Waking the Tiger: Healing Trauma

When our physiology responds to an event or stimuli with arousal, we do not move into an orienting and defending response like a healthy human. Instead, we move directly from the arousal into immobility and helplessness, bypassing our other emotions as well as the normal sequence of responses. We become victims, waiting to be victimized again and a

When the neo-cortex overrides the instinctual responses that would initiate the completion of this cycle, we will be traumatized.

To get a sense of how dissociation feels, sit comfortably in a chair and imagine that you are lying on a raft that is floating on a lake. Feel yourself floating, then allow yourself to gently float out of your body. Float up to the sky like a slowly rising balloon and watch yourself sitting down there below. What is the experience like? What happen

The forces underlying the immobility response and the traumatic emotions of terror, rage, and helplessness are ultimately biological energies. How we access and integrate this energy is what determines whether we will continue to be frozen and overwhelmed, or whether we will move through it and thaw.

Psychiatrist James Gilligan, in his book Violence[8],makes this eloquent statement: …“the attempt to achieve and maintain justice, or to undo or prevent injustice, is the one and only universal cause of violence.” (italics his) On an emotional and intellectual level, Dr. Gilligan’s insight is profound and accurate, but how does it translate into th

The nervous system compensates for being in a state of self-perpetuating arousal by setting off a chain of adaptations that eventually bind and organize the energy into “symptoms.” These adaptations function as a safety valve to the nervous system.

There is a growing tendency to see danger where there is none, and a diminished capacity to experience curiosity, pleasure, and the joy of life.

As I have mentioned repeatedly, the perception of threat in the presence of undischarged arousal creates a self-perpetuating cycle. One of the most insidious characteristics of trauma symptoms is that they are hooked into the original cycle in such a way that they are also self-perpetuating. This characteristic is the primary reason why trauma is r

Avoidance behaviors are a form of trauma symptom in which we limit our lifestyles to situations that are not potentially activating.