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Participate in the Online Discussion 9/2 – 9/13/19
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29 Replies
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Initial Post:
I have recently began a partnership with a local holistic practitioner who has agreed to refer her clients to me on an as needed basis. Her work delves into the metaphysical. In short, she believes that in consult with the client, she can determine personality types and give explanation for perceived negatives in one’s life, be it difficulties in time management, or phobias, what have you. While I am intrigued in her work, I am skeptical. But, it doesn’t matter what I believe. Her clients are seeking answers in her that they are not getting going the traditional counseling or healthcare route. In her work, she will typically see a client one or two times, with little follow up. That is where I come in, in the partnership.I was recently referred a client who I will call Hannah, who was dealing with some depression and anxiety. The initial assessment, according to the other practitioner, is that there was a “pre-birth” trauma that has forever shifted Hannah’s focus, which explains the mental health concerns. This made perfect sense to her, given that he father left her mother before she was born and because she was born via C-section, two traumatic events occurring prior to her birth.
Before addressing her concerns, I first established confidentiality, ensuring that I wouldn’t share her personal information with anyone, including the other practitioner. I informed her that I am an EBI student and some of her story may be shared with the group, but that her identifying information would remain confidential. She agreed to this and allowed the coaching relationship to begin.
The challenge that I immediately faced was trying to accept her reasoning that she was anxious because of her “pre-birth traumas”. The more I thought about it though, the more I was reminded to meet the client where she is. Hannah has felt depressed and anxious “forever”, so let’s assume that that is true. The mental health aspect is established, now how do we refocus her to the present.
On our first meeting, I had planned on going for a walk at a nearby park. I thought the landscape and creek would offer good places to reflect. However, we found ourselves on a bench for the entire session. And that was ok. That is what Hannah needed that day. It actually wound up being beneficial, because I left her with homework—establish a sit spot. A simple enough task, but honestly one that I wasn’t sure she would complete.
The next session, we were able to walk around and talk. I had only one goal in mind—use wide angle vision to get her to see the world in different ways. She seemed to get it, which was a relief. It showed that I can coach and relay the topics in a meaningful way.Though we have only had the two sessions, I am preparing for future ones. Without attempting to erase the trauma she has faced throughout her life, I would love to explore things that she finds joy in, things that feel good. The goal being to show her that parts of her life are good. Let’s honor the past while welcoming the present.
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Josh thank you for your post and congrats on the new business partnership. That’s awesome!
I completely feel where you are coming from on having our own thoughts on certain situations and applaud you on being able to separate that and give the client their own experience. What is trauma to one person maybe a daily activity to another and being able to meet the client where they are like your said is very important. Again thank you for your post and reminding me that the client has to take their own path and we are along for the ride so to speak.
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Josh,
Congrats on the collaboration/partnership with the practitioner. I hope it goes well!
Your post reminded me to offer the idea of sit spot to my clients. I have been in a ‘rut’ of thinking in terms of offering only wanders, journaling and meditation, and sit spots aren’t getting thought about enough–one of the most basic things!I echo Ben’s kudos on meeting the client where they were, and working the whole session on the bench–when maybe you had other ideas. I fall into that one all the time–my expectations being totally trashed. And that is what makes the work exciting, and challenging for me–you never know exactly what each session will contain! It sounds like this was a great session for you also in terms of having success with your client using wide angle vision and other awareness techniques to gain new awareness!
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Josh, congratulations on the collaboration that is really cool to see you move forward with this work of yours! I enjoyed reading your post because it is so relatable. I find myself at times with preconceived notions of what a story should look like/does look like. However, it sounds like you were able to really meet the client where they were at and let them be with it instead of allowing your own set of circumstances dictate how things went.
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Hey Josh,
I totally recommend reading the book that Daniel gave us, The Inner Matrix. It goes into it pretty deeply on pre-birth traumas and how it effects us without us even realizing. I had no idea about most of the information in the book and when we are in utero, whatever traumas and life experiences our mothers were going through, imprinted onto us. Being aware of that, helps to understand why we are the way we are.
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Initial post
I haven a client that deals with trauma everyday as she is a paramedic. However, her trauma manifests in a slightly different way than you might think. I would say it is a combination of survivors’ guilt and lack of confidence. She feels that when she looses a patient that she didn’t do everything that she could. It is a manifested feeling because when we go through the experience she identifies that medically nothing more could be done.
The way her trauma shows itself in her life is the form of anxiety and loss of self control. She will have an episode and lose control and pop off on her spouse or just shut down all together. She already has this awareness and is able to see it happening. She told me that when she exercises it makes her anxiety feel better, but she cant always exercise when she feels it coming on. In our session we tried the describing exercise. I asked her to feel the anxiety and she said, “oh I already feel it, it is a constant 4.” So I had her describe a Hydro Flask bottle that was sitting next to me and she quickly spouted of a number of things then I asked her a few questions about it to keep the conversation going and to her surprise without me even asking she felt the anxiety of 4 dissipate. This is something she is able to take with her and try on the fly in her head to subside the anxiety.
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Excellent awareness to be able to help her find the root to her anxiety. I would imagine that for paramedics, the anxiety of losing someone and having that survivor’s guilt is very real. I wonder if there is a specific case that she can point to that affected her more than others. A cause for the anxiety, if you will. While our jobs are not to diagnose or necessarily treat the trauma, if we know the moment it began, maybe through other exercises we can help keep it in check.
I was also curious about her listing her anxiety at a 4. On a 1-10 scale, 4 isn’t too bad. (Though I acknowledge that someone’s 4 might be different than my 4) I wonder if her anxiety has ever been higher. What brought it down to a 4?
Good job being able to teach her a skill to use to keep the anxiety in check when she feels it coming on!
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Josh thank you for your feedback! The anxiety that she feels cam long before the trauma she has from her job. We have found that the trauma has just perpetuated the anxiety. When we were working with the “4” anxiety, that is what she feels and carries with her on a daily basis. We used the 4 as a baseline to gauge if she could feel it lower through the exercise to make sure the exercise worked and was something t=she could bring into her daily practice.
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Ben,
Thanks for the reminder of using pendulation and present moment awareness to get at lessening your client’s habitual anxiety pattern. I think I’ll try this with my client K, to give her more resources for realizing her reactive pattern and regaining the present moment. Also I liked your scaling by number whatever the feeling is, in this case anxiety. It reminds me a lot of WFR medical training where we use the number scale to ascertain relative (physical) pain severity, and get a baseline. Then we can get a history and ask, when if ever has it ever been a 10? We start to map changes in client/patient experience, based on environment, triggers, etc. The number scale is so useful to help us track where the client is, has been, and wants to go with whatever the feeling is. Thanks for your post. -
Awesome job Ben! It sounds like this kind of client can definitely use the resources you are providing. Some times exercise isn’t always an option, or going for a walk, so giving your client that other option seems super helpful.
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Summary Post
The trauma workshop has been one of my favorite intensives so far. I use the exercises we learned with a lot of my clients. I have also started beginning my sessions with some sort of grounding exercise to get a focus for the session. Starting the session this way seems to help the client figure out what is most present for them at that time. I find that this helps start the session in media res if you will rather than taking up precious time with story. This has been really outside of my comfort zone but helping direct the client I feel has been super beneficial to the session. I an curious how you start your sessions.
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Initial post
My client K is a 47-year old female restauranteur. Her business encompasses 2 restaurants and she employs about 130 people 7 nights a week in the high season. K is very hands on and greets almost every customer. She works long hours alongside her staff, who know that K can be demanding. K does have high standards, and also takes customer comments very personally, and can be deeply hurt by someone’s rude or impatient remarks concerning her product or service.
K had radiation therapy for breast cancer and tests show it now is gone. She recently had a ‘miracle’ birth of her 2nd child, whose embryo was frozen for 3 years prior to radiation therapy. My intake form asks about trauma, and I noted she’d left it blank. She replied that the cancer was not traumatic–just another thing to meet and overcome, like how she approaches work.
K came to me for coaching help on techniques to slow down and be more calm at work, and to get support having a more balanced life between work and home with new family.
What we discovered in working together were two things related to trauma:
K is now feeling energy or heat at the site where the radiation was directed. Although test still now show all clear, I mentioned this may well be residual trauma from her treatments–fear unprocessed and still in her body from that experience. When we did guided meditation, she was able to get to a place where the pain was totally gone. This brought a sense of relief because it made sense when explained as the body’s physiological response to an actual life threat (surgery, anesthesia). I encouraged her to contiue with regular check-ups, and meanwhile to work with visualizations and yoga poses that open the chest.The second thing is what Katie Asmus said Dan Siegal called Developmental Trauma, which can be from repeated exposure to any situation where over time there is a lingering possibility of threat. In talking about what it is like for K to go to work, it sounds a lot like preparing for battle–every night brings a recurring feeling of low-level trauma. She is working on putting a new manager in place to lessen her load.
So, we have been working with identifying grounding Resources for her; we’ve been doing some breath awareness, guided meditation and body scan exercises each session.
These have been helpful in calming her, and homework always involves daily meditation to begin to carve a new neural pathway toward a more calm and controlled place. She’s been doing meditation now regularly for several months and recently had an encounter where previously she would have blown her top, but took 2 minutes to go out on the sidewalk, came back in and made a proactive plan that rocked the rest of the day. She told me she recognized her newfound ability to stop and make a different choice in the present moment. And that was a very good moment for me!-
Sandy, that is awesome that by working to find resources together it has helped her deal with more of life and the traumas that arise. You sound like you are very hands on and right there with the client matching the frequency she is at. All the exercises you were doing sounded like they really payed off, and you provided her with a different way of looking at issues in her life. That ability to create the space for another to create awareness within themselves is a very powerful gift you have!
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Final post
In thinking about trauma and others’ posts, I come away with a newfound appreciation for how widespread trauma is and how it varies so much from person to person. So, with this in mind, I’m feeling the call to be ever-vigilant for the signs of trauma in my clients, regardless of what opinion or feeling I may have about whether an incident is traumatic for someone, or not.
The body doesn’t lie, and I’m working with my own trauma responses, starting to notice where they occur in my body and what the somatics of the experience are. This is already giving me better insight into my client’s experience, and is helping me to help them identify when traumaatic response is happening, and how to develop and use resources and grounding tools in their own journey. -
Response to Ben:
Reading your post was really interesting as this had previously been my narrow understanding of trauma – the blood, guts and hard core physical injuries. I had never considered it from a different perspective and I’d certainly never considered the possibility that trauma can be suffered either as a group or that what is trauma to one person might not be to another.
It was also interesting how while logic says she’d done everything medically possible, her emotions and the trauma of the death are stronger than that logic. I guess that’s how trauma takes a hold of us.
As I know that your practice is focused around exercise, I’m interested to know if that works or if that would be considered a distraction from sitting with the pain and discomfort of the death, thus enabling the trauma to live on.
Nice job with the pendulation! I did that with a client recently and it’s amazing how effective it is. I used a fountain but glad to know that a water bottle works too! -
Response to Sandy:
I was pretty blown away by the resilience of someone who views cancer as ‘just another thing to meet and overcome’. Having spent a week with you, I’ve no doubt that you were the perfect coach for her – you have such a calm and gentle demeanor that I’m sure the space you created was just what she needed to feel safe and held.
I also love how you walked us thru’ how you guided her thru’ the visualization exercise which led her to focus on the area of historical trauma. So often we feel pain or discomfort but never create the space/take the time to identify its source and/or location. By guiding her thru’ that exercise and then inviting her to continue the practice for opening her chest, I’m sure that the physical manifestation of that trauma will cease to have such a hold on her – what a way to support your client!
One of the things I find most profound about your post is the integration of so many of our learnings – body work, meditation, breath work, trauma, visualization; it’s great to see you incorporating so many techniques in a meaningful way with a single client – congratulations – I know you will go on to help many people! -
Summary post:
As I write this, I realize that both the clients I’m working with currently (and the 2 which are getting scheduled) have suffered trauma which is showing up in their daily lives. This module opened my eyes to the fact that trauma is present in all of us but is so often unseen. As I watched the Ted talk ‘My Stroke of Insight’, I would never have guessed that she had suffered such a violent and dangerous physical event but what was really fascinating was the awareness with which she moved thru’ the event, how she could live every second of it, recount it and go on to be such a successful professional.
Just this week, my client talked about her fear of abandonment and how it is rooted in her childhood. She’s very aware of it being an issue and, while aware of how it’s impacting her professionally, she is currently unable to manage it and prevent herself from becoming obsessed (her word). She’s not so much a storyteller as a very distracted client so finding ways to have her focus on 1 thing is extremely challenging. However, I’m going to continue to probe on this issue as it is impacting how she performs in a broad way. Fortunately our coaching time is going to change which I think will make it easier for her to focus. She’s let go a few times in session but, because she knows she’s going straight back to work after session, she’s unable to fully embrace the emotions. I believe it would be helpful for her to experience this trauma and feel safe with it so I’m looking forward to the new time which, I really believe, will give her the ability to focus. -
Initial Post
I have been working with a client who has some trauma around abandonment which causes him to have a lot of pent up anger towards the world on most of his relationships. He has been unable to have a serious relationship with his family, and most of his romantic relationships flutter out after a couple years. Working with him he has been unable to really process the trauma and let it work out of him, and he still holds on to so much of it. This in turn leaks its way into every aspect of his life. So, to help work with this I asked what is feeling associated with the story around father abandoning him. His description was blood boiling all over his body, an extreme hatred for the world and everything in it. We tried some resourcing exercises to see what, if any, things he might have to help him feel a space of calm. He is a spiritual person, so meditation and bringing back to the idea of unity and oneness helps. There is still a big story that is created by the mind that we are working through. I let him know that it is okay to feel what you are feeling because in the past he has suppressed and bottled up so much of what he was feeling that he would just make a problem bigger by eventually exploding to the point where people were afraid to be around him. By working in this way to allow him to feel the experience of what he is feeling, and pendulating with his experience from meditation on the unity and oneness of everything it is slowly creating a new story, and a new way of being for him to experience the world. -
Summary Post
At first trauma appeared to be a big monster that I was trying to slay. However, after coaching and reading others’ experiences it provided me with a little more comfort. It reminds me of what was said back in the intensive about working through trauma and not necessarily healing it. The mind/body/spirit has a way of orienting itself towards health, and there is nothing that I really need to do to try and heal other than hold that space and allow the other to be with what they are with. As always, I enjoy seeing how each of you are using the tools we have gained and reading about things that did/didn’t work, and how this affected you as a coach. -
*Initial Post*
I have begun working with a client who is essentially a ball of constant anxiety. During our first session, she originally thought her goal was quitting her job and moving to NYC. By the end of the session we discovered she has no self worth from trauma from a past relationship that has left such damage on her life, that she has no confidence in being able to take steps towards her goals. She is lacking confidence, self worth, trust in herself, trust in others, doesn’t believe she can succeed, etc. She said the anxiety hits her most at 2am-3am when she wakes up in the middle of the night.
I told her the next time she wakes up in the middle of the night with an anxiety attack, take 7 deep breaths, jot down how she is feeling, take 7 more breaths, jot down those feelings again and see if anything has shifted.
During the beginning of our second session, she was proud to show me her “homework” – After the first 7 breaths her words were “fuck, im not okay, stressed, tired” after the second 7 breaths her words were “this is nice. i’m going to be okay. calm. tired”. We both thought it was really cool to see how quickly the breathing shifted her anxiety.
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Initial Post:
I guess my first (post) realization that there is such a thing as secondary trauma is related to the events of 9/11. I wasn’t there but loved ones were (and are safe) and my ex husband was stranded in FL with me in MA. I was definitely traumatized but not at Ground Zero. Sadly, since that historically defining moment in our lives, there have been so many others, generally involving mass shootings or bombings. I’ve often been curious and, if I’m being really honest, somewhat intolerant of people who have seemed to jump on the bandwagon of the directly-impacted peoples’ grief. I never understood about secondary trauma, until now.
Understanding that there is such a thing has opened my eyes in a way in which I will never again be tempted to think that they’re trying to capitalize on someone else’s grief or sorrow but are genuinely impacted by an event even if it may be somewhat tangential to their own lives.
I’m so glad to have had this learning and will always approach grief and trauma with a more open and sympathetic attitude. -
*Summary Post*
I think we all went into Trauma with our own ideas of what trauma was and what it wasn’t. I feel like all of us have learned such a great deal of how big trauma actually is and how it can affect us all in large and small ways without realizing. I certainly thought trauma was essentially something after a tragic event, not realizing all the different types of trauma, how it shows up, and how it can constantly show up not just directly after that event. I feel like I have a much better understanding of what trauma is and how to approach it, and understand if a client is experiencing or re-living a traumatic experience. I would’ve never understood all the ways it can come up in our lives if it wasn’t for this incredibly helpful course.
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Hi Ben,
Using the bottle to turn on her frontal cortex was a good way to alleviate her symptoms of anxiety. It definitely seems like she could have some shock and secondary trauma. She is dealing with people and their lives are in her hands. That is an incredible amount of pressure. I wonder if you could help her find resources that are meaningful to her to help her cope? She may contemplate the future of her career with you. -
Cory,
Great use of all your tools including resourcing and pendulation. You were even able to tap into his core issue which was anger toward his father. I would imagine too that giving him permission to feel was very important. There could be a present stereotype of having to bury feelings as a man. You might have been his first safe space to share! Sounds like you are doing great work with this client.
