The actual talk that this blog post references doesn't seem to be available free, but I wanted to undersand from the horse's mouth what van der Kolk had said, so I found a paper "CLINICAL IMPLICATIONS OF NEUROSCIENCE" at Link Removed
Three excerpts, from near the end seem relevant this thread The first certainly reflects my experience of attempting mindfulness, and often of attempting to look within myself in any way. I want to flee from what should be calm observation, because it seems dangerous and threatening. Like so much else, it confirms that I am innately WRONG. Avoidance seems the safest solution.
" traumatized individuals, as a rule, have great difficulty attending to their inner sensations and perceptions—when asked to focus on internal sensations they tend to feel overwhelmed, or deny having an inner sense of themselves. When they try to meditate they often report becoming overwhelmed by being confronted with residues of trauma-related perceptions, sensations, and emotions: they report of feeling disgusted with themselves, helpless, panicked, or experiencing trauma-related images and physical sensations. Trauma victims tend to have a negative body image as far as they are concerned, the less attention they pay to their bodies, and thereby, their internal sensations, the better."
But I don't think he was saying that mindfulness in itself is a bad thing - he goes on to say
"treatment of traumatic stress may need to include becoming mindful: that is, learning to become a careful observer of the ebb and flow of internal experience, and noticing whatever thoughts, feelings, body sensations, and impulses emerge. In order to deal with the past, it is helpful for traumatized people to learn to activate their capacity for introspection and develop a deep curiosity about their internal experience. "
I think the key here is the phrase "careful observer". Somehow there must be a way to watch this rather than to be re-participating in it. I don't know what that is, I certainly haven't encountered it. I think this is where the dissociation comes in, and I think for me there are two successive stages of it. As I look within, first I dissociate from the here and now to go back into those old "trauma-related perceptions, sensations, and emotions". Then in order to avoid that perceived danger I dissociate from the whole experience and drift away. Attempting mindfulness ends up with me being wholly un-Mindful.
He does seem to offer hope, that if we can be fully present through Mindfulness we can start to overwrite the old records.
"traumatized people often lose the effective use of fight or flight defences and respond to perceived threat with immobilization. Attention to inner experience can help them to reorient themselves to the present by learning to attend to nontraumatic stimuli. This can open them up to attending to new, non-traumatic experiences and learning from them, rather than reliving the past over and over again, without modification by subsequent information."
For myself, I need to think about how to apply this to the Qui Gong I'm encountering as part of Tai Chi. Our Chinese instructor can be hard to fully understand, but she has tried to explain that Qui Gong is more meditative, and often tells us to "Aware the body" and to I thought the drifty state I was entering into was an indication of doing it right, but I realise that once again I am not staying present with the movements and what I am feeling. Challenging.
