What is trauma? By definition; trauma wreaks havoc in a body, a mind or a system.  Do you imagine the devastation might be less if the person who had the experience were accompanied?

One way to think about trauma, which may seem surprising, is, rather than measuring the magnitude of the horrendous event, we can measure the extent to which the person who experienced the tragedy was left alone with it.  When we approach trauma from this point of view, its after-effects become the evidence that a part of us became stuck in terrifying, isolated, moments of time. 

These little ones hidden within us, the ones we try to care for with self-harming remedies, are formed and then left behind by the rolling waves of trauma, such as; an intensity of loneliness, of terror, or of rage, which as it slowly recedes leaves behind entangled parts of self. The tangles are unchanging in their need; inconsolable, forever desperate, seeking to be soothed by something that is so close to what...

You know, we all have an automatic voice in our head that tells us how we feel about ourselves. This part of us is known as our Default Mode Network, or DMN. It turns on and starts running anytime we relax and are not focused on doing something. When we are stressed, what it does is worry all the time, and can get on hyper-mode with its worrying. It can get super intrusive, and it gets harder, and harder, to enjoy our life.  

The problem is, when we are stressed, our Default Mode Network thinks that the problem is us. That’s when it’s like a hamster wheel that goes around, and around, and around, and it becomes very, very critical of ourselves. It watches everything we do and analyzes it to prove that we are the problem.  

Well, you know, even though our Default Mode Network is deeply shaped by our unconscious contracts that we hold deep within us, it is possible for our DMN to work really well for us. When it is working well, it very easily learns...