, she was the only adult present when her parents were drinking alcohol and partying. She became the designated family marriage counselor once the arguing began.
However, another more astounding awareness that developed after forty years of doing this work is that therapists, counselors and the majority of people in the helping professions also make up the majority of seekers on this planet. They are seeking answers and healing for themselves as well as for their clients. They are seeking to understand and relieve their own emotional scars in an effort to be more clearly available to others.
As Diane worked with therapists, she was devastated to realize that their pain, their human angst, their physical and emotional dysfunction is as great or greater than any other group of people. Her husband, David Hartman’s and her purpose statement clearly emerged as a dedication, first and foremost, to heal the people who have the lives of others in their hands.
This book is dedicated to all of the wounded healers. Just like the parent on the airplane who must put on her own oxygen mask first so that she can breathe and become clear-headed, we as therapists must heal our own shock first in order to perceive the shock in our clients.
SEEKING REFUGE—A CREATIVE WAY TO HANDLE SHOCK
Trauma. In psychological settings, we use the term frequently and we treat clients to undo the damage caused by trauma. This has been done effectively for years for many clients…but not all of them. Because it turns out that trauma isn’t such a “one size fits all” term. In fact, it’s become something of a controversial word among mental health workers as we debate how to use the term and how to treat the problem.
We’re convinced after so many years of working with trauma that it can’t be used with just one meaning or treated with just one approach, because of the nature of human beings. In biology, there is a term known as “homeostasis,” where the body tries to maintain a balance point for optimal health. Like a tightrope walker, the body doesn’t have to keep strictly to the midpoint—an exact body temperature or pH level—but it does need to remain in a constant state of flux to keep very near to that midpoint. The tightrope walker who isn’t making minute adjustments every second falls. The same is the case with the body.
For nearly a hundred years now, we’ve used the term “stress” to talk about any kind of environmental factors—from food to pollutants, from germs to physical accidents or abuse—that push the physical body out of homeostasis. So, on the one hand, it’s the cause. But on the other hand… what do we call it when we’re not in homeostasis? We’re “stressed,” or we have stress. So the term is used as both cause and effect.
If we’re pushed too far out of balance, stress is no longer stress. Then it becomes disease, whether as an ulcer, heart attack or other serious condition. In the end, this might just be semantics. We change the term, however, to recognize that the stress has reached a new level and to describe—with the name of some disease—the resulting symptoms.
Yet stress doesn’t just impact us physically. It also impacts us psychologically. As with our physical bodies, our minds and emotions need to continually respond to the environment to maintain a healthy, balanced state. When life and/or other people push our buttons, we are stressed mentally or emotionally. Hopefully these are minor stresses and we can keep our balance and our psychological health.
When we are stressed often enough or deeply enough…we no longer call it stress. We call it trauma. Like stress, trauma is used to mean both the cause (the traumatic event) and the effect (the trauma that needs to be treated). This is where we’ve reached a state of psychological imbalance, something we’re not able to recover from without treatment.
In fact, it’s more complicated than that, which is why choosing the right professional is so important. Because stress becomes trauma and trauma becomes complex trauma—what we’re calling “shock” in this book—on a gradual basis. There’s no magical point at which stress becomes trauma or trauma becomes shock, because it all boils down to an individual’s ability to handle the stress and to maintain balance before it reaches these deeper conditions. Where we really see the difference is in therapy, where people respond to treatment according to the depth of trauma they’ve experienced. Without the right tools for more than one depth of trauma, a professional really can’t help all the clients passing through his or her door.
What we can say is that the younger someone is at the time of trauma, the more likely it is to be a complex trauma or shock. The more intimate the relationship with the abuser, the more likely it is for the trauma to become shock. The less chance there is for safety, the more certain the danger, the more likely it is to become shock. The more pervasive the trauma, the more it is repeated and the longer the period of time over which it is repeated, the more likely it is to turn to shock.
When
