Celeste Mendelsohn | CPTSDfoundation.org

The ICK Factor

Celeste Mendelsohn — Thu, 15 Feb 2024 10:18:27 +0000

Have you ever had the experience of going somewhere or meeting someone that you just instinctively knew was bad news?

What did that feel like? I’m not talking about what you thought about it, I mean what did it really feel like?

We’re created with a variety of sensations that can tell us when things are amiss (and also when they’re really good, but more on that in another article). We’ve created a vocabulary around these sensations, but we’re often not really aware that we actually do feel these things. We think they’re just expressions. Often, that’s because we’ve learned to numb out that extra felt sense that our body is trying to direct us to, and we “think” rather than acknowledge the sensation. Becoming aware of our felt sense is what this article is all about.

Have you ever noticed… There are these phrases we use for feelings and sensations that we think of as throw-aways as if they don’t mean anything. Statements such as “He Gives Me the Creeps,” “It Broke My Heart,” It Was Gut Wrenching,” “That Makes My Skin Crawl,” and “What a Pain in the Neck”(or nether regions).

Have you heard and used phrases like this? We think they’re just expressions, just a thing we say. But they’re actually a description of physical sensations that we often don’t pay attention to as the warning signs they are.

We say them because they’re expressions in common use, but they come from real, physical sensations. And often, especially for trauma survivors, the reality and the intensity of the physical feelings are numbed out.

This is important because, with more awareness of our physical selves, we can respond more quickly and accurately to situations that used to baffle us.

The good news is that it’s something we can work to change. Creating more awareness and connection to our felt senses will tell us when people or situations aren’t good for us – before we’re faced with a challenge. When we learn to connect and pay attention, we’ll walk the other way instead of running head-on into a problem.

I call this the ICK Factor.

When it happens, it feels, well… icky! We’ll instinctively know that there’s a problem. We won’t need to think about it or figure it out. We just need to believe our instincts and remove ourselves from the situation.

The challenge is that feelings like these were common in our childhoods. And, we had them about people that society or our friends and families said we should trust, so we stopped noticing them. In fact, you may have numbed them out completely – because to know and acknowledge those feelings about members of your family or others around you made you feel unsafe… and wrong (in the eyes of friends and family), even though you were, most likely, right!

You didn’t want to feel that way, so you just stopped feeling.

But those phrases are accurate descriptions of physical sensations. So, what if you could re-learn how to connect to your physical sensations, and your felt senses? And what if, instead of trying to escape feeling your felt-sense, you started embracing it as the warning, the red alert, that is actually akin to a secret power?

Wouldn’t it be great to reconnect with your senses and be able to rely on your own felt senses to keep you safe?

Yoga can help us learn to re-awaken that felt sense. Not yoga as we tend to think of it these days, with music and lots of people and acrobatic poses. What will help us as trauma survivors is therapeutic yoga, which offers ways to reawaken the senses and connect the body, mind, and spirit.

You can relearn the connection to your body and the felt sense that will always tell you the truth. Reconnecting with your senses, your spirit, and your inner strength is the work of yoga therapy. Yoga therapy creates more awareness and connection to our felt sense that tells us when people or situations aren’t good for us – before we’re faced with dangers we can’t control.

If you’ve been living with anxiety and fear, this may sound too good to be true. I get it. I’m a survivor of childhood trauma too. I’m really grateful that I found my way to yoga, and that I had yoga therapists to work with and to train me.

I was lucky. I learned how to heal my body, mind, and heart with yogic practices before childhood trauma was fully recognized as the epidemic we now understand it to be. We didn’t have a name for it then, but the practices of yoga therapy worked with the symptoms – anxiety, depression, dissociation, emotional dysregulation, and de-personalization that are endemic in society today.

But here’s the thing: yoga practitioners understood trauma 5000 years ago. They knew how to heal it and how to deal with the symptoms. Yoga therapy can help us to untangle the threads that “tie us in knots” inside.

If this resonates with you, or you know someone who needs to read it, pass it on. We CAN heal.

This is the first part of the practice that will increase your sensitivity and create inner awareness: empty your lungs of air. Let it all go. Relax your belly, take a full deep breath in, and then exhale everything. Repeat. Continue.
With Gratitude,
Celeste Mendelsohn
C-IAYT Yoga Therapist

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Celeste Mendelsohn

Judgment

Celeste Mendelsohn — Wed, 20 Dec 2023 13:22:35 +0000

I was in a meeting the other day, trying to de-stress and find resources for a background level of anxiety, and the topic was judgment. It got me thinking, as much of the sharing was about judging others.

Judgment isn’t good or bad; we’re designed to make choices

What came to me, was the relationship between how we judge and the reference material our minds have for making judgments. Judgment isn’t good or bad; we’re designed to make choices. Our intellect and experience filter everything we observe and do.

It’s like cruise control in a car. I can override it, but it has to be a choice. Otherwise, I’ll continue on autopilot until I crash into something.
It’s important for me to remember that my judgment of present life situations can be skewed in either direction by past trauma. I may look at a current relationship, for example, and if it reminds me of a painful one in the past, I could easily run the other way without giving this one a chance.
The philosophy of yoga talks about this. Memories of past events lodge in our brains and direct our current reactions. They’re called samskaras in yoga and are described as “grooves in the brain” taking us down these twisty but familiar roads of reactivity, keeping us from seeing this situation as unique. So we continue doing the same things over and over again, expecting different results (kind of like an old, scratched 45 rpm record).
Today, science explains that our minds have a negative bias, created by the amygdala as a sort of shorthand, for the purpose of keeping us safe. If something was painful in our past, we’re more likely to remember it, unlike something pleasant that we forget. And because it’s memory, we react more quickly than if we had to think it through.

But, as a trauma survivor, memory may not accurately inform current decisions. Then, things become complicated

Even though a past event was painful, if it feels familiar I might gravitate toward this one – because it feels familiar. Sounds crazy, right? Well, it is… sort of. Here’s how it worked for me.

The “fawn response,” as therapists call it, keeps trauma survivors trying to make others happy so they’ll stop hurting us. It’s what happens when you know you can’t fight and you can’t run. It’s often true for children because they need their parents in order to survive.

What I learned as a child was how to be a peacemaker. “Fawning,” was my first option. But I didn’t really have an option two. So, I’d lose it.
For me, fawning worked – sometimes. When it didn’t, I’d panic. I’d cry uncontrollably, threaten to hurt myself, anything to make my parents stop fighting. That worked – sort of. The yelling stopped. But the problem didn’t go away, and my mom still had a black eye in the morning.

As an adult, I did much the same thing. I would try to smooth things over, accept unacceptable behavior, and numb out the pain – until I just couldn’t do it anymore, and in desperation I’d lose it completely, repeating my childhood panic attacks. I accepted a lot of things I shouldn’t have and endured a lot of pain because of it. I was also called “crazy” more than once because of my desperate, fearful, last-ditch efforts to fix the unfixable.
Emotional numbing, the fawn response, and panic don’t go away without awareness and effort. It’s how so many of us with violent, dysfunctional pasts continue to gravitate to the same situations in the present.

In this case, the samskaras were misleading. I believed, because a situation was familiar and because I was numb, that I could fix it by being extra nice, extra sweet, and more. In other words, I’d fawn instead. It was my go-to. When it didn’t work, I panicked.
To overcome the samskaras that were holding my felt sense and intuition hostage, I needed to understand that my past solutions weren’t working in the present. I also had to accept that while both my parents contributed to some very painful memories, they had fairly extensive trauma histories of their own. A program helped me find forgiveness for them, and for myself.

Today, I no longer rely on old patterns to guide my actions. Today I have choices, and I make certain that before I take any action in a difficult situation, I look at what’s in front of me in the present moment, not just back at the past.
When yoga came into my life I was already in 12-step programs. These programs helped me a lot, but the constant stress of living on “red alert” exhausted my body and mind, creating daily physical pain. My body started breaking down.

When I came to that first yoga class, the teacher welcomed me and I gave him my laundry list of what I couldn’t do. His only response was, “Yet.” I didn’t understand then, but he was right.

The awareness that I was on autopilot came from my yoga practice, and I realized I was dissociating before that was a term I even knew. Yoga started changing me gently – physically, mentally, and emotionally.

Making good decisions for myself was also something I didn’t do “yet.”
That, and many other things, I can do today.

I believe my Higher Power guided me to exactly what I needed – therapeutic yoga. The practices were gentle until I could do more, and the awareness I’ve gained keeps me connected to myself in ways I’d never experienced.

The programs and yoga saved my life.

I’m so grateful for everything I’ve been given, and also for what was taken away.

Celeste Mendelsohn
IAYT Certified Yoga Therapist and Complex Trauma Recovery Coach
https://www.treatingtraumawithyoga.com

Celeste Mendelsohn

Healing from Childhood Trauma – It’s An Inside Job

Celeste Mendelsohn — Fri, 22 Sep 2023 09:24:26 +0000

I enjoy reading the sayings on my meditation app. I’ve also enjoyed sharing some of them in various places on social media recently. Today, I found one that connected for me, immediately, but that I hadn’t heard in its current iteration before: “Nobody can bring you peace but yourself,” by Ralph Waldo Emerson.

As I read it, I realized I’d originally connected with this sentiment in Al-Anon meetings in relation to the phrase “It’s an inside job,” author unknown.

I was so taken with this way of thinking that I went on Chat GPT and asked for different ways of saying the same thing, and the AI came up with 12 versions. The one I liked best is “Peace is a journey you must take on your own.”

My version is “Peace of mind is a journey you must take on your own.”

They’re all true, but I like that last one (even as a small voice inside wants to call me a traitor for looking at an AI’s interpretation for inspiration).

For those of us with histories of trauma, finding peace of mind isn’t easy. We tend to look everywhere for the solution, except inside ourselves. It feels scary to go there. But what I’ve found over the years is that inside is actually a very safe place. We think of it as scary because our memories of bad people and scary events live there too. But, the actual experiences were external, and they’re over. In the present moment, inside myself, I can find peace.

The secret is to be very present — to remember and ground into the current reality instead of allowing our minds to carry us away into the past. But our minds aren’t actually the enemy, either.

The real enemy at this point is fear. It’s fear that keeps us going over and over scary things from the past, like a scratched 45 rpm vinyl record (if you know what I’m talking about you’re likely older than 40).

Science now says that we humans have what’s called a negativity bias. We continue to replay past events in our minds because that negativity bias is designed to keep the memory fresh, so we don’t forget, so we’ll never let that happen to us ever again.

We tend to be very afraid of looking at this negativity bias, but really, the scary stuff was all external. We internalized it, thinking that somehow we were responsible, and somehow we needed to change, so they would change. That isn’t true. We’re not responsible for another person’s behavior, only our own.

The problem is that while this negativity bias was really important when humans lived in places where there were tigers in a cave around the corner or quicksand on that muddy forest path, it doesn’t work well for what we encountered as kids. First, the people involved are, or should be gone from our lives, and secondly, we’re only punishing ourselves by replaying these memories. They are not saving our lives.

There’s another saying I remember from somewhere too – “It’s okay to look back at the past. Just don’t stare.” It’s attributed to a journalist – Benjamin Dover. This, I think, is true wisdom. It’s important to recognize that these things happened, but to live our lives in fear of them happening now doesn’t serve us. It only keeps us locked in and afraid to open the windows of our hearts and minds to the magic that exists in the world, if we’re willing to trust in ourselves.

Change doesn’t happen outside. It IS an inside job. The hard work, then, is to recognize our own strengths, to believe that we’re enough, to know that we’re really okay and capable of our own internal change. Because, yes, change is needed, but mostly what needs changing is our perception of how we deserve to be treated, and what we decide to allow in our own lives.

For me, this journey forward was jump-started by the Al-Anon program and turbocharged when I started taking yoga classes.

Over the years both the 12 steps and yoga together have shaped my perceptions and strengthened my resolve and my healing skills. The wisdom of these two modalities, so different on the outside, are incredibly compatible and actually pretty similar when you start breaking down the concepts and comparing them. What 12-step programs offer is emotional and mental support. What yoga offers is mental and physical support. Taken together, the package is whole-istic (my word), which allows myself and others to find tools that help us cope with the past and thrive in the present. Yoga as therapy for trauma is better than medication for CPTSD, according to Dr. van der Kolk, and 12-step programs give us the foundation to build a new and better life.

My thought? Use EVERYTHING that works for you. Don’t stop. Rinse and repeat.

Celeste Mendelsohn
IAYT Certified Yoga Therapist

Celeste Mendelsohn