John Lumiere-Wins is a Somatic Experiencing Practitioner and Transpersonal Hypnotherapist with offices in Marin and the East Bay. He is the author, with Lynn Marie Lumiere, of The Awakening West. See John's listing in OPEN EXCHANGE's Counseling & Therapy category.

The wide variety of mental, emotional and physical syndromes and symptoms that are associated with traumas are compromises the organism makes in order to bind the overwhelming mental, emotional and physical energies of the trauma and get on with life; And we do, somehow, get on with life, but with diminished capacities, functioning and well being.

An example of the long-range effects of trauma can be illustrated by sharing an experience I had one day with a friend, who I will call Monique, a woman in her fifties. We stood, sharing a cup of coffee in her kitchen, I was excitedly telling her about recent successes with clients who had suffered symptoms of earlier traumas. She confessed to me that when she was 31 she remembered a time when she was four years old and her best friend stayed with her for a sleep over. They were giggling and laughing and having a wonderful time until Monique's step father came in and sexually molested her friend as Monique lay in bed, frozen, beside her. Her eyes moistened and her body drooped.

Any experience that overwhelms our organism's defenses and is perceived as life threatening is traumatic and has a profound and lasting impact in our bodies, in our relationships and in our minds. The effects of what's called trauma can result from our organism being overwhelmed by neglect, abuse, violence, accidents, medical procedures, natural disasters and un-natural disasters such as war, difficult births, traumatic shocks during formatory developmental stages of human development, etc. Any experience that overwhelms our organism's defenses and is perceived as life threatening is traumatic and initiates dysregulated patterns in our reptilian brain stem and autonomic nervous system, the relational dimension of our limbic-heart brain circuitry and the imaged and language meaning, belief and memory faculties of our neo-cortex.

Monique's eyes became frightened, her head still leaning forward slightly as her shoulders curled down, around her heart as she told me that despite fifteen years of therapies--talking about it, pounding rages and interminable grief--she still had symptoms. She indicated she'd be willing to let me come closer and hold her shoulders; I stood behind her I rested my hands around her shoulders and invited her to begin noticing whatever sensations of aliveness, comfort or support she could discover beneath my hands; She sighed and the tension in her body began to release.

After we became comfortable together I mentioned to her that as the energies of traumas that have been bound up in our symptoms begin to release they often flow down the arms and legs and into the hands and feet; they are experienced as subtle tingling, pulsations, warmth, vibrations, little jerks or shakings, and sometimes as mobilization in the musculature for defensive orienting, fight or flight responses to the perception of threat which were initiated but interrupted or overridden at the time of the trauma.

Reassured by my hands on her shoulders, Monique's nervous system settled a little and with attention, she began noticing some tingling and warmth in her hands. I soon noticed her head moving spontaneously, slightly to the right and I asked her to move it consciously, very slowly, in that direction and back it off repeatedly while paying attention to all the nuances of sensations in her neck, shoulders, face, throat, chest, hands and feet; noticing in a felt-sense way. Soon I noticed her left forearm lifting slightly as her left elbow pushed back.

I then provided resistance to her elbow and as she slowly pushed hard against my hand. As her whole torso followed her head to the right, deeply feeling the sensations, at certain moment, she gasped, and began to sob. As she settled, Monique explained that when the mature woman, Monique, remembered the molestation of her little friend she was enraged. What followed was all those years of therapies talking about it, being heard and expressing all that rage and the hurt beneath it. But as we followed her body's responses somatically, she realized that in that inconceivable and terrifying situation the impulse of that precious, innocent four-year old Monique wasn't to protect her friend. As her sobbing subsided and her body settled, her head was of slightly swaying from side to side, rather slowly and she kept saying, so softly, "I just wanted to get away; I just wanted to get away."

As she gazed into my eyes, I sensed that Monique was experiencing a soft and quiet depth within herself. She seemed a little unfamiliar with this rather vast space. I guided her to a chair in her living room and I sat on the floor, in front of her. remarked how deep and soft and quiet she seemed and how she looked a little frightened and disoriented; as if this rather vast space was not a place she'd had much experience hanging out in. Her eyes nodded. I commented on how she looked a little frightened and disoriented.

Through a series of inquiries into her actual, somatic experience, she began to notice that, although this space seemed un-familiar, the actual the felt-sense of this space itself was peaceful. She reported that it felt safe, cozy. As her awareness began to re-orient to these actual sensations that were the expression of the present moment and a more coherently reorganized nervous system, the arousal in the fear/survival circuits settled. Monique was then able to smile and say, "Something is different. I can't quite say what it is, but something is very different."

I asked her to not try to say what it was but rather to just feel what was feeling different and if some description came out of that, then please share it. She paused a while, eyes wide open, looking deeply.

What happens when the nervous system reorganizes out of a traumatic pattern is a very interesting unfolding of our human potential. We come into a more coherent organization of our body, nervous system/ brains, and our consequent experience of our self, our relations and our mind/world. When an interrupted and stored defensive/orienting gesture gets released from the nervous system and is completed, like what happened here with Monique, the nervous system-body-mindis no longer constrained by that particular pattern of disorganized resonances. The increase of natural coherence in the neural resonances of the whole lower brain entrain the resonances of the upper brain spontaneously reorganizes into its most natural, larger possibility, a more coherent integration. We become relaxed and alert. "Past-ing" "future-ing" and "agenda-ing' fall away; there is a subjective experience of more space, in and around our experience of being here. Once the underlying nervous system reorganizes, the limbic-heart circuits of relational significance, and the cortical circuits of meaning, image, language, memory and, are released to reorganize, organically, into a new coherence as well. Initially this may feel different and unfamiliar and alarm circuits can get triggered and need to be settled out by directing attention to the virtues of the experience itself.

When how we experience our selves changes like this a rather profound reorganization of how we experience ours selves our relations with others and our world. We are less at cross-purposes within ourselves and our container for life becomes larger, more naturally harmonious and more stable.

With most trauma, but especially, when the trauma happened during our early, developmental sequences, the patterns left in trauma's wake, the traumatic organization of our neurally-mediated body, psyche and mind becomes part of the basis of who we are in the world as well as how we experience ourselves, others and the world thereafter. When that shifts, its like something that has always somehow been a part of us is gone; our subjective experience of ourself is different than it has been. To some extent we don't know who we are, what the world is and how to be our self with others. This can be scary until we are aware of how to relax and get oriented in a new space.

As Monique began to feel oriented in this new space, she nodded and I saw her look with fresh eyes around her familiar and beautiful living room, and out, over the hills across the bay, beyond the ring of Marin, San Francisco and the Golden Gate, above the ocean and out into the deep blue sky. After a while, she smiled into my face and spoke again. "Something is very different; but it is good. I like it."

I soon had to leave for an appointment. Daily travel and time permitted me to stop by to chat a couple of weeks later. After Monique reported that now the difference that began as we'd worked together felt natural, symptoms were gone and changes, lasting, our conversation just meandered on through other topics of shared interest.