Moving Through
What seems like a long time ago, I was teaching in a medical school course that introduced medical students to different philosophies of healing. A person I later got to know and become friends with, a medicine man in the Cherokee tradition named Hawk Littlejohn, gave a lecture on how he understood his approach to compare with conventional allopathic medicine. He talked about understanding illness as a loss of balance between primary forces. I’m not sure how much I remember from his talk and how much I later learned – having been stimulated to read and study Native […]
As I work with adults who experienced childhood trauma, I’ve increasingly become aware of a child’s belief, deep down inside many of these folks, that they are the cause of their own unhappiness. The chronic symptoms that have brought them to see me reflect how this core belief has lingered into adulthood in crippling ways.
I’m old and pretty active. I play racquetball several times a week, I garden and haul big, 50 pound bags of “stuff” around and dig and bend over and weed and Kathleen makes sure my vegetable intake is pretty good. I also spend a lot of time sitting in a chair talking to people.
I’ve been writing in this column about trapped fight-or- flight responses as the origin of post-traumatic stress disorder. The theory is that the primitive part of the brain that controls our nervous system’s response to threat needs to come to completion any time it is startled into action. The body wants to fight or flee and if it cannot, the energy of those powerful impulses are stuck. Imagine your accelerator and brake […]