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Those of us who suffered severe trauma and abuse particularly during our earliest infancy — so that our physiological development was forced to change in adaptation to the trauma — need to speak out and begin to think about our resulting difficulties in getting along during our lifetime in a world that really (fortunately in many ways) does not have a clue what living in a trauma-altered body is like.

We need to realize that dissociation is NOT a clearly understood phenomena.  There is no clear trail of understanding about dissociation laid out for us to follow by the experts in any field of research or practice.  I believe dissociational experiences need to be documented in any way that we can manage because it will only be in the future that survivor’s who were forced to build a body-brain that contains dissociational patterns will receive the help needed to understand how we are in the world — along with HOW we are in our body in the world affects WHO we are.

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If you have just landed at this post, please first read the post that immediately precedes this one.

Living requires that everyone continually process incoming information so that it can be responded to.  Through safe and secure earliest caregiver relationships we are supposed to build a body-nervous system-brain that can smoothly take in new information, match it up with related and relevant information we have gained during our past, and then be able to respond in the present (responding to the future is a different topic) in appropriate ways.

This process is supposed to be both ongoing and coherent.  That means it is supposed to make sense.  We are supposed to be able to make sense out of what happens to us.  We are supposed to come up with responses, reactions, and actions continually that make sense — make sense to US and make sense to those around us.

Early maltreatment of infants during their first year of life, during the period in which the body-nervous system-brain is undergoing its incredibly fast and complex building process, interferes with this process.  When primary caregivers confuse, hurt, terrify and terrorize, neglect and in other ways mistreat an infant, the information the infant receives cannot possibly be received by the infant in positive ways.

The only alternative a maltreated infant has is to physiologically adapt its development in response to horrific conditions that signify to its growing and rapidly developing body that the world is not safe, that the infant is vastly insecure, and that the infant is ALONE in the midst of all of this.  Dissociation is one of the natural consequences of being overwhelmed, traumatized, and of being fed not only too much information to handle (process, make sense of and respond to), but too much of the WRONG information about the self and the world the self has been born into.

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Now, to simply get to a nitty-gritty description so that I can document a dissociational episode I experienced yesterday.

The first phase of trying to document dissociation involves the reaction (I believe) of shame and embarrassment.  “What’s wrong with me?”  This stage also includes the sense that what happened made no sense at all and that there was no ‘reason’ for it.

We must be careful here.  I am NOT saying that shame and embarrassment TRIGGER the dissociational episode.  I am saying that these feelings are a very seductive temptation to fall into when we go back and try to document such an episode.

Humans are supposed to gradually build into their body-NS-brain from birth the ability to smoothly transition between experiences.  Traumatized infants cannot build this ability into their body because nothing about what they experience allows them too.  Being traumatized and frequently overwhelmed creates a different body-NS-brain because it has been fed, as I said above, too much of the wrong kind of information.

I see an image:  Picture someone saying to an infant, “Eventually in your life, when you are bigger and ready to handle it, life is going to give you a LOT to deal with.  Right now our job is to build you a body-NS-brain that will have good, healthy strong channels in it so that when this time comes, everything you need to get along in the world well is prepared and ready.  This way you will nearly always (overwhelming trauma can hit anyone down the road) be able to take in stride all that you encounter in your life.  You will be able to transition, or change smoothly with the changes as you move along through the rest of your life.”

Dissociation is a DIFFERENT way to handle transitions and changes.  As we document dissociation we do not need to judge it.  We need to pay attention the best that we can and describe it.

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So there I was yesterday, already hyper aware of my well overamped stress response system that had been overtaxed during the week by my efforts to take care of my friend’s job so that she would not worry as she heals from her illness.  Of course all kinds of other stressors went on all week, and the end result is that my entire self, living as it does in a trauma altered body, was on overload.

Standing in line at our small town’s local hardware store — did I notice the BLANK instant that would have let me know dissociation was going to take over the job of handling me in relation to the changes of the world?

Nope.  I did not.

But as always happens sooner or later, once dissociation has occurred and a DETOUR is in progress, something happens to make sure we know we are on a different track in our life from the one we were following prior to the dissociational experience.

What I find fascinating as I make the effort to document yesterday’s experience is that somehow I switched the identity of the person I was speaking to.

Within my own self I simply reorganized certain information within me and reoriented the entire scenario so that as the DETOUR was in progress everything made sense to me.

Did it make sense to the woman I was speaking to?  Of course not!  Did it make sense to me once she put the roadblock in the middle of my DETOUR route?  Not at the time, not even yet — but I respect who I am and how I am in the world as a severe early trauma survivor to try to look at this without criticism and judgment.

I don’t believe dissociation happens without the presence of both stress and a stressor.  Because at the same time I had a permanently turned on/activated stress response system (that I am coming to believe is the exact same thing as the insecure attachment disorder-system I also have that also cannot be turned off), I am ALWAYS experiencing stress (call it anxiety — but it is a very particular kind of anxiety).

It could take a book to adequately document just this one episode of dissociation that happened to me yesterday standing in line at the hardware store.  I believe, when I talk about honoring and respecting the dissociation severe early trauma survivors experience, that this fact is true for every single dissociational experience any survivor has.

Present with any single instance of dissociation is an entire lifetime of accumulated knowledge about what trauma is, what it feels like to endure it, what it takes to survive it, and about what the risks continue to be as we stay alive in a vulnerable body in what our body knows to be a dangerous, threatening and hostile world.

THAT IS A LOT OF INFORMATION!  All of that information is both vital and very near to us (because it is IN us) all of the time.  So-called ordinary-normal people do NOT carry this vast storehouse of trauma-related information.  Therefore, they are NOT at risk for becoming overwhelmed at any given time with a wealth of survival based information — which means they are not at risk for a dissociational episode that seems to come from ‘out of the blue’.

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If I were writing this in a book format I would start another chapter here.  Because I am writing this in a blog format, this post is simply going to get longer!

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I feel like I am inching my way out on a precarious branch that few before me have traveled so far out on.  As I described in my previous post, dissociation is always connected to our physiological adaptation in our body-NS-brain to terrible trauma that overwhelmed, and therefore confused, disorganized and disoriented us.  Those earliest traumatic experiences that built us always happened at the same time that chaos was present.  Within chaos — all possibilities exist simultaneously.

Our tiny growing body-self had to find a way to continue-on-being in the midst of these experiences.  At the same time we brought right along with us into our future life, one instant at a time, all of this UNRESOLVED trauma experience information.

Trauma remains alive in the body of all survivors until somebody somewhere somehow pays the right kind of attention to its message.

Why?

Just as trauma involves the experience of chaos where ‘all is possible’, at the same time it carries the parallel message that if the human race is going to survive and endure the information contained in the trauma has to be understood so that in the future the same kind of trauma can be first of all AVOIDED and if that doesn’t happen, then the same kind of trauma can be responded to when it happens in a new and better way.

Just as trauma=chaos=all is possible, any individual member of our species who experiences trauma is connected to the ALL — we each contain within us the genetic information that made us members of our great species in the first place.  And along with being a member of our species we are given an inescapable mandate:  What each of us experiences in our lives as individual representatives of our species belongs to the WHOLE.

If any single one of us continues to carry information within us about a trauma that was NOT resolved, that information is designed by nature and by evolution to be of critical importance to every single member of our entire species.

Problem?  We do not think this way.  But not thinking about something accurately does NOT make the faulty way of thinking accurate.

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So, again, there I am standing at the counter in the hardware store having a verbal exchange with the cashier.  I am interacting with a woman I will call Anna, though I do not actually remember her name.  I know her through associated experiences I have had in the past.

This woman’s brother is married to my neighbor in this trailer court where the house I live in is located.  I will call my neighbor Ruth.

Over 95% of the population of the border town I live in is of Mexican heritage.  (The town 8 miles away where the hardware store is located is probably 50%.)

Now, looking closely as I try to describe and document what happened to trigger what happened next I verify my own statement above.  All the trauma related information of my entire lifetime was present in that instant I stood in line — and dissociated.

How is that possible?  Again as I stated above, all of this information is present with EVERY early trauma survivor because our bodies changed in their development to make sure we remember.

Dissociation is a part of this trauma-related altered remembering ability that we survivors are blessed-cursed with.

Entering into the context of the hardware store exchange came all the information that I have about my being unable to attach to others in the world.  My insecure attachment disorder exists in nearly absolute contrast to what I see happening between family members, neighbors and friends in this area I live in.

These people are above all else supremely social from the time they are born.  They love one another and they show it — all of the time.  They are designed from birth to value one another in social interactions — Anna and Ruth being no exception.

I lost track of certain facts yesterday, things I consciously KNOW about the relationship of these two women.  I know about the connection by marriage that socially makes these two women very real sisters.  I know Ruth lives two trailers to the west of my house, just over the chain link fence of the neighbor that lives between us.

I know Ruth drives a little silver car.  I know Anna lives in another town 13 miles away and drives a large four wheel drive.  Both women work at this hardware store but seldom on the same shift, and on this day only Anna was working.

Enter my dissociation.

Enter my attempt to document what happened.

Anna cheerfully made a light comment that she loves this time of year, that the night previous she enjoyed lighting her wood stove.

Enter my dissociation.

Enter my WAY TOO MUCH RELATED INFORMATION.

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I must take a moment here to mention something that has happened to me in recent weeks — at least that I have certainly become aware of in recent weeks.

Never before in my life have I consciously noticed that I occasionally think in smells.  Over the past two months I have noticed that sometimes if I think ‘lilac’ I simultaneously literally SMELL lilac.  If I think vinegar, I smell it.  If I think sour milk, I smell it, etc.

How and why this is happening to me (and not all of the time – randomly — and I can not predict it and do not expect it when it DOES happen) I do not know.

But it happened yesterday.

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As soon as Anna mentioned her wood stove three things happened simultaneously.  (1) I remembered that I sometimes think in smells, (2) I remembered actually smelling very real woodsmoke wafting through my back yard this week, and (3) I was overwhelmed with the connection made inside of me to everything I have EVER known about wood smoke and wood stoves.  With an Alaskan homesteading childhood and a long time spent living in the cold winters of northern Minnesota my memories of these experiences are vast.  Because I was built the way that I was, trauma is connected to many of these wood smoke memories.

Strange trigger.

I am not sure that I would have reacted the way that I did yesterday if I had not already been near my complete stress overload point from all the other things that are happening to me (none of which would overstress a ‘normal-ordinary’ person).

So, yesterday suddenly out of nowhere I dissociated in such a way that I lost track of the real time information about who Anna and Ruth are, where they live, etc.  Suddenly I was talking to Anna AS IF SHE WAS RUTH.  In my trauma-stressed-altered reality suddenly Anna lived in the trailer as my neighbor and Ruth disappeared as a person from my reality.

The conversation included me telling Anna that I have tree branches in my yard from the trees I have trimmed, and that she could have them for her stove.  At the same time I could ‘see’ Anna coming down the driveway to get them.  Discussion turned to stray dogs because I was purchasing T-posts so that I can try to build a fence along the east side of my yard that the stray dogs cannot penetrate.  Anna told me about her fence that keeps her dog in her yard.  I responded, “I didn’t know you have a dog over there!”

Abrupt crash – detour ended.  Anna:  “I don’t live there in the trailer, Ruth does!”

Me?  Embarrassed and shaken, confused at my own self, “What HAPPENED, Linda?”

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Even though we are most certainly operating within the cultural norms of our society to take dissociational experiences personally — after all, word of my ‘faux pas’ is no doubt going to spread like wildfire around this small, closely knit neighborhood I live in — my documentary’s point is that dissociation happens to us as individual people because trauma has ALWAYS been bigger than we are as separate people.

We did not survive, evolve and endure as a social species by being alone as separate individuals.  We endured as a group.  When trauma-related memory information overwhelms us — FOR WHATEVER SEEMINGLY INSIGNIFICANT REASON IN THE PRESENT MOMENT — at the instant that it does, at the instant we become overwhelmed and dissociate as a consequence, we are being humbled as an individual self.

At the instant something around us connects with something within us that triggers dissociation, NATURE itself — along with the human specie’s mandate to carry trauma information until someone somewhere at some time can solve the riddle so THAT won’t happen within our species again — takes over and overrides in real time our ability to be a cognizant person with free will and free choice.

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So, yes, patterns of dissociation can wreck absolute havoc with a survivor’s ongoing experience of being an individual person ‘equal to all others’.

Severe infant-child abuse survivors ARE DIFFERENT.  We carry information about terrible things that CAN and DO happen within the reality of our species.

Nobody listens.  Nobody learns a damn thing.  Nobody cares.  The trauma information gets carried forward because NATURE is NOT going to let a species member forget what ALL species members need to know.

A traumatized, maltreated, abused, neglected infant is not given any other choice but to endure the best that it can.  This endurance includes trauma altered changes to its physiological development.  From that time forward ALL early trauma survivors are not given a choice about whether or not to carry the torch that blazes with signals that this kind of trauma DOES exist in the world.

When we experience dissociation we are experiencing what it is like to carry this torch.  What was it yesterday in that conversation that caught my trauma survivor attention?  The detailed specifics no longer mattered about who the actual individual was who lit a wood fire to stay warm.  What mattered was the ability to stay warm to survive in the cold.

The detailed specifics no longer mattered about whose dog lived where.  What mattered is that dogs that are not cared for adequately by owners cause all kinds of problems and are threatening.

The detailed specifics of who these women were as individuals ceased to matter, as well.  What mattered is that they are connected and closely attached to one another and share each others lives.  Their reality is fundamentally in contrast to my own where I live alone, am alone — because I pay this price for being formed as an isolated and severely abused and traumatized tiny human being.

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Severe early trauma survivors are at risk of dissociating ALL OF THE TIME.  It is nearly a superhuman task for us to anticipate what is going to trigger the overwhelming reactions to trauma that were built into our body.

What really matters to me is that I am prevented in real time within my society from approaching my neighbor and her ‘sister’ to tell her what happened to me yesterday, and what has happened to me all of my life as a direct physiological consequence of having been born as a beautiful, whole tiny baby to a vicious psychotic mean, dangerous mad woman who was supposed to be my mother.

I cannot tell them that even my mother was a torch carrier for trauma-related information.  I cannot tell them that really awful things happened to my mother when she was tiny and that she passed trauma on down to me.

So I say all of this here and now, knowing that whatever backlash that is likely to surround me — silently and invisibly — as a result of yesterday’s social fiasco will be detectable to me.  I still have the same basic choice I have always had as a trauma survivor:  survive or don’t.

That my species does not care about the information about trauma that my body has stored and carries is NOT my problem — really.  My job is to carry this torch — and carry it I do, no matter what awkward and puzzling ways this torch sheds its information.  What matters to me is that I figure this all out the best that I can.

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Something on my blog’s admin page under ‘Top Searches’ has again especially caught my attention:

how to proactively look for triggers from abuse

My first response was, “What an excellent question?”

That this searcher at least temporarily made some kind of contact with my blog in response to these search words make me wonder if I have anything here that actually answered any part of this question in any way.

Of course I have no idea what part of the ‘abuse’ spectrum this searcher was inquiring about, but the question itself tempts me to believe that because the word ‘triggers’ is included in the search, the abuse was severe.  At the same time, this searcher did not use the word ‘trauma’, so the field of inquiry was obviously limited to ABUSE rather than to any other kind of overwhelming and negative event.  Yet a concern with ‘triggers’ would be the same whether a person thinks in terms of a specific abuse or in the more general terms of ‘trauma’.

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To me, abuse and difficult traumas share an important underlying condition — that of feeling (and/or BEING) overwhelmed by an event that is harmful to one’s well-being.  Therefore the issue of competence to counteract the event as it happened comes into play along with degrees of POWER and POWERLESSNESS.

This searcher’s question alerts me to a very positive relationship with these issues.  Our work toward learning how to be proactive involves both an effort to improve our competence and our ability to have as much power over our lives as we can healthfully manage to have.  This is resource management.

To be most healthily prepared for our entire lifetime in this world we need to be as flexible (not rigid) and as resilient as we possibly can.  TRIGGERS can interfere with both of these well-being aspects because what happens to us inside of our body in response to any trigger most often happens in our body — automatically — and without our conscious effort.

We need to increase our conscious ability to MANAGE all the inner resources including our responses to the world we live in.  In order to increase our conscious participation in our life we MOST need one very critical resource — INFORMATION.

When our body is receiving and responding to information without our having the ability to consciously manage its (our) response, our body is having access to information that our BRAIN-mind-self is missing.

I think about above ground and below ground information-getting and information-responding.  Above ground information that moves through our conscious awareness by nature requires the involvement of what might be called our ‘higher brain’s involvement’.  Below ground information is received and processed by our body automatically WITHOUT these ‘high brain regions’ being a part of the information-gathering or the information-responding loop.

When we introduce abuse and trauma into the topic, it is critical to remember that involvement of our higher brain abilities is SLOWER.  Much, much slower, and far, far more efficient as well as most-likely-to-succeed in response to immediate threat to our well-being and our life.

Automatic below ground processing is VERY VERY FAST.  Our body has evolved over many generations and throughout many cycles of difficulties as a part of our species to USE this below ground immediately available, rapidly generated and unconscious response-ability to maintain the life of our species.

If our body has in the past been told through abuse and trauma encounters that we are not safe and secure — enough — in the world, the balance of power in our body will automatically — and very naturally shift toward the unconscious immediate response end of our competent-response spectrum.

WHY?  Because in the majority of cases, these rapid automatic unconscious responses are far more likely to SAVE us than are the slower, pondering (in comparison) conscious ‘higher brain’ responses.

Plain and simple.

So, if we have experience with overwhelming abuse and trauma under circumstances in which there was nothing at the time we could do to THINK OUR WAY out of the situation or to THINK OUR WAY past the horror as it immediately happened to us, our fast responses kicked into play — and they are far more likely to do so in the future than if we had never experienced severe abuse and trauma in the first place.

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So if we introduce on our own behalf the idea that we wish to take back control over the mutineers of our body who usurped our conscious power — in our own best interests — we have to begin to gain information that BOTH levels of our SELF can work with.

First of all, we must work on the level of having a safe and secure attachment to the world, in our body, and within our own mind.  This will NOT happen easily if we had an unsafe and insecure early beginning as an infant-child that built trauma response into our growing and developing body-nervous system-brain.

Early trauma survivors have a much greater task to accomplish if they wish to gain increasing ability to be PROACTIVE — and therefore increasingly CONSCIOUS — about how they are responding to ALL aspects of being alive in a changeable world.

The more conscious INFORMATION we can gain about who we are, how we are formed, how our body operates, about the nature of the abuse and traumas we experienced, and about how our body thinks it is BEST PREPARED to respond to threat and danger — the more power we will have to apply to our efforts to be proactive in response to possible abuse and trauma triggers that we may encounter in ‘the future’.

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One of the key and central consequences to trauma reactions as they build themselves into our body is — as I mentioned recently — an altered sense of time in the body.  Once we have experienced trauma that forced us to experience ‘a peritraumatic altered sense of time’, on some level our body has learned a critically important piece of information:  Trauma can happen ANY TIME, ANYWHERE!

If we are working toward being prepared to live a proactive life, we MUST understand that our body has only two ends to its sense-of-time continuum:  Being alive or Being dead.

In between these two ends of the time spectrum the body has come to understand that there is only one very long (hopefully – because being DEAD greatly shortens this line!) ongoing experience — BE CONSTANTLY PREPARED BECAUSE THE THREAT IS CONSTANTLY PRESENT.

The more severe the traumas we have experienced (including the younger we were when they started) the harder it will be to convince our body that our ‘higher brain’ part of who we are is capable of protecting us.

The automatic trauma responses that our body is continually preparing itself to carry out happen in a very FAST world where trauma can happen again out of nowhere INSTANTANEOUSLY.  The body is not going to let go of its competence in being emergency-prepared.  The body lives on this very FAST time track, and to gain increasingly conscious powers to determine the ACTUAL course of our life we have to learn how to be a TIME bandit.

The body has usurped the power to experience time and all possible responses within the span of the time of our lifetime.

If our higher conscious brain wants some of this power over time for its own needs and purposes, it has to negotiate with the body (in my opinion) over this most central issue — TIME, which is our lifetime.

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In essence, this negotiation has to happen in a cooperative environment — between our RIGHT brain which is the spokesperson for our body and all that it knows, and our LEFT brain which is the spokesperson for our higher (slower) thought and reaction processes.

The ONLY way this negotiation process is going to move toward positive ends is IF a person has the lowest possible level of overall stress and reactivity in the environment of their life.

Nobody can ever control for all the possible unforeseen traumas that might pop up out of nowhere at any time.  BUT being proactive is to recognize this fact at the same time life can slow down and be ENJOYED, not only endured and survived.

In order for this negotiation between the time bandit of the body with its automatic and unconscious immediate response, and the time bandit of our slower conscious brain abilities to steal back some ‘control’ over how the time of our lifetime is actually spent, is for a PERSON on all levels to be living in an inner state where they can access peace and calm — both consciously felt and physiologically experienced.

That happens when safety and security that fosters a safe and secure attachment to and in the world, is present.  Safety and security along with access to states of peace and calm are the antidotes to trauma and abuse.

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Our most ancient body responses happen to keep our body alive so that we can procreate and/or take care of our offspring.  Our most ancient body memory doesn’t care a HOOT if we are peaceful, calm or happy — just that we survive.

If we want ‘control’, or the ability to consciously manage our reactions to our environment, we have to understand with the deepest possible admiration and gratitude that our very fast automatic body-based responses are our most powerful asset.  Our body is not our enemy.

Cooperation and negotiation happens where and when mutual respect and appreciation exist.  This is where peace and calm lie.  And when we think about what our right brain knows and does, and what our left brain knows and WANTS us to do, I find it helpful to think about these two brains we have as if they are each a great and powerful nation — neither one to be taken for granted or tampered with.

We talk about our two brains in terms of the right hemisphere and the left hemisphere.  I find it useful to add into my consideration about what each of these two hemispheres evolved to best accomplish in keeping us alive thoughts about the two distinct and different CULTURES that each hemisphere lives with.

If we wish to become more proactive in our life on every level, and especially if we wish to become more proactive regarding our response both to trauma and to its triggers, it is ALWAYS helpful to investigate these two cultures.  The more information the entire brain, our entire self has about our two brain hemispheres the better!

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Our two brain hemispheres each have TIME terms within them that are vastly different from one another.  The left brain has regions devoted especially to sequencing actions.  That is the area of our entire brain that had to be highly developed BEFORE we could begin to make good use of the FOXP2 gene that we carried for a long time before it could be activated for our verbal language abilities to appear about 140,000 years ago.

That sequencing part of our left brain is what we rely on to make good of our intentions to be proactive about anything.  Being proactive means that we are taking control over TIME along with TIMING.  It allows for things to be put into the perspective of past-then, NOW, and future-then.  Proactive is about accessing information from the past as it applies not only to our present but also as it helps us to proactively prepare for the future.

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NOT SO within the culture of the right brain hemisphere.  EVERYTHING IS ALWAYS PRESENT in that world.  The right brain is friends with chaos because it was designed by nature to hold within it ALL POTENTIAL FOR ALL POSSIBILITIES.  And because life can be so unpredictable, the right brain is also friends with trauma (trauma being such a close relative to chaos).

That might seem to be a strange concept, but without having an ability to ‘stay friends with the fact of trauma’ we could not have evolved.  While nobody has ever LIKED trauma, everyone knows it continues to exist just like we do.

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I am going to pause here and throw in something my right brain hemisphere wants to mention.  Yesterday morning I had a friend over to visit who works at our local thrift store.  The store is connected to a very well-established local effort that supports low-cost housing.

I have a collection of indoor aloe vera plants that cannot survive outside in the winter’s cold.  They have spent the entire summer multiplying in pots under the shade of my plum tree.  Yesterday’s plan was to have my friend help me divide all these babies so we could plant each one in a little paper cup.  They will be taken into the thrift store and sold.

All fine and good.  We were out there with our chairs under the shade of the plum tree’s leafy umbrella, armed with our spades, cups, and big dish of moist sandy soil.  I pulled out one full tray of confused plants.  We divided and potted away until suddenly the potential for trauma appeared.

Key word:  suddenly the potential for trauma appeared

This blog’s readers know I spend as much time as possible outside.  I dig and work and landscape.  In the back of my mind I HAVE to have known that such a potential for trauma MIGHT appear.  But after yesterday’s event, believe me I am going to have caution much more up-front in my body and brain.

I pulled out the fourth big tray of plants from under the tree, and suddenly there on the moist dark ground coming right for my friend’s feet was the largest scorpion I have ever seen.  I have lived here in this high desert going on eleven years and never have I seen such a large scary critter with legs.

In the four years I have been in this house, I haven’t seen even ONE scorpion.  But there it was!

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One of the most important steps we can take in our efforts to increase our ability to be proactive regarding trauma and its triggers it to pay very close attention to HOW we react.  I can scrutinize my response yesterday, while at the same time being aware of the ‘shoulds’ and the ‘should nots’ that are naturally a part of the scrutinizing process.

The scrutinizing process is SLOW!  ALWAYS it is slow!  And when it comes to baseline survival reactions, SLOW is DANGEROUS — and we need to let our body know this.  We need to ALWAYS give our body permission to step in FAST with its lifesaving abilities when that is our best course.

AND, as the body knows, when in doubt — let the right brain with its deep roots into our body have the ball.

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So, what did I do?  The scorpion stopped its movement about two feet from my friend and I.  As soon as I saw the critter (about 2 1/2 inches long in its body with its nasty toxic tail swung in a high arch over its back), I FROZE.

TIME again.  Think TIME.

Dissociation, one of the major consequences of long-term, early trauma exposure, is NOT necessarily EVER our conscious choice.  It scares me that my own dissociation is NOT predictably and dependably my strongest asset when it comes to reacting in the moment to a threat.  (This is what a disorganized-disoriented insecure attachment style-pattern-disorder can do to sabotage effective survival strategies.)

My brain hemispheres took the time to think about how I was going to respond.  Here was this dangerous predator, small as it was compared to us humans, way too close for comfort.  Yes, it had a right to live.  Yes, on some level it was a ‘bad thing’ for me to kill it.

Where was the wisdom in this situation?

How much TIME — and therefore increase risk of harm — did my LEFT brain need to decide how I was going to respond?

Yes, this is a small illustration of the topic of trauma and trauma response, of preparedness and the power of being proactive, but I did respond.  I told my friend to lift her feet off the ground and onto her chair as I slowly — not to startle the critter into movement — walked between the scorpion and my friend’s chair to grasp my long handled shovel.

I then returned with shovel poised in the air — and experienced my instant of self doubt knowing that I cannot trust  my aim to ever be entirely accurate because of the interference of my own self-doubts — as I brought the end of the shovel (hopefully) straight down on the body of the scorpion.

I caught its head under that edge, but so fast I could hardly detect what it was doing the scorpion used its front legs to dig down into the soil, under the shovel edge, so that it could lower its head into the dirt and escape.

My next response WAS as fast as it was instinctive and automatic.  Up down up down up down I raised the end of my shovel and slammed it into the soil as the scorpion turned and ran backwards.  Yes, I chopped it into little tiny pieces and killed it.

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My newly reawakened proactive lesson from this?  No more being care-less stupid in sticking my ungloved hands in amongst my plants to move them, to pull weeds, to try to define root structures so I can try to pull the Bermuda grass out of them.  The experience also brought into my clear conscious awareness the fact that diamond back rattlesnakes are giving live birth to their pencil-sized offspring this month.  It is a dangerous time, and because we have been blessed with amazing amounts of rainfall much of the soil is moist, damp and cool.  Critters in this region — along with their potential for harm — can be hiding anywhere.

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In other words, considering that the name we have given to our own species means ‘The Wise Ones’, the more we can learn about not only potential traumas, and about their triggers, but also about how we are patterned both as a species and as individuals to both prevent where possible and to survive traumas, the better off we will be.

There is a TIME and a purpose to all of the abilities we possess.  What so often happens through exposure to abuse and trauma is that our BALANCE between the wise use of our resources for self-protection has been upset.

That, again, is where the healing balm of peace and calm has its OWN power to help us.  Peace and calm, the state that was SUPPOSED to be built into the center of our body-nervous system-brain-mind-self is the state in which we can examine our self, our reactions, and think about the environment we live in.

The state of peace and calm is the middle ground between our fast and our slow reaction abilities.  It is the state where negotiations between the cultural hemispheres of our left and right brain can come together and converse.

The state of peace and calm corresponds to the STOP arm rather than the GO arm of our autonomic nervous system (ANS), and is the place where true REST occurs.  In this state TIME is not acting to put pressure on any part of who we are.

This state of peace and calm is vital to our ability to repair ruptures and to restore our self from the demands of continuing to move forward in our life.  It is a place where risk, direct action, threat, active harm and consequence only come into play as we pay attention to anything we think or feel that is connected NOT to the present moment where our state of peace and calm resides, but EITHER to the past or to the future.

And when push really comes to shove, it is during the time of rest while we are asleep and dreaming that the two cultures of the two hemispheres of our brain have the TIME to process information they each have accumulated while we are awake.  To also learn how to let our two brain hemispheres work together while we are awake is a very good thing.

To live a life of increased well-being we can begin to more consciously understand the balance we need between the SLOWER and the FASTER reaction potential that lies within us.  This is how our highest brain functions can help us live an increasingly proactive (offensive) — rather than reactive (defensive) — life.

NOTE:  Now that it has been written I realize this post is about our reaction to trauma and its triggers, not about “how to proactively look for trauma triggers.”  I need to think about that separately.

(It is important to realize that over the time span of our specie’s evolution nature dictated that our growing and evolving brain NOT duplicate the ability to accomplish tasks because it was efficient and vital that our brain not get too BIG!  Our two brains didn’t each get their own separate house.  They reside together in a duplex!

Between these two living areas is a common space, called the Corpus Collosum, where under the best circumstances information is freely transmitted between our two hemispheres to be processed and understood equally by both regions of our brain – and thus our whole self.)

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