WEBSITE UNDER CONSTRUCTION - BETA VERSION!
PAGES & AUDIO/VIDEO TRACKS & RESOURCES STILL MISSING!
If you find any typo's or unreadable sections, please email me! - Thanks
Licensed under
CC BY-SA 4.0
: also see my full Copyright statement.
It may perhaps be necessary to begin where we are standing and not some abstract idealised place. So I have also taken a little time to frame the goal – at least partially - in more culturally familiar terms – i.e. " What has gone wrong (so we might address it)?"
You don’t actually need to read this part!
Our 21st Century Western techno-industrial society has ended up with many belief systems about how the body-mind works that are incorrect; and has created a physical and social environment vastly different from the one our nervous system evolved in. Its almost as if you buy a new washing machine and the supplied instructions for use lead to a way of operating it that brings about its untimely and unnecessary self-destruction. But with a washing machine it would be more obvious – "This machine works best when standing in six inches of dirty water. Add two large bricks and a handful of screws, nuts and bolts to every load of laundry. If it stops working then hit it with the biggest hammer you can find and stab the control board with a screwdriver".
The net effect is that – relative to our hunter-gatherer ancestors - it is far easier to become both physiologically and psychologically (mentally-emotionally) overwhelmed. And then, starting from that state of overwhelm, far less easy to reset the nervous system back to safety. Although the tendency is to think of trauma with a capital "T" (a major violent incident), trauma as overwhelm occurs all the time when the total instantaneous demands on all of the physical / homeostatic / mental / emotional / immunological (etc.) resources of the body-mind crosses a certain threshold - and momentarily exceeds the person’s available reserves or resilience. It is true that can be caused by one big event. But it happens far more often with an accumulation or combination of relatively small everyday stressors that reduce the spare adaptive resource to critically low levels.
Human relationships are better than any amount of medicine, ammunition
or the help of others could have done. Once they were recognized,
welcomed and made at home in his daily reckoning, he would be
reassured, composed and more resolute. And he would come back, tired as
he was, night after night, with whatever little of food he had gathered
from the desert, eagerly looking forward to seeing those dear, trusting
faces, ... asking only that they should open their eyes and show him
that the ancient, first look of trust was still there.
The detail of every evening was stored up accordingly in his memory as
a new source of wealth and daily he would hasten back, spurred on by a
feeling of going "home", however strange it may sound in a desert where
no one had a fixed home, where home was not in any given place but in
the feeling of being at home anywhere in the universe, by instant right
of the fact that one is a child of it and the life it lit on earth.
Laurens van der Post, A Far Off Place, p. 271
Similarly, dissociation may have a clinical (psychiatric) definition, but it is also a far wider phenomenon that is extensively endemic in Western culture at both clinically recognisable and subclinical (i.e. less visible) levels. We say there is a "problem with embodiment" – meaning that dissociation and disembodiment are rife. Trauma and dissociation both have similar causes, arise in largely overlapping circumstances, and are both usually residual overwhelm adaptations that have not re-normalised to the reality of the present moment. The result is that – for most people walking round in Western society - some parts of the organism of a single human being are adapting to "now", whist others are adapting to "then" (or many "then"s). This fragmented state results in a loss in biological efficiency, a reduction in physical-mental-emotional resilience, and a degradation of sensory capacity along with a subtle but pervasive reduction in quality of relationality and empathy.
What sane person could live in this world
and not be crazy?
Ursula K. Le Guin
Many of these stressors are cultural and specific to our Western techno-industrial society at this particular time in history - such that we live in a far more demanding environment than our stone-age ancestors, and have far fewer personal resources and adaptive choices available to deal with them. Probably the beginning of everything was that after a few hundred thousand years walking we reached the edge of the world, and from then on it started to get smaller, more cramped. Faced (from no less than 25,000 years ago) with too many people and insufficient space to hunt and gather in the most fertile parts of the known world, static agriculture started to look like a good thing, which then accumulated its own particular problems.