Insights into Stress and Traumatic Stress

Hello, my name is Roland Trujillo, MS, DPP  (Doctorate in Pastoral Psych). After over 24 years of research into stress, 2 million listeners to my weekly radio program, 16 books, and having developed special meditations for stress, I am please to have discovered some new resources to share with you.

Ever so often I run across an author, researcher, or a mental health professional or cleric who gets it.
I will never forget something that R. D. Laing said.  He said that a person who was hospitalized for for mental health issues told him:

The ones who understand, can't help. And the ones who can help, don't understand.

So I am pleased to discover mental health professionals who both understand (or at least have some understanding) and who are also in a position to help.

I myself have been getting better from early traumas, but as the years go by, I still notice things coming off the assembly line to be observed, understood, and healed.

When about a year ago, I suddenly experienced tachycardia, I used it as an opportunity to learn more about mind body interaction.

Hopefully I can put what I have discovered in an upcoming book, or at least some lectures and blog posts, but for now I want to just get a couple of new sources of information out there. I know that some of you are looking for insights into your stress reactions and into your ptsd.

Of course, I recommend that you go to my 24/7 resource center and check out the meditation training that I have, and check out the free 5 minute meditation and the free meditation mobile app for your mobile device or android.

Then you could possible get my special meditation for ptsd (or the one for anger management), the classic 4 part meditation, and read some of my books, which are easy to read, such as Conquering Stress.

But I always like to share resources I have found that are helpful.

For example, I recently read  A Bright Red Scream: Self-Mutilation and the Language of Pain by Marilee Strong.

While reading this book (which I think is a very good read), I encountered reference to   Traumatic Stress: The Effects of Overwhelming Experience on Mind, Body, and Society, edited and with chapters by Bessel A. van der Kolk, Alexander C. McFarlane, and Lars Weisaeth.

This is just an excellent book for both mental helth professionals and for people who want to read something thoughtful and well reserached about traumatic stress.

In fact, here is a short video by Dr. van der Kolk  


Dr. van der Kolk seems to have a nice grasp of  the issue of how a victim  of trauma gets trapped in the past. He also has an insight, one I have long known, and which I am so glad to see him validating:

Here is a excellent one hour lecture at Yale University where Dr. van der Kolk talks about childhood trauma, affect regulation and borderline personality disorder.  

The person who is experiencing post traumatic symptoms or flashbacks loses a sense of time. But if that person can mentally stand back and observe the symptoms in a detached way, he or she immediately regains their sense of time and then can watch or observe their emotions and also know that the emotions will soon diminish and be gone.

In other words, calm observation in the present is how to handle various emotional symptoms and flashbacks that intrude into the present.

It's called the eternal now, and my meditation helps you to stay anchored in the now-present.


Next I also wish to share one more resource with you, and that is:
 
The Polyvagal Theory: Neurophysiological Foundations of Emotions, Attachment, Communication, and Self-regulation 
by Stephen Porges. 

 When vagal tone to the heart’s pacemaker is high, a baseline or resting heart rate is produced. In other words, the vagus acts as a restraint, or brake, limiting heart rate. However, when vagal tone is removed, there is little inhibition to the pacemaker, and so rapid mobilization (“fight/flight”) can be activated in times of stress, but without having to engage the sympathetic-adrenal system, as activation comes at a severe biological cost.

 The measurement of vagal tone in humans has become a novel index of stress vulnerability and reactivity in many studies of populations with affective disorders.

The above from Wikipedia is just a small sample of the clues his writings offer. In my own case, I suspect that dysregulation leading to the tachycardia is a hold over from both learned lack of emotional control when I was younger, combined with many years of over reacting to stress. A new exposure to stress, or one with yet unseen hypnotic cues, taking my body back to an earlier mode of response, together with adrenal exhaustion from, again, years of over reacting, could easily lead to spikes of hyperinsulinism.

I will continue to explore and let you know what I discover. But in the meanwhile, I hope you will find something of value in the resources I have mentioned, and I hope you try the meditation.

I also wish to mention my new book  Forbidden Food: the legacy of paradise lost and the promise of redemption, a spiritual look at food issues.