Melaragno: In the chapter “Healing from Trauma, Owning Yourself,” you cover six important ways to connect with what is going on inside oneself: managing hyper-arousal, mindfulness, relationships, communal rhythms and synchrony, touch, and taking action.
van der Kolk: Well, let’s start with the fact that we are collective creatures. We don’t exist as individuals. Our brain is meant to be in synchrony with other brains. Interaction with other brains fundamentally shapes who we are. When we cry, we’re supposed to get a response, and when we laugh, somebody is supposed to laugh with us. Those are the rhythms of life by which we the brain develops. If kids are left by themselves, as occurs in orphanages and drug abusing households, their brains do not develop properly and are damaged. There’s very rich research now on how sounds, facial movements, and the synchrony and the rhythms between faces and voices are what gets the basic brain structures online. If you don’t get that synchrony, certain parts of your brain that are supposed to develop to be in sync with other people get damaged. So, you have a hard time with other people as you grow up, a hard time getting confident about other people, getting pleasure from other people, being in sync, and enjoying a sense of community with others. You feel lonely, isolated, and miserable. Our brains are meant to be in sync, and the big challenge often in traumatic stress is the question of how you create a brain that can be back in sync with other people. In order to do that, you need to first of all notice yourself. As long as you don’t notice yourself, you are like a chicken with his head cut off. You just run around like an automatic animal that responds and gets enraged. But when you know what’s going on with you, you start to get some choices like “Maybe I should not react to this” or “Maybe I should not touch her.” You need to have a quiet mind in order to get ownership of yourself, and therefore the cultivation of mindfulness and self-observance is absolutely critical. This is easier done if there is somebody out there who could help you with it. Someone who can see you, who can notice what goes on with you, who can help you to name things, who can help you say, “This is what’s happening to me.” You don’t need someone to name how screwed up you are, how you need to be fixed. You need to just notice yourself, just notice, just notice without judgment.
The latest piece of research that came out after my book was finished is that the issue is not mindfulness alone, it’s rather mindfulness with self-compassion. See that angry part of yourself and acknowledge what that anger has done for you to survive. See that the anger has been a way of managing yourself. Thank that anger for having helped you. Then say to that anger, “Can you please step back a little bit so I can be back in charge of myself?” It is compassionately negotiating those inner parts of you.
To read more of Elissa Melaragno's interview with Bessel van der Kolk, please click here.
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