compassion – Grow Mindfulness

Accessing the Present Moment through Mindfulness Meditation

Diana Winston, Director Mindfulness Education at MARC, offers a guided meditation podcast on the theme, “Back to Basics”. She reminds us that mindfulness is very much about the capacity to pay attention in the present moment and to do so with curiosity, openness and a willingness to be with what is, including our habituated distraction behaviours. Without mindfulness meditation we tend to spend out time thinking about the past (replaying undesirable events/outcomes) or the future (worrying about possible negative events which rarely happen).

Mindfulness meditation enables us to build our concentration by staying fully focused on the present. The beauty of the present moment is that it is always accessible to us if only we focus our attention. However, our busy human brains are forever active – engaged in planning, categorising, criticising, exploring, and many other mental activities that manifest our intelligence. Diana notes that everyone gets distracted during mindfulness meditation but the power of the process lies in the ability to return to our anchor to restore present moment awareness and build our awareness muscle.

Diana suggests that if we become distracted by thoughts we can name what we are doing, for example, “planning” or “critiquing” and return to our anchor. She reminds us of the research that demonstrates the benefits of mindfulness, including building relational resilience and relieving pain. Neuroscience research shows us how mindfulness can increase our capacity to manage stress, enhance positivity and happiness and even alter the physical shape of our brains. Dr. Dilip Jeste, Professor of Psychiatry and Neuroscience, provides research to highlight the role of mindfulness in developing wisdom and compassion. Daniel Goleman and Richard Davidson in their book, Altered Traits: Science Reveals How Meditation Changes Your Mind, Brain, and Body, explain that mindfulness research provides very strong evidence that meditation builds self-awareness, self-management and social awareness.

Diana maintains from her research and extensive training of others in mindfulness practice, that “people who practise mindfulness report more gratitude, more appreciation and more connection with themselves and other people”. Sometimes, a particular location can provide us with the right environment to develop mindfulness. It may provide solitude and silence or reinforce our connection to country and community as Brooke Blurton frequently describes in her memoir, Big Love: Reclaiming myself, my people, my country. Nature has a way of developing mindfulness because it stimulates wonder and awe and all our senses – sight, hearing, smell, touch and taste.

The guided meditation

In the guided meditation, Diana encouraged us to adopt a comfortable posture to enable us to sustain our focus throughout the 20 minute meditation. She suggested we choose an anchor to enable us to restore our attention whenever we notice that we were distracted. The anchors suggested were our breath, external sounds or bodily sensations. I chose to focus on my joined fingers that were resting on my lap. I find that I can very quickly sense the tinkling, vibration and warmth in my fingertips once I have them joined. As I focused on the associated bodily sensations, I became aware of pain in my fingers and wrists which then became my focus.

Diana suggests that when you are starting out using meditation, it is best to maintain a focus on your anchor and not be diverted by strong emotions. There are, however, specific guided meditations for dealing with challenging emotions.

The guided meditation provided by Diana (which begins after 6.35 minutes of introduction) incorporates a 10 minute silent meditation. Towards the end of the meditation, Diana encourages us to sense how we are feeling, e.g., whether we are experiencing ease or relaxation.

Reflection

After the meditation, I recalled that one of the first mindfulness books I read was that by Eckhart Tolle, The Power of Now. Also In an interesting occurrence of synchronicity, I had been listening to mantra meditations on Spotify (via a Janin Devi Mix) as I wrote the first draft of this blog post and Alexia Chellun starting singing The Power Is Here Now (a song I have never heard before).

As we grow in mindfulness through our regular mindfulness practice, we can access the power of the present moment to gain greater self-awareness, heightened creativity, improved emotional regulation and a deeper sense of happiness and ease. There are many options available for us to choose, e.g., chanting, meditation, yoga, mantra meditations or movement meditations. We just need to choose the modality that works best for us and enables us to sustain our practice. I find that Tai Chi provides the greatest immediate benefits for me and that is my primary mindfulness practice (supplemented by other practices as well).

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Image by Ryan KLAUS from Pixabay

By Ron Passfield – Copyright (Creative Commons license, Attribution–Non Commercial–No Derivatives)

Disclosure: If you purchase a product through this site, I may earn a commission which will help to pay for the site, the associated Meetup group, and the resources to support the blog.

Building Tolerance through Understanding

We have each experienced situations where someone seems to overact to what appears to be a minor stimulus – a sound, a sight, something said, or a gentle touch on the arm. For example, I have seen people become hysterical while just observing a one-on-one facilitation process or hearing a very loud note sung close to them. More than likely, we have each observed a disruptive person in a team meeting or training course, someone who is withdrawn and refuses to engage in conversation or someone who is overly aggressive. Bruce D. Perry and Oprah Winfrey in their e-book, What Happened to You? maintain that understanding the impact of trauma on others helps us to build tolerance for what seems initially to be aberrant behaviour. They argue that the foundation for that understanding is learning about how our brains operate.

Understanding how our brains work

Bruce illustrates the processes of the brain by showing an inverted triangle with the cortex at the top and the “lower brain” or reptilian brain at the bottom. While the cortex enables us to think, create and plan and is conscious of time (past, present and future), the lower part of the brain has no sense of time but serves to regulate bodily functions. The fundamental problem with our emotional and behavioural response to stimuli is that all sensory input (perceptions) are first processed in the lower part of the brain and interpreted there after matching with prior experiences (which are stored along with the emotional content). This is why someone who shares a disturbing event with others can become quite emotional even when the event occurred many years before.

The associated problem is that sensory input (sight, sound, taste, touch and smell) can stimulate recall of a traumatic experience – “a powerful, frightening or isolating sensory experience”. Bruce discusses a case study of a veteran of the Korean war experiencing Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). The sound of a motorcycle backfiring would generate an “extreme survival response” such as immediately lying prone on the ground behind some form of shelter. Bruce comments that what was originally an “adaptive protective memory” (for surviving in the trenches “where you had to keep your head down”), had become a maladaptive behavioural response. The veteran’s life became “miserable” because he was frequently startled, always on the alert (scanning a room or the environment continuously) and often “jumpy”.

Maladaptive responses

Oprah pointed out that people like the veteran who have maladaptive responses to stimuli, often ask “What’s wrong with me?” The book she has produced with Bruce, changes the focus to “What happened to you”. Understanding what people have experienced and the depth of the impact on their lives helps to build tolerance and empathy, and ideally, compassionate action. Bruce explained that for each of us “every moment builds upon all other moments that come before”. The net result of our personal history shaping our brain’s development is that “each of our brains are unique” – our experiences, traumatic and otherwise, shape our perceptions of the world, what we feel and how we respond.

Oprah describes in detail her own traumatic experiences and maintains from her numerous interviews with people who have experienced trauma, that the result is often self-sabotage in the form of addiction, abuse, promiscuity or “the need-to-please”. She argues that there is considerable work to be done by the individual and their therapist to identify the trauma-inducing event, the “evocative cues”, and the related emotional and behavioral responses.

Reflection

We can become more tolerant of other people if we acknowledge Bruce’s findings (developed through neuroscience and clinical practice) that “each of us sees and understands the world in a unique way” – and this conclusion applies to us also! Our view of the world is not the only view nor is it necessarily complete, accurate or uncontaminated by our life experiences. We are challenged to recognise our own fallibility, especially if we too have had traumatic experiences that will have shaped our perceptions and responses. We can build our tolerance of others too if we work to understand what trauma does to the brain and its impact on behavioural responses. Bruce suggests that we approach others with a degree of “curiosity”, wanting to understand what happened to them (not what’s wrong with them). Frank Ostaseski, author of The Five Invitations, encourages us to cultivate openness and curiosity – to replace criticism with understanding.

As we grow in mindfulness through reflection, journalling, research on trauma and meditation, we can develop greater openness and curiosity, increase our self-awareness (including of the impacts of trauma on our own emotional and behavioural responses) and cultivate understanding, empathy and compassion.

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Image by John Hain from Pixabay

By Ron Passfield – Copyright (Creative Commons license, Attribution–Non Commercial–No Derivatives)

Disclosure: If you purchase a product through this site, I may earn a commission which will help to pay for the site, the associated Meetup group, and the resources to support the blog.

Integrating Kindness with Mindfulness Meditation

In a recent guided meditation podcast, Radiating Kindness Practice, Diana Winston reinforced the view that kindness is integral to mindfulness – kindness to ourselves and others. She maintained that being kinder to ourselves (e.g. overcoming negative self-evaluation) and to others (loving kindness towards both people we love and those we dislike), is embedded in meditation. In the guided meditation, she integrates kindness with the meditation process by incorporating three different loving kindness practices that she describes as:

“Dry loving kindness”
“Wet loving Kindness”
“Radiating loving kindness”

At the start of the meditation, Diana encourages us to adopt a comfortable position that will aid relaxed breathing and assist us to express kindness to ourselves and others. She begins with taking slow breaths before engaging in a brief body scan to identify points of tension or tightness. After encouraging us to release the tension/tightness by softening the point in our body, she moves onto undertaking the different kindness practices in the order indicated above.

Dry loving kindness

Diana explains that the idea behind dry loving kindness is repetition of words that supplant any negative thoughts. The idea is to stop ourselves from engaging in unflattering comparisons, negative self-evaluations, caustic critiques or cycles of worry and anxiety. The concept is simple and is easy to undertake. Basically, you can repeat words like, May I be happy, may you be happy, may we all be happy. The approach adopts the intention to change our inner dialogue from negative to positive, from denigrating ourselves and others to empowering each of us through the repeated expression of kind thoughts. Karen Drucker, in her song Gentle with Myself, expresses this form of loving kindness when she sings, I will be easy on myself, I will be kinder with my heart.

Wet loving kindness

“Wet loving kindness”, in contrast to the previous approach, focuses on feelings rather than thoughts. Thus it involves a systemic approach whereby we extend feelings of loving kindness towards people closest to us and then to others from those we love to those we may ignore or actually resent. Reflection on resentment that we carry towards another person could be a useful prelude to this meditation to free us up to express understanding and kindness towards the person we resent. Diana suggests a series of expressions that could be used as part of this wet loving kindness practice, such as:

May you be safe and protected

May you experience peace and contentment

May you feel strong and healthy

May you experience ease and equanimity.

Diana suggests that you substitute your own expression of kind feelings as you work from envisaging the people you love to others who may present a challenge to you. She provides some ways of expressing kindness to others by way of example, not as a prescription.

Radiating loving kindness

The idea here is to radiate kindness beyond ourselves to the broader world. In the guided meditation on radiating kindness, Diana begins with asking us to envisage a glow or sense of warmth emanating from our heart. Initially, we can envisage it extending within our room – to the left, right, below and above. As we capture the essence of this approach, we can expand our vision to envisaging our heart’s glow/warmth filling our house (and household) and extending to our immediate neighbourhood and beyond. I found it useful in this radiating kindness practice, to envisage wrapping people in Ukraine with warmth, care and kindness, embracing Ukrainian refugees as well.

Diana suggests that you can radiate kindness to areas of conflict, disease, natural disaster (e.g. floods, fire or hurricanes) or alternatively to individuals or groups who may be in need of kindness and thoughtfulness. For example, I focused too on extending warmth and kindness to the relatives of the Australian soldier, known as “Ninja” who died fighting as a volunteer for Ukraine in the current war. “Heart-focused breathing™” promoted in the online Heart Science Course could be a useful prelude to the radiating kindness practice as it helps us to recognise and appreciate the energy field that emanates from our heart.

Reflection

I have previously written about barriers to expressing loving kindness, including self-absorption, disconnection from the outside world, distorted view of “love” and inability to recognise that compassion requires external expression, even in the form of loving kindness meditation. An additional barrier can be the inability to understand and value the intelligence and energy of the heart which has been demonstrated in research and documented in the Science of the Heart (free book).

As we grow in mindfulness through different loving kindness practices, we can become more open to the needs of others, better able to express gratitude and appreciation, more willing to take compassionate action, and more ready to accept things as they are for us.

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Image by Elias from Pixabay

By Ron Passfield – Copyright (Creative Commons license, Attribution–Non Commercial–No Derivatives)

Disclosure: If you purchase a product through this site, I may earn a commission which will help to pay for the site, the associated Meetup group, and the resources to support the blog.

How to Build Team Resilience: The 10 C’s

After writing multiple posts about personal resilience over the past five years, I have turned my attention to the task of building team resilience. This has always been a challenge for managers but the issues have been compounded by the challenging times we are experiencing at the moment (with the global pandemic, war in Ukraine and elsewhere, economic uncertainty and the differential impacts of climate change and associated global warming). Managers and staff are increasingly facing discontinuities in the way work is done, in where they work and in the nature of internal and external environmental changes.

How then do we go about building team resilience as we are confronted with multiple assaults on many fronts – e.g., on physical and mental health, economic welfare, working conditions, supply and demand, and relationships? More recent writing and research point to a number of factors that contribute to team resilience in these challenging times. I have summarised these as the 10 C’s for ease of access and recollection.

The 10 C’s for building team resilience

Team resilience has been described as “the capacity of a group of people to respond to change and disruption in a flexible and innovative manner”. Even if adverse conditions result in a temporary loss of productivity, the resilient team can restore its balance, take care of affected members and find new ways to work and achieve their goals. They are able to revise their goals, too, where necessary. The 10 C’s of a resilient team are described below:

Congruence: This is the cornerstone of a productive, mentally healthy and resilient workplace culture. Managers need to ensure that they share their values and align their actions with their words. Congruent leadership inspires, motivates and engages others in the task of personal improvement and innovation. Lack of congruence on the part of a manager adds to environmental uncertainty, derails personal resilience and undermines team cohesion. Team members don’t know what to believe, question their own self-worth and lose confidence in the face of the ambiguity created by incongruent behaviour. Managers need to develop managerial mindfulness so that they are constantly aware of the impact of their words, actions and omissions on the welfare and resilience of their staff.
Connection: Dr. Erin Raab maintains that “resilience is rooted in relationships” which enable trust and flexibility to develop and grow. Without trust in a team, there is no resilience – individuals withhold information, protect themselves and withdraw (both psychologically and physically). Managers need to be proactive in building connection through established rituals – e.g., regular, productive and focused meetings; celebrations of birthdays and personally significant events such as cultural or religious days; on-boarding and “off-boarding” practices; and regular occasions of eating together (e.g., enjoying shared lunches that reflect the multicultural nature of a team). Foundational to trust and a sense of being valued for contributions to a team, is expression of appreciation given as positive feedback in a way that is sincere, specific, timely and personal. This builds personal self-efficacy, reinforces team values and develops overall team competence and capability.
Clarity: Along with relationships, Dr. Erin places considerable emphasis on the role of clarity in building team resilience. She maintains that clarity “facilitates communication, increases intrinsic motivation and engagement” and contributes to a team’s capacity to handle change adaptively. At a fundamental level, this involves ensuring that each person understands the specific requirements of their job and are trained and resourced to achieve them. For the purposes of this discussion, clarity includes not only roles and structures but also team values. Lack of clarity around roles/structures can lead to role overlap, role conflict and role ambiguity – each of which can undermine alignment of individual effort with team goals. Clarity about team values is critically important to team resilience. If team values are developed collaboratively, along with the explicit behavioural expressions of those values, they provide agreed guideposts and enable individual and collective alignment with the ethos of the team, facilitating working together productively within an ever-changing environment.
Collaboration: This includes being conscious of contributing to a team effort (rather than solely absorbed in one’s own tasks) and a willingness to work together and to help out where needed. It also involves moving beyond competition to “committing to build each other’s competence” to enable other team members to be the best they can be. In line with an action learning approach, this can entail providing “supportive challenge” to assumptions or negative self-talk that are holding an individual back and undermining their personal resilience and capacity to contribute to the team. Managers can proactively build collaboration through cross-functional, action learning project teams, establish reverse mentoring (e.g. where new, young staff with specific technological skills mentor older staff in those skill areas) and/or engage in team-building activities such as collaborative problem solving using change tools (e.g., Force Field Analysis or Brainstorming). These activities build overall team competence and capacity to effectively manage change as a team. They also develop a sense of agency amongst team members – the ability to influence their work environment and how their work is done.
Competence: Conscious efforts to build individual and team competence are an essential element for moving a team beyond its current level of capability. This not only involves providing externally facilitated individual and team training opportunities but also building competence through internal, prioritised knowledge sharing processes, multi-skilling activities and related learning-on-the job opportunities. If people in a team are not developing their knowledge and skills, they are going backwards in terms of a changing environment and its concurrent demands for upskilling. The wider the gap between the present level of team members’ knowledge and skills and that demanded by the internal and external environment, the less resilient the team will be. In contrast, relevant competence building develops a team’s resourcefulness and the process of continuous learning builds a team’s resilience. Having a debrief or reflection process after a mistake or setback, without trying to apportion blame, can provide team members with new insights, ideas, tools and increased capacity to avoid or manage such adverse situations in the future.`
Candor: LHH and Ferrazzi Greenlight, through their research, identified candor as one of the four critical characteristics of a resilient team, along with compassion , resourcefulness and humility. Candor can be understood as “tell it like it is”. It entails honesty, openness and transparency on an individual as a well as a team level. It is the manager’s role to keep the workplace “businesslike and professional” and a key element of this is providing corrective feedback to an individual where they fail to meet communicated performance and/or behavioural standards. Honesty in this interaction is essential to develop the receiver’s self-awareness, create the opportunity for their skill development and reduce the possibility of disharmony in the team. On a team level, the manager can openly share with the team where they are placed in relation to the team goals and elicit team members help in attaining the goals and/or setting new goals.
Challenge: Keith Ferrazzi, Mary-Clare Race and Alex Vincent argue that helping team members to own, and share, their workplace challenges, builds trust and openness. This is important on a team level as well as individually. Managers can be open about the challenges facing the team as a whole. I worked with a CEO some years ago who managed an aged care operation with 23 different residential facilities on the one site, each with a separate manager and providing services ranging from respite care to palliative care. What the manager found is that the level of care required by residents was increasing in need, complexity and cost, at the same time that Government funding was reducing dramatically. The manager openly shared this financial situation with his team of facility managers and enlisted their aid in resolving the challenge. The facility managers came up with a number of innovative solutions which enabled the installation to overcome substantial losses. Managers, where possible, can share information about impending organisational changes to build change readiness in the team and to prevent team members from being blindsided by the changes when they occur. In the absence of information, team members fear the worst and start to share rumours that undermine individual’s confidence and the team’s resilience. Sharing information about forthcoming changes can enable a team to collaboratively develop strategies to effectively manage the changes, thus building resilience.
Compassion: It is important that managers show that they care – not only expressing empathy for staff needs, but also taking compassionate action. This may entail making reasonable adjustments for people experiencing mental or physical health issues. It could involve developing mental health awareness programs that facilitate people effectively managing their own mental health. Another approach involves offering workplace mindfulness training to enable staff to manage stress and build personal resilience in the face of multiple workplace stressors. Mindful organisations develop compassion in all their interactions, including actively listening to each other in the workplace and helping each other through the challenges they experience. Overall, it entails cultivating a care and concern culture where peoples’ welfare comes before task achievement – a culture that can be developed by regular, non-invasive check-ins by the manager as well as by workplace colleagues. Involvement in the RUOK? movement can facilitate the development of this cultural orientation.
Communication: “Information is power”, so sharing information is sharing power – empowering others to achieve. This involves moving from sharing information on a “need-to-know” basis (often arbitrarily determined by the manager) to a “need-to-enable” basis. People need information to do their job, to understand the organisational context and to align with the organisation’s strategic direction. Managers are interpreters of the organisation’s vision, values and goals and have a critical role in ensuring their staff know where the organisation is headed and why. They can enhance their role in engaging the minds and hearts of staff by enabling collaborative development of a local statement of the team’s vision in line with the organisation’s direction. What mangers say and how they say it can create a positive or negative culture and contribute to team resilience or undermine it. Research has shown that a manager’s mood is contagious. This emotional contagion impacts how a team responds to challenges and setbacks. Managers are encouraged to be positive and avoid cynicism and negativity if they want to build team resilience. They need to be conscious about the impact of their communication and monitor their own talk
Celebration: Celebrating successes in terms of goal accomplishment or achievement of project milestones, deepens the memory of team members in terms of how they have overcome obstacles and setbacks and serves as a fall-back when future challenges or setbacks arise. Mind Tools provides the research behind the value of savoring team success and offers multiple ways to celebrate team achievements. Celebrations open up the opportunity to share success stories, build cohesion and reinforce positive emotions associated with belonging to the team – all of which adds to a sense of connectedness and team resilience. Another way into savoring team achievement is to engage in an “appreciative inquiry” process with a team. This strengths-based approach works from what is good about the present (revisiting achievements) to envisioning an even better future and innovating to realise this vision.

Reflection

The factors impacting team resilience – the 10 C’s mentioned above – are not discrete influences. They overlap to some degree and reinforce each other. The relationship between different factors is often bi-directional, e.g., connection inspires compassion and compassion, in turn, builds connection. So, acting positively on any one of the factors identified, can strengthen other factors and enhance the impact on team cohesion and resilience. The factors provide a focus for efforts to build team resilience. If a manager wants to achieve a significant change in an organisational/team context, they need to have multiple points of intervention to shift from the status quo to a desired future.

However, trying to focus on all the resilience factors at once can create overwhelm for a manager. Shelly Tygielski, international mindfulness trainer and trauma counsellor, encourages “chunking” when faced with such a mammoth “to-do list” – that is, grouping tasks into like activities (chunks) and assigning relative priorities. A manager, for example, could engage their staff in a Force Field Analysis (FFA) process to identify the helping and hindering forces impacting the goal of developing team resilience and then collaboratively assign a priority to each force to determine what factor(s) to focus on. The 10C’s and their component elements could be used as a checklist during the FFA process.

When writing about personal resilience, Shelly Tygielski encourages “building resilience one step at a time”. On a team resilience level, this involves beginning with a primary focus and progressively adding activities as one intervention is established and stabilised.

As managers grow in managerial mindfulness, they will see opportunities for improving their own practices and develop creative ways to build team resilience. Proactivity is required on the part of a manager if team resilience is to be developed and sustained. Writers in this area often liken team resilience to a battery – needing continual recharging and reenergising.

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Image by John Hain from Pixabay

By Ron Passfield – Copyright (Creative Commons license, Attribution–Non Commercial–No Derivatives)

Disclosure: If you purchase a product through this site, I may earn a commission which will help to pay for the site, the associated Meetup group, and the resources to support the blog.

Ways to Manage Ourself During Difficult Times

The Mindful Awareness Research Center (MARC) at UCLA offers weekly guided meditation podcasts on a wide range of topics and issues. In one of the recent meditation podcasts Diana Winston, Director of Mindfulness Education at MARC focused on “Practices in Difficult Times” – providing several mindfulness practices designed to help us achieve calmness, manage our challenging emotions and express compassion to ourselves and to others who are suffering.

Diana highlighted the fact that challenging events such as the mass shootings in America and the war in Ukraine can generate “emotional inflammation” in us – we can feel strong emotions of anger, grief, rage or sadness. We might feel overwhelmed by others’ inconceivable pain and loss and our own emotional response. We might be confused and continually ask ourselves, “Why the children?”, “Why Ukraine?” or “When will this emotional and physical devastation stop?”

Diana draws on mindfulness practices to help us deal with these challenging times and the emotions they elicit in us. She reminds us that mindfulness involves placing our attention fully on the present moment while being open and curious and accepting what is in our present internal and external reality.

Three mindfulness practices for difficult times

The three mindfulness practices offered by Diana are described, in turn, in the following discussion:

Calming Practices: Here we are encouraged to tap into the body’s own capacity to generate calm and ease. The primary aim is to achieve groundedness in a way that is conducive to our present needs. We could start by taking a couple of deep breaths and releasing them slowly to let go of the tension within us. There is the option to find a place of ease in our body and focus in on it, e.g., our arms beside our body, our relaxed legs or our fingers joined and pulsating with energy. Diana particularly stressed the power of “feeling the support of the earth” through our feet on the floor or the ground. Our breath with its natural rhythm can provide a basis for experiencing calm and ease (unless, of course, focusing on our breath acts as a trauma stimulus). If attention to our breath is calming, there are many ways to access a relaxed state through mindful breathing practices. We could adopt “micro-practices” such as the 4-7-8 breathing practice often used in yoga, the breathing in time practices (using our breath as a musical instrument) or we could pay attention to the internal physical sensations of our breathing – e.g., the rising and falling of our abdomen or the feeling of air moving in and out of our nose. Diana suggests another alternative is to pay full attention to the sounds in the room or what is being generated externally (especially if we are in a natural setting with the sounds of birds, waves, or wind). Sound can also be used as a calming mindfulness practice as we listen to and sing mantra meditations provided by people like Lulu & Mischka (such as their Rainbow Light song as part of their peaceful Horizon album).
Holding strong emotions: Normally, people tend to suppress challenging emotions, deny them, or deflect their attention from them by numbing themselves with some form of addictive behaviour such as drinking excessive alcohol, overeating, taking illegal drugs or over-spending while shopping compulsively. Mindfulness experts and psychologists remind us that we need to face up to our emotions or they will cause disruptions in our lives through some form of mental and/or physical illness. Diana encourages us in this guided meditation to pay attention to our challenging emotions and observe how they are manifesting in our body, e.g. tightness in the chest, pain in the arms or neck, headaches, overall stiffness or fibromyalgia (non-specific whole-body pain). Holding on to these strong emotions enables us to deal with them directly and use the healing power of our mind and body to dissipate them. If we experience overwhelm while confronting our strong emotions, we can return to our meditation anchor which could be our breath, external sounds, bodily sensations or music.
Compassion practice: Diana explains that compassion practice in this context involves ourselves as well as others who may be experiencing suffering and loss. She encourages us to treat ourselves with kindness and compassion as we struggle to deal with our challenging emotions and our misguided attempts to ignore them or numb them. She suggests, then, that we extend loving kindness to others in the world who are experiencing pain, devastation, grief and anger. Diana offers a possible expression of compassion for others in the form of a statement of desire, “May you be freed from pain and suffering and find contentment and ease”.

Reflection

We have a deep well of ease in our bodies that we can access at any time, if only we can let go of our damaging thoughts. As we grow in mindfulness through calming practices, facing our challenging emotions and practising compassion towards ourselves and others, we can gain the insight, courage and capacity to manage ourselves during difficult times. Mindfulness enables us to achieve emotional regulation, self-awareness and the creative drive to be the best we can be. Challenging emotions, left unchecked or ignored, can undermine our endeavours at home or at work.

Over time we can develop a regular mindfulness practice that suits our make-up and that we can undertake on a daily basis (e.g., Tai Chi, mantra meditations, chanting or yoga). This core mindfulness practice can be supplemented by micro-practices that we engage in throughout the day (e.g., when washing our hands, during waiting times, or when boiling the jug). The compound effect of these core and micro-practices is a calm state of mind, enhanced patience and conscious presence.

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Image by ChiemSeherin from Pixabay

By Ron Passfield – Copyright (Creative Commons license, Attribution–Non Commercial–No Derivatives)

Disclosure: If you purchase a product through this site, I may earn a commission which will help to pay for the site, the associated Meetup group, and the resources to support the blog.

A Compassionate Approach to Addiction

Gabor Maté argues for a compassionate approach to addiction in his book, In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction. He points out that Portugal has successfully decriminalised the personal use of drugs that were previously illicit with the result that they have seen “a reduction in drug habits, less criminality, and more people in treatment”.

However, he maintains that a key success factor in this decriminalised approach is the development of effective rehabilitation processes and comprehensive resources to support them. Such rehabilitation approaches need to be viewed as ongoing and long-term as well as “patiently pursued and compassionately conducted”. Gabor claims too that Portugal’s success in decriminalisation of personal drug use is influencing the development of a more compassionate approach in Norway and Canada.

Gabor contends that addictions. no matter what their form or manifestation, in very many cases have their origins in the pain resulting from adverse childhood experiences. For example, in his book he explains that the self-harm (lacerations) employed by “Arlene” creates pain that obliterates, however briefly, “the pain of a larger hurt deep in the psyche” – a deep pain resulting from sexual exploitation when she was young.

Parents reaction to addiction suffered by their adult child or children often involves hurt or anger, instead of understanding and compassion. This censorious stance is underpinned by self-blame and a lack of self-awareness.

Gabor maintains that parents should not be blamed for their children’s addictive behaviour – they have most likely experienced intergenerational trauma and “unwittingly bequeathed” to their children their “own unresolved or unconscious trauma”. They have tried to cope with their own pain by what Johann Hari describes as “disconnection from childhood trauma” in his book, Lost Connections: Uncovering the Real Causes of Depression.

Adopting a holistic approach

Gabor also argues that a holistic approach to addiction in all its forms requires teaching people ways of self-care including meditation and other mindfulness practices as well as what he describes as “body-work” which covers practices such as yoga and Tai Chi and other forms of martial arts. Included in self-care approaches would be training in nutrition and overall stress management approaches such as reconnection to nature.

While Gabor acknowledges the benefits of 12-step approaches like that adopted by Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) and GROW, he asserts that these approaches are not for everyone and other methods may be more appropriate for some people. He argues for an approach that he calls “compassionate inquiry” which is based on trauma-informed understanding and a depth of inquiry that pursues causal factors rather than just seeks alleviation of symptoms.

The aim of compassionate inquiry is to help the person suffering addiction to identify the trauma/traumas that they have experienced early in life, to isolate the resultant negative self-messaging and to ultimately confront and name the underlying pain they are seeking to alleviate through their ineffectual addictive behaviour.

Reflection

Underpinning Gabor’s compassionate approach is his unshakeable belief, informed by research and decades of field work, that addiction “arises from thwarted love” and that it is “one of the commonest and most human manifestations of torment”. He maintains that the addicted person is constantly seeking external solutions for their internal “insatiable yearning for relief and fulfillment” – a state he describes as the Realm of Hungry Ghosts.

As we grow in mindfulness through reflection, meditation and body-work practices such as Tai Chi we can enhance our self-awareness, reduce self-blame and increase our understanding and compassion towards ourselves and others who are addicted.

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Image by Gisela Merkuur from Pixabay

By Ron Passfield – Copyright (Creative Commons license, Attribution–Non Commercial–No Derivatives)

Disclosure: If you purchase a product through this site, I may earn a commission which will help to pay for the site, the associated Meetup group, and the resources to support the blog.

Illness and the Impact of Our Psychological and Social Environment

Over the past couple of blog posts, I have focused on the manifestation of trauma and adverse childhood experiences in our negative self-thoughts and addictive behaviours. Drawing on the work of Dr. Gabor Maté in the area of compassionate inquiry, I have also discussed how the compassionate approach to addiction is to look beneath the self-destructive behaviour to the person and pain that lies beneath. In this post, I want to explore more of Gabor’s ideas about the negative impact of adverse psychological and social environments and how they lead to chronic disease.

Gabor suggests that a fundamental flaw of the traditional medical model is the separation of mind and body and viewing a person in isolation from their psychological and social environment. This leads to a symptomatic perspective on illness and the use of medications to redress the symptoms. He suggests that these deficiencies in the approach of traditional medical practice are no more highlighted than in the pursuit of the search for a cure for cancer. He draws on the work of a holistic wellness expert who illustrates this flawed thinking by arguing that the research of individual cells for the source of cancer is like exploring the combustion engine as the cause of traffic jams.

Gabor strongly maintains that his years of family medical practice and his role as Coordinator of palliative services (end-of-life care) for a hospital have convinced him that underlying all chronic disease, without exception, is a deficient psychological and social environment of the individual involved. His assertion is based, in part, on the assumption that a defective social and psychological environment negatively impacts the immune system as well as other bodily systems (such as the respiratory and cardiovascular systems) that are inextricably interconnected. He asserts in live with Buddhist philosophy that everything is connected to everything else and that “nothing exists on its own”. He cites the Buddhist concept of life as the “interconnection of co-arising phenomena”.

He argues that in line with this perspective which reflects the reality of human existence, that a leaf and raindrop should be viewed not as isolated occurrences but as resulting from the interplay of soil, compost, sky, sun, rain and atmospheric conditions. Louie Schwartzberg would add the role too of mycelium (mushrooms and their internet-like connected tentacles beneath the earth). Gabor maintains that we have to take a “biocycle, social approach” to really address the causes of chronic illness.

The impacts of injurious psychological and social environments

Gabor in his YouTube© talk on “When the Body Says No”, draws on scientific studies to demonstrate the connection between stress and disease. He maintains that an injurious psychological and social environment has major implications for the development of illness. He illustrates this interconnection, for example, by discussing the impact of stressed parents on the physical welfare of a child. Parents themselves can be stressed by their environments (economic and social systems, the presence or threat of war, racism) and/or their own lived experience of trauma or adverse childhood experiences. The child, in consequence of this psychological/social environment, is stressed and scan suffer from asthma (which itself is treated with stress hormones to open the airways and reduce inflammation, resulting in the adrenal system becoming overcharged).

The parents’ stress is contagious – the child is aware of their own body and the impacts of parental stress on their bodily sensations. The pain of the parent, mother and/or father, is experienced by the child but the real problem is that this pain “never gets discharged”. Gabor cites Australian research that demonstrates that our bodies adapt to our psychological and social environment (as well as our physical environment). He maintains that some of this adaption is helpful in the short term but in the longer term results in adverse bodily manifestations such as elevated blood pressure, heightened stroke risk, unhealthy sugar levels, arteriosclerosis and defective immune system.

Gabor also refers to research that shows that if a woman is both stressed (psychological environment) and isolated (social environment) her chances of a lump in her breast being diagnosed as malignant are increased immensely. This research reinforces the interplay of illness and the psychological/social environment of an individual. Other research shows that if one partner of an elderly couple dies, and the other partner is left bereaved and isolated, there are deleterious changes in the surviving partner’s immune, nervous, hormonal and cardiovascular systems, resulting in a “significant risk of dying”.

The development of illness through the suppression of challenging emotions and our own needs

Gabor demonstrates that suppression of challenging emotions such as anger negatively impacts the immune system and other connected bodily systems. A person may suppress expressions of anger to gain and/or maintain parental affection and affiliation (because their absence is too painful). The result of suppression of challenging emotions is “suppression of the immune system”.

Gabor argues that a key contributor to disease is a personal stance that is forever worrying about other people’s psychological needs while “ignoring your own needs”. This can manifest as feeling responsible for the feelings of others and avoiding any words or actions that might disappoint them. Gabor argues then that there are four significant risk factors that contribute to chronic illness and are life-threatening (18 minute mark of his talk):

Ignoring your own emotional needs to cater for the perceived needs of others
Identifying yourself with duty and responsibility in a way that is rigid (at the cost of your own authenticity, thus creating an external locus of control)
Repressing challenging emotions such as anger or resentment
Believing that you are responsible for how other people feel and, in consequence, trying assiduously not to disappoint them (and, as a result, never saying “no” when you should do so for your own health and welfare).

Gabor contends that “attachment” is the “most important dynamic in human life”. Without it, we cannot survive as infants or adults. We seek “closeness and proximity” with another so that we “are taken care of”. He maintains that pathologies arise when our attachment needs are not met. This, in turn, leads to frustration of our other basic need, the need for “authenticity” – which he expresses in terms of our ability to be in touch with, and listen to, our “gut feelings”. Gabor instances the “please love me syndrome” of Robin Williams as an underlying cause of his depression and chronic illness, leading to his death by suicide.

Reflection

We cannot ignore the impact of our psychological and social environment on our physical health. At the same time, we have to recognise that we are contributing to the creation of a psychological and social environment that could be healing or harmful for others, especially if we are in a caring or managerial role. Gabor explains his ideas about stress and illness in his book, When The Body Says No: The Cost Of Hidden Stress. He also provides training and further resources on his website, The Wisdom of Trauma.

As we grow in mindfulness, we can become increasingly self-aware and aware of our impacts on the physical health and psychological welfare of others. We can be more determined to take compassionate action, to look beneath self-destructive behaviours to find the person desirous of wellness and associated ease.

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Image by Pete Linforth from Pixabay

By Ron Passfield – Copyright (Creative Commons license, Attribution–Non Commercial–No Derivatives)

Disclosure: If you purchase a product through this site, I may earn a commission which will help to pay for the site, the associated Meetup group, and the resources to support the blog.

Understanding the Pain Beneath Trauma and Addiction

Dr. Gabor Maté encourages us to look beyond trauma and addiction to the unfulfilled needs and pain that lie beneath. He maintains that the traumatic events and adverse childhood experiences are not the trauma but the catalyst for the trauma that is created within an individual. This traumatised inner landscape reflects the pain of unfulfilled needs experienced by the individual and manifested in addictive behaviours, that are often self-destructive. The internal trauma involves disassociation from one’s true self and distortion of internal and external perception.

Gabor offers compassionate inquiry as a way to help a client access their inner pain and distorted self-beliefs. His approach is confronting but compassionate, penetrating but respectful, persistent but with a healing intent. He is intent on helping an individual come to his own truth and to understand the connection between their trauma experiences and their addictive behaviour. He makes the point that addiction is not just about drugs but people can be addicted to anything – to work, sex, “the need to please”, money, food, shopping, or anything else that holds them captive in compulsive behaviour that is injurious to the individual physically, mentally or intellectually.

One way we can understand the pain that lies beneath other people’s addiction and our own is to hear Gabor talk about examples and/or see him work with someone in his compassionate way. By observing him unravel the threads that link a traumatic event or developmental experience to the self-talk that underlies addictive behaviour is enlightening and a motivation for compassion for others and self-compassion.

The negative self-stories that lie beneath addictive behaviour

We are very impressionable in early childhood and are forever trying to make meaning out of events in our life and experiences that flow from these. Gabor states that children are basically “narcissists in the developmental sense” – everything is personal to them. When parents, for example, are unhappy, fearful or sad because bad things are happening, then the child thinks “it must be about me” and develops low self-belief and negative self-talk accordingly.

Gabor talks about his own addiction to his work as a family medical practitioner as a way of fulfilling an unmet need. His adverse childhood experiences during the Holocaust led him to believe that he “was not wanted in the world”. His workaholic behaviour, negatively impacting his family and his clients, was designed to enable him to feel as though he was wanted and needed. However, the continuous positive reinforcement of his role led to entrenchment of his addiction to work. Beneath the workaholic behavior was an attempt to address the self-talk that reflected the pain of an unfulfilled need – the need to be wanted and protected (a basic attachment need).

In his interview podcast with Joe Polish, Gabor explored what Joe described as his sex addiction earlier on his life. He had been molested in childhood over two years and his parents, who themselves were traumatised at the time, did not protect him. His negative self-talk then was around “I am only valued for my body” – thus leading to addiction to sex to fulfill his unmet need to be wanted and needed. Gabor stated that acknowledging and confronting this unmet need is painful but essential for healing. Addiction is often an escape to avoid facing up to a deep pain that seems bottomless.

Developmental trauma and worldview

In the interview with Joe Polish, Gabor maintained that there is another form of trauma that is not derived from a specific traumatic event. He described developmental trauma as a disconnection from self that arises through a defective developmental childhood, resulting in a distorted worldview. He instanced the different developmental traumas that can arise with parents who fail (for whatever reason) to provide a balanced environment for a developing child. If, for example, the father was highly competitive, aggressive, domineering and “raging” at times, the child learned that the world “is a horrible place” and the way to survive is to be aggressive, grandiose and defensive.

If, on the other hand, a child experienced an early childhood environment where she was bullied by her peers and informed by her mother that she should get out there and face them for “there is no room for cowardice”. In Gabor’s interpretation, the message would be “to suck it up” – put up with whatever is happening, even if it is abusive and bullying. Gabor commented that this worldview would lead to passive behaviour, even where someone is abusive and aggressively invading your personal space.

So our early developmental experiences can lead to aggressivity or passivity, depending on the nature of these experiences. In both the early childhood experiences described above, there was an unmet need for protection and warmth. The pain of this deficit was hidden beneath the individual’s distorted worldviews and consequent “habituated behavioural patterns”.

Reflection

Gabor maintains that “recovery” from trauma and addiction involves “reconnection with yourself” – being in touch with your feelings, intuition and insight. It also involves replacing distorted perceptions of the world and self with compassionate understanding of the fragility and complexity of the human condition.

When I think of my early childhood, I recall the 18 months I spent in an orphanage separated from my younger sister and parents when I was four years old, as well as the 12 months boarding 100 kilometres from home when I was seven years old. My negative self-talk, in line with Gabor’s experience, would have been “I am not wanted by my mother” (even though she was suffering serious illness at the time and could not take care of me while my father was on army duty overseas). These early adverse childhood experiences may have translated, after completing secondary school, to my pursuit of study for the priesthood – a very strong desire of my mother. Thus I could have been trying to fulfill that unmet need to be valued by my mother – and during the five years of my religious life I certainly gained reinforcement of how much my mother valued me in that role. I left the religious life more than 50 years ago because I decided “it was not for me”.

On reflection, I can see that my distorted perspective of what I perceived as a lack of care and concern for me by my mother was derived from my narcissistic orientation as a child (in reality, my mother was incredibly thoughtful, kind, generous and courageous – at the time of my separation she was not only very seriously ill, but grieving for the death of my four month old brother that occurred just before I was sent to the orphanage).

As we grow in mindfulness through reflection and meditation, we can gain insight into the antecedents for our behaviours and come to understand the source of our negative self-talk. We can also renew our sense of wonder and awe, not only about nature but human life as well.

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Image by Carina Chen from Pixabay

By Ron Passfield – Copyright (Creative Commons license, Attribution–Non Commercial–No Derivatives)

Disclosure: If you purchase a product through this site, I may earn a commission which will help to pay for the site, the associated Meetup group, and the resources to support the blog.

Compassionate Inquiry as a Healing Mode for Trauma and Addiction

Compassionate Inquiry is a psychotherapy method developed by Dr. Gabor Maté to help people suffering from the effects of trauma and addiction to experience “deep healing and transformation”. Gabor is a world authority on trauma and addiction and has developed his method after many years in family medical practice, covering the whole range of human experience from obstetrics to palliative care. He found through his counselling sessions conducted each day after his clinic hours that trauma underlay many of the numerous physical and mental illnesses he encountered in his medical consultations. Gabor intensified his research in related fields and explored his own addictive behaviour and its trauma-induced origins.

Gabor acknowledges that his early efforts at therapy were inadequate because he had not been trained in the area. However, he persisted because there were very few people offering a psychotherapy approach to addiction and trauma – even psychologists, in the main, trained in the medical model, adopted a symptomatic approach and related medication treatment. They did not explore the root cause of the addictive behaviour or the distorting impacts of various traumas experienced by people, especially in early childhood.

Compassionate inquiry to heal addiction and trauma

Gabor learned through his early experience that healing lay in enabling the client “to experience the truth of themselves within themselves”. So what he attempts to achieve is not just an intellectual exercise – it involves engaging the whole person, their distorted perceptions, thoughts, and feelings. He maintains that his approach is compassionate even though he interrupts people, challenges assumptions, and explores aspects that are painful for the client. He believes that it is not his role to make the person feel good but to help them to genuinely face their pain and the truth about themselves.

Gabor stated that often therapists are dealing with their own trauma and addiction issues (as he was in his early stages) and are not able to be totally present to the client nor able to control their responses to what the person is saying or doing – their help is not offered unconditionally. He suggests that therapists need to work on themselves to ensure that they do not contaminate their interaction with their client/patient because of their own unresolved issues. He stated that therapists who display anger or other challenging emotions undermine the healing process for the other person.

Paying attention to the cues

There is one very important aspect to paying attention to the cues provided by the client’s words, actions and non-verbals – and that is the issue of consent. Gabor seeks consent to explore behaviour in-depth with the person he is working with but he also checks that he has consent to continue when the going becomes challenging. He argues that the person will give some cues if they are too uncomfortable and these should be used to confirm ongoing consent. In a podcast conversation for Banyen Books, Gabor said that he exceeded the consent boundaries in his earlier days as a therapist when he would drop into therapy mode with his family members – who outright rejected his approach given that they had not given consent. He soon realised that they wanted him as a spouse, parent, friend or supporter – not as their therapist.

The other key aspect of paying attention to cues is that they give the therapist insight into what is really going on for the client. Gabor illustrates how “unconscious metaphors” (such as the sun revolving around the moon) can indicate that the balance of dependence and inter-dependence is distorted in a relationship between daughter and mother. The daughter might be “carrying” the mother, thus creating a traumatic experience of missing out on maternal support in the early stages of development. Gabor maintains that metaphors a person uses are instructive, even if employed unconsciously. He uses this cue to explore the meaning of the metaphor for the client and the underlying thought processes and emotional component.

His compassionate inquiry approach is designed to get at the “basic human need” that lies unfulfilled in the person he is working with. He argues that no matter what the words or behaviour of the individual (e.g. aggressive or obnoxious) there is a ‘real human being underneath”. He uses the words of Marshall Rosenberg when he describes addiction as “the tragic communication of a need”. The challenge is to enable the client/patient to go inside themselves and confront the uncomfortable and painful truth that they are futilely pursuing an unmet, and unacknowledged, need deriving from adverse childhood experiences or adult traumatic events. Gabor spontaneously illustrates his compassionate inquiry approach in a podcast interview with Tim Ferriss.

Gabor makes the point that his approach does not involve having people tell detailed stories about their traumatic events or adverse childhood experiences, he consciously chooses to focus instead on the impacts of these events/experiences in terms of the person’s distorted perceptions, false self-beliefs and/or addictive behaviour. He sees his task as staying present to the person and their “here and now” experience so that he can “mirror back to them their true selves”. Gabor’s compassionate inquiry approach is supported by Bessel van der Kolk, a global authority on trauma, who has used attachment research and neuroscience to develop innovative treatments for adults and children who have suffered from traumatic events. Bessel contends that his research demonstrates that to change the way we feel we need “to become aware of our inner experience” and then learn to “befriend what is going on inside ourselves”.

Training in compassionate inquiry

Gabor maintains that compassionate inquiry requires an “unconditional determination to understand a person”. He offers several training courses for people who want to develop the requisite skills and personal wholeness to be able to offer compassionate inquiry in their therapeutic/consulting practice. He indicated that experience with these courses shows that participants gain insight into themselves as much as learning about the compassionate inquiry method. Gabor often uses inquiry into the experiences of individual participants themselves to illustrate his perspective and process. He offers a one year, online course in compassionate inquiry over 12 months, as well as an add-on certification process for those who want more advanced training.

An alternative to the online training is paid access over a 1-year period to Gabor’s recorded seminars based on a weekend workshop conducted in Vancouver in 2018. The four videos involved cover more than 9 hours of training by Gabor. Free access to Gabor’s perspective and methodology can also be gained by exploring his YouTube Channel, which includes his interviews and his TED Talk. Gabor’s website also provides additional resources.

Reflection

With his compassionate inquiry approach, Gabor provides a methodology that a skilled facilitator with adequate training and immersion in his approach, could employ to help people who seek assistance with addiction and/or the effects of trauma. Compassionate inquiry practitioners are available in multiple locations around the world. Gabor also offers CI Circles facilitated by a certified CI practitioner for anyone who wants to learn more about CI concepts and practices and to engage in self-inquiry. The Circles involve self-reflective journalling and a willingness to share insights and disclose present moment experiences, somatic and otherwise.

As we grow in mindfulness and associated self-awareness through reflection, meditation and guided inquiry methods, we are better placed to help ourselves deal with the impact of traumatic events from our past life and to assist others with similar needs.

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Image by John Hain from Pixabay

By Ron Passfield – Copyright (Creative Commons license, Attribution–Non Commercial–No Derivatives)

Disclosure: If you purchase a product through this site, I may earn a commission which will help to pay for the site, the associated Meetup group, and the resources to support the blog.

How Trauma Impacts Our Behaviour

Dr. Gabor Maté, world authority on trauma and addiction, has produced a film titled The Wisdom of Trauma. In the film, he draws on his research, his own experience of trauma as a child of the Holocaust and the addiction and trauma stories of others. Through this wealth of evidence, he challenges several prevailing myths about the nature of trauma and addiction. For instance, he maintains that addiction is not just an inherited illness nor is it a basis for blaming an individual. He takes a more compassionate approach and suggests that we need to understand the true nature of trauma and addiction.

In essence, Gabor maintains that trauma is not external catalytic events such as adverse childhood experiences or adult traumatic events. In his view, trauma is what happens internally, not externally. Fundamentally, trauma is the “resultant dissociation from self” that occurs for the individual. Gabor describes this as a “loss of authenticity” in that the traumatised individual can no longer access their intuition or gut feeling and as a consequence tend to engage in self-destructive behaviours such as addictions in different forms including alcoholism, drug addiction, workaholic behaviour, or addiction to sex or shopping. These injurious behaviours are a form of escape designed to avoid personal feelings that are too painful to face.

The traumatised person loses the capacity to deal with their emotions and seeks diversions that they hope will bring freedom, a renewed self-esteem, a sense of completion or aliveness – which are all legitimate pursuits of healthy humans. So the addiction is a way of solving their fundamental problem – a basic disconnection from their real feelings. The addictions do not bring freedom or wholeness but serve as an imprisonment and deepen the feelings of hollowness and meaninglessness.

Gabor contends that for the traumatised person, their healthy orientation has never been expressed in life through meaningful relationships. He argues that we have to see addiction as a response to trauma and look beyond its external manifestations and “see the wound that is right inside that person”. Gabor encourages us to look beyond “what is wrong with a person” to what has happened to them in their life, including their early childhood. His compassionate approach is spellbindingly expressed in his book, In the Realm of Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction.

Recovery from trauma and addiction

Gabor illustrates through his film and books, amazing stories of recovery from addiction. He shows that the wisdom that lies in trauma is awareness of how our response to everyday interactions throws light on our fundamental traumatised thinking such as “I am not worthy of respect” or “I am not lovable”. Gabor asserts that recovery from trauma and addiction requires “compassionate inquiry” that enables a person to face their fear, let the truth inside themselves out into the light of day, and gain insight into the drivers of their behaviour, including their distorted worldview.

He illustrates how addiction and healing were manifested in his own life. His trauma experience as a child during the Holocaust, hiding with his mother and being passed over to others for safe keeping, led to his belief that “the world doesn’t want me”. He realised with the help of the compassionate assistance of his wife, that his workaholic behaviour as a specialist medical doctor was designed to “to make himself needed”. The continuous affirmation of his contribution to peoples’ health and wellness served as personal validation and cemented his addictive behaviour.

Reflection

Gabor demonstrates that if we do not address the fundamental problem of dissociation from our feelings, we will not be able to achieve recovery from our trauma and associated addiction. Trauma has a way of surfacing in distorted perceptions and inappropriate, sometimes high risk-taking, behaviours.

Gabor suggests that each of us examine situations where our response to some stimulus leads to an over=reaction on our part, e.g. when a waitress tells us we cannot change a menu item or a tradesperson does not turn up when they promised. He encourages us to look beyond our reaction to the personal belief that is being played out, e.g. “I am not good enough for people to pay attention to my needs”. He would encourage us then to explore what traumatic event(s) led to this fundamental self-belief. In the film, he illustrates this process by sharing part of his podcast interview with Tim Ferriss where he explores Tim’s self-belief (“I am not worthy of respect”) deriving from adverse childhood experiences.

As we reflect on our life and our responses to everyday events, we can grow in mindfulness and develop increased self-awareness, insight and self-compassion. We can also enhance our empathy for others who are addicted and develop the courage to take compassionate action, inspired by the work of people like Gabor, who with Vicky Dulai, founded the Compassion for Addiction group.

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Image by Jubair Bin Hasan from Pixabay

By Ron Passfield – Copyright (Creative Commons license, Attribution–Non Commercial–No Derivatives)

Disclosure: If you purchase a product through this site, I may earn a commission which will help to pay for the site, the associated Meetup group, and the resources to support the blog.