Cygnus Transformations is an expansion of the psychotherapy practice that I’ve been building for over five years. In addition to therapy, I will now be offering additional mind-body services to provide enhanced approaches for wellness and well-being for the whole-being. Here is a short video that was prepared as an entry for the Wells Fargo Small Business Contest:
This blog will contain a variety of posts on topics surrounding well-being, trauma treatment, post-traumatic growth, my business expansion, and my academic progress and pursuits as I move through my PhD in Mind-Body Medicine at Saybrook University. If there are specific topics you’d like to see, please let me know!
I’ve been so busy posting everywhere else, I forgot to put a blog post on my own website! In my role as Ph.D. candidate/researcher, I am now conducting my research study for my dissertation. I knew finding participants would be difficult, but I didn’t know it would be thisdifficult. I am looking for adults in the Bay Area who have both post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and chronic low-back pain. There is a significant overlap between the two conditions, and they appear to be connected through muscle tension. Very little is known right now about how to help people who have both conditions.
The study is important to me for more than just finishing my Ph.D. I truly believe that self-help muscle relaxation techniques can be beneficial for people who have both PTSD and chronic low-back pain, but there is no published research in this area to date. Lack of funds, lack of access, lack of time, stigma, and side effects are all reasons people may not seek out traditional medical treatments. Having a self-help technique, rather than having to go to a professional for treatment, could mean that many people who do not currently seek treatment or who have given up might find some relief.
Perhaps you are someone who suffers with these conditions, or you have a loved one who does. Maybe you are a medical or mental health professional who treats people with one or the other condition and have never asked your patients/clients if they have the other. Many people who see a doctor for back pain will not volunteer that they also have PTSD, and many people who see a therapist for PTSD will not mention having chronic pain. If you are any of the above, please check out this web page or contact me for more information. Be well! http://www.cygnustransformations.com/research-central/muscle-relaxation-study/
As our world gets smaller through technology, and our use of language is changing rapidly, it’s important to give some thought to the language we each use and what we’re trying to communicate with it. The words we choose, the ways we choose to express them, and the ways we choose to withhold information, all impact how we relate to each other.
The Language Research Laboratory at Ohio State University has put together a wonderful set of videos about the psychology of language in The Psychology of Language Video Series. Each video is 15 minutes or less. They present topics like: “The Psychology of Swearing;” “The Bilingual Mind;” “The Power of Silence: Nonverbal Communication;” and many others.
The videos were designed for students, teachers, and the general public. Take a look!
In the past few weeks, I have heard from clients, friends, family members, colleagues, and acquaintances that they are experiencing significant distress as a result of the current political events and announcements. I began to recognize this distress as acute stress injury, which can be a precursor for post-traumatic stress injury. This specific distress is connected to actions being taken by our government, which is an entity we all rely on for our safety and welfare. The nature and volume of shocking announcements and executive orders also adds to the sense of surrealism and unsafety. It makes sense that people would develop fear and anxiety when they feel they can no longer rely on their government to act in sane and stable ways.
To help people understand what is happening to them in reaction to this acute stress, and to get help if that is needed, I’ve developed the term of political acute stress injury (PASI). I’ve also created a new page on my psychotherapy site: http://www.beverlyswann.com/practice-areas/political-acute-stress-injury-pasi/. This page gives a description of the condition along with many of the common symptoms.
I’m welcoming comments and feedback from other professionals as well as from people who are experiencing PASI. I believe a dialogue about how to recognize PASI and how to help ourselves and others would be very valuable.
Like many in the US, I have felt increasing outrage at the well-orchestrated hostile takeover of our nation in the past week. Blatant disregard for many of the values near and dear to the foundations of this country has had me thinking about what I can bring to the table. I marched with friends in Sacramento last weekend at the Women’s March, and it was encouraging to be with so many other people who were willing to stand up and say NO. NO hate; NO fear; Everyone is welcome here.
Many people I have spoken with have expressed a desire to become more politically active, but have also said they feel overwhelmed in getting started. In my own search to figure out next steps, I realized that Integrative Life Coaching is a perfect match for helping people accomplish this goal. Integrative Life Coaching uses coaching tools, empowerment, and accountability to help people move forward when they feel stuck or overwhelmed.
So today, I am announcing a new specialty in my Integrative Life Coaching practice: Coaching for Emergent Activism and Feminism (EAF) http://www.cygnustransformations.com/coaching/coaching-for-eaf/. Please also see handy resources at Resources for EAF and Roadmap to EAF. If you’d like to know more about Coaching for EAF, please call at 925-705-7036, or contact me for a free consultation. I would be honored to assist you in finding ways to stand up and have your voice heard.
I learned a new term tonight…personal safety. It refers to the ability to keep one’s person safe. What a concept! It goes against everything I was taught growing up.
IMPACT Bay Area (http://www.impactbayarea.org/) is a non-profit organization which has been teaching personal safety, primarily to women, for 30 years. I attended their 1-hour free workshop tonight. Casey, our instructor, gave us practical tools to use in everyday life. She briefly covered internal tools such as intuition and awareness, then taught us physical tools like heel palm! It felt fantastic to strike upwards at a pad (this would land in the soft part of the upper throat on an actual attacker) and yell a hearty NO!
Self-defense is something I have had on my To Do List as something to learn for many years. This free workshop was a beginning. It’s safe, fun, and builds confidence. They have more extensive classes which allow students to fight off padded attackers (instructors) to have a real-life felt sense of what it is like, making it more likely to remember how to do it if you ever need to. If you are in the Bay Area, please check out IMPACT Bay Area. They have scholarship programs, and no one is ever turned away for lack of funds. They are also in need of volunteers and contributions!
Recently, I’ve been experiencing a real-life example of how injury forms into chronic tension in the body. I fell three weeks ago on pavement, with a pretty bad sprain to the left foot, milder sprains in other joints, and bumps and bruises in many other places. Initially, the foot got all the focus and other parts had to compensate for it. Using crutches, holding my body in weird ways, not being able to sleep well…all of these impacted how I used muscles and whether they were able to recover.
A surprising influence has been the terror in my body when faced with doing a seemingly normal activity that I haven’t done since the fall. For example, a couple of days ago I was faced with the prospect of going up and down a flight of stairs. When I realized I would need to do this, I was flooded with fear and tension. I recognized what was going on and was able to talk myself down and negotiate the stairs. If I hadn’t been that aware, I could have held on to that fear for quite awhile. Bodies moving while holding tension tend to then develop more tension, and potentially cause more injury, causing more pain, causing more fear, etc. This is known as the Fear Avoidance Model.
Throughout these few weeks, I’ve been using TRE several times daily to try to move the tension out of my body. Often they are quick shakes when I’m resting for a moment, as well as practicing tremoring a few minutes before I get out of bed in the morning. As my foot hurts less and functions more like a foot, I am noticing tension in my back, my right leg, and shoulders. I’m working hard to prevent this from becoming a chronic problem, but it takes a lot of conscious awareness and willingness to do things despite the fear. It’s really been quite an amazing process!
Attending a hybrid PhD program at a small university has some distinct advantages for a working professional. I can fit schoolwork in to my full schedule, and I don’t have to spend time commuting to a campus. But there’s a big disadvantage – missing out on the experience of being on campus and all of the resources that go with that.
Recently, I discovered that the generous folks at UC Berkeley Libraries give free access to the community, as long as you go to the physical library. I hadn’t been on the campus of a major university since I graduated from Indiana University in 1985. The energy of so many people gathered in one place in the pursuit of learning is unique to large campuses, and I totally enjoyed just walking around. Large, impressive buildings with great staircases leading up to heavy wooden doors…this is very much the old-fashioned university campus in my mind’s eye.
The library itself is everything a university library should be: high ceilings, lots of wood and marble, and of course, tons of books. However, I was there for electronic databases. In pulling together the literature to support my own research for my PhD, I’ve hit multiple walls of not having access to key articles. I can see the title and the abstract, but to read the full article there is a hefty fee.
UC Berkeley libraries appear to have access to everything, and the articles I need were definitely available. Sadly, I forgot to bring a flash drive. The community access allows you to download to a flash drive, print a copy for a fee, or read the article there. I’m sure I’ll be making a few trips back, for both the articles and the ambience.
I’m very disturbed over the violent events of the past few weeks, as many people are, but it seems for different reasons. As a psychotherapist, I get to see issues through many different lenses as clients come in and work through their own distress. I also have many first responders among my clients, who bring different perspectives than the public at large. Finally there are my own views, colored by my own life experiences and education.
What does all that mean?
For starters, it means I’m exhausted after last week. While the public eye has been fixed on San Bernardino, I’ve been helping clients work through fear, shock, and grief over the shooting death of a local teen. Thus the hobbit reference in the title…I’ve been longing for a Samwise Gamgee to tell me “There’s some good in this world, Mr. Frodo, and it’s worth fighting for!”
Beyond that, it means that I’m disturbed by the outcry, once again, for gun control. Certainly, if guns were less readily available, then the frequency and breadth of the mass killings might decrease. But have we learned nothing from prohibition and the war on drugs? When people want something illegal, they find a way to get it. There isn’t much research to help us understand why people plan and execute mass killings, but I have an educated guess. It has to do with impulse control.
Everyone has emotions, and at different times of life most people have at least a thought about throwing a temper tantrum or getting revenge. Usually, those people exercise impulse control and don’t go on killing sprees. Two factors seem to be changing that. One is the belief that “more is better” and everyone needs to express feelings. The second is the constant bombardment of our brains with violent images and the ability to kill people whenever we want to virtually. It’s just not as taboo to shoot up a place if you’ve already done it thousands of times in video games and watched/heard/felt it in movies. The neural pathways that know how to do this already have a foundation.
To go back to the first piece about “more is better,” I’m remembering a lecture I heard years ago. (I wish I could remember the woman’s name so I could give her proper credit.) She spoke about emotional expression and how Freud started something that is now run amok. Freud worked with a limited set of upper-middle class Caucasians who had been taught to repress all strong emotion. Thus he introduced us to the idea of full expression. However, we now have a few generations of people who have grown up with the idea that they not only “should” freely express emotion, but that they also have the right to. Emotional expression, when it has been repressed, is a first step towards health, not the end-product.
There’s the tie-in to buying flour and baking a cake. Our society seems to be caught in a young developmental phase of wanting things to be fast, easy, and painless. Impulse control is something that is learned over time, and the parts of the brain that say “you don’t have to buy that big-screen TV today in order to be happy” are the same parts that say “you don’t have to pick up assault rifles and murder people in order to manage your anger.” Fixing this problem is more about teaching accountability and self-control than it is about restricting access to weapons.
All of the people who stake out their positions about gun control and then demonize the other side without proposing and actually implementing viable answers are simply adding to the frenzy. The fact that it seems to happen each time one of these incidents occurs is very disturbing, because all of the outcry has not brought any change.
I want to share a very interesting, and for me profound, experience that happened as a result of my cat Angus’ surgery. The way I’m interpreting it, it’s directly related to body-oriented treatment of trauma.
He came home late Sunday night, around 10:00 pm. He paced the house quite a bit, knocking into everything (wearing a cone) before settling down to sleep on me. I’d decided to sleep on the couch with a few low lights on, just in case he had problems during the night.
At about 4:00 am, I woke up because he was shaking quite a bit. At first I was afraid he was having a seizure, but I could see his face and he looked quite calm. So I just observed. The shaking centralized in his back legs, then his front legs joined in. Then it rolled down his spine from his shoulders all the way to the tip of his tail. Then it all stopped, he heaved a huge sigh, and was still. In a few minutes, it started again. He went through this cycle four times, each time with less intensity. As I observed it, I was struck with impressions of fear, confusion, and a sense of “I’m home; I’m safe.” These were all more inner knowing rather than emotions or images in my mind. I have no way of knowing if that was what he was experiencing…it was just present for me. During the whole time, his face was calm and his heart rate was normal.
This shaking was very different than the twitching that dogs and cats often do in their sleep. It followed this specific pattern to completion each time, and it was more of a full-body shaking. I was reminded of a video I saw several years ago and again recently at a Trauma Releasing Exercises (TRE) training. It is of a polar bear being chased down by men in a helicopter so they can tranquilize him as part of the effort to track polar bears in the wild. As he is recovering from the tranquilizer, he goes through a shaking process that is, in theory, releasing the fear and trauma of being chased, anesthetized, and handled by humans:
Witnessing this same process in Angus while he was stretched out on my side was an embodied experience for me as well. I don’t really know how to describe it, except that I have a much better sense of the value of letting traumatic experience flow out of the body as soon as possible. I can only guess that it happened six hours after getting home because it took that long for him to accept that he really was safe. It may also be connected to the anesthesia from the surgery, being sedated twice after that while at the hospital, and the heavy medication he was still on at the time.
He’s doing well now, though very aggravated at the continued presence of The Cone.
