Tonight's picture was taken in December of 2007. That night we took Mattie to Brookside Gardens in Maryland. This is a beautiful garden by the spring and summer, but in the winter time they transform the space with lights. You literally walk through a frozen garden and see an incredible light display. Mattie loved this experience and after a walk in the cold they gave us hot chocolate and cookies. Of course Mattie, being a chocolate hater, did not appreciate the hot cocoa, but he definitely ate the sugar cookie. That was the first and last time we ever did this light event. The next Christmas, Mattie was dealing with cancer.
Quote of the day: We have all a better guide in ourselves, if we would attend to it, than any other person can be. ~ Jane Austen
In the midst of doing a bunch of things today, I came across an article entitled, Understanding neurobiology of trauma will enable counselors to help clients heal permanently from it. This article is located in The Advocate Magazine, which is a publication of the American Mental Health Counselors Association. An Association in which I served as the president in 2008-2009. Do these dates ring a bell? They are the years Mattie battled and died from cancer. That's a whole other story, as I was the youngest elected president of a national organization (with 6,000 members), and yet couldn't effectively serve my role. In the scheme of things, this lost opportunity is a small issue on the grander totem pole of issues!
This article title is featured on the front cover of the magazine. So it caught my attention. Naturally dealing with trauma, specifically trauma from loss, interests me because I personally live it. So I read the article. I was fine with the description of trauma. Dr. Judith Swack, the founder of Healing from the Body Level Up (HBLU), feels there are two types of trauma: from loss and from violence. She feels that trauma is organized into layers, that it has a structure. Each layer needs to be addressed in therapy, because if not the symptoms will return. Which is why she feels standard treatments are not effective. Brain imaging have helped understand how the human brain is altered by trauma. As if the trauma makes aspects of the brain go off-line, making it impossible to process what and when the trauma happened. So in essence the sympathetic nervous system remains on and with that comes somatic symptoms such as headaches, stomach aches, and body pain.
It isn't a very long article, and the second half of the article tries to give an overview of HBLU. The acronym was constantly used in the article, without a full description of what HBLU actually stood for. That was my first problem with the article. I also couldn't follow the methodology, so I quickly Googled Judith Swack and HBLU and I found her website. I included a short video of Dr. Swack below so you can see her discuss this model, a model which apparently has been around and effective for 30 years. In a way it is a self help model because the goal is to take the lessons learned in therapy home with you, you internalize them, and then apply them to yourself whenever feeling anxious or experiencing negative emotions.
The premise of Dr. Swack's model is that our subconscious mind controls 90% of our lives and the conscious mind runs very little. So the fact that we think we have control over our lives, isn't really the case. Therefore the goal of her model is to get in touch with this subconscious part/voice. This philosophy already bordered beyond my logical comfort zone, but then watching her demonstrate how a few taps and touches on certain parts of a patient's body could transform someone's thinking, SHE LOST ME. I mean ABSOLUTELY lost me. Dr. Swack claims that her model can help address just about every problem from medical issues, food cravings, to relationship concerns. WOW! Could I see it helping with medical trauma, or more specifically with me????..... NO!
I think the notion of the article was well intentioned. But given its title, I was expecting to really hear about the science of trauma, and through that scientific knowledge understand the methodology of its treatment. Not only did it not accomplish that, I am left with more questions then answers, and I am wondering why more space wasn't allotted to deal with this difficult topic.
If you are interested in what I have been discussing, feel free to read the article yourself, go to Dr. Swack's website and even watch the six minute video! Come to your own conclusions.
The article:
Dr. Swack's website:
Healing from the Body Level Up (HBLU):
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