In An Unspoken Voice - Peter Levine

In this video, Peter Levine talks about the different types of memory and uses examples from his therapy and study to explain them. He also explores inter-generational memories and gives some examples.

44mins
The video isn't showing here but can be seen by following the link in the above.
 
Peter Levine and Thomas Huebl (who works more with collective trauma rather than individual) discuss healing trauma and spiritual growth:

- healing trauma is not spiritual growth, but it can open pathways to it.
- trauma doesn't necessarily have memories associated with it, but it does have symptoms. Working with symptoms may help to recover specific memory, but can vary in the time it takes to get to it if at all.
- perception of time is different where there are unhealed traumas.
- healing trauma is one thing, but changing the associated personality can be a lifetimes work.
- uses an analogy of waves created when a bunch of pebbles are dropped into water and where the waves intersect is where the trauma response is and there is blocked energy disrupting connectedness with self and others. Healing trauma allows the wave to move on unimpeded.
- discussion on collective trauma and how the narratives may be different, but the trauma is pretty much the same.

53mins

Thanks for sharing. I've added a few additional notes as that was an interesting talk. Never heard of Thomas Heubl before.

- Trauma, at the deepest level, is not being able to be in the here and now and can be seen as, or looked at like a wave, whose energy has gotten stuck in traumatic events where that motion is locked/blocked and needs to be released.
- For those who are traumatized, meditation can be hanging around in dissociated spaces and that’s not what you want because in the dissociated space, we are not able to evolve our energy. Our energy can only evolve when it’s connected. When there is disconnection, there is no movement.
- Daily experience is our practice time. Inappropriate relations creates a lot of trauma, so appropriate relations are healing and one of the fundamental spiritual practices.
- They talked about Contraction and Expansion – Light and Darkness – has to be held together. Because it’s not all light and that’s one of the gifts that trauma transformed, offers. You learn how to hold polarities in experiencing the non-dualities of existence.
- Working with the core and essence of trauma, the person is eventually able to say I’m alive and I’m here, I’m alive and I’m real. So the process of becoming more alive and more embodied is - at a minimum - a life's work.
- The past is not what happened yesterday, the past is what has stayed from yesterday and has gotten stuck.
- Question about cycles, healings, dimensions of patterns IRT trauma: Somebody who is stuck in the fixity/grip of trauma, wherever they look, every person they meet, every relationship, they are banging into their trauma. As you work on it for a while, that sharpness starts to smooth out so that you are eventually able to rub up against it but move along and through it.
-Healing is about developing relational capacities enough to create an environment of healing
-Answer to a question about how to handle someone who doesn’t want to let go of their trauma: To transform trauma is easy, to transform a personality takes a lifetime
- Why does it take so long to remember non-verbal trauma? The word memory is used in a narrow way. The types of memory involved in trauma cannot be remembered in the same way a declarative memory can. They are remembered not as memories as we normally think of it, but as reaction patterns in the body and emotions that erupt seemingly out of nowhere.
- Know how to meet and bring those unconscious memories into greater consciousness which can be formed into a healing narrative/make sense of it.
- If someone can help you track sensations, you’ll eventually be able to access these memories.
- Q: How to know if the trauma is personal or tapping into the collective? A: Doesn’t matter. Do you have to have a memory to work on it? No, everyone has a symptom, behaviour or haunting and that’s all you need (to work on it). Start with your pain and symptoms, what’s close to home and work out from there. When you are more stable, becoming more aware of the world and the collective.
- Lot’s of discussion of surfing on the energy of the moment. You’re not interpreting but rather observing how it flows. That’s the best tracker to unravel the question between individuals and collective issues. Need to work on yourself before working on the generational. Sometimes, individual trauma can be entangled with a generational process but that’s more complex.
- Trauma is primordial and the key is being able to feel those sensations and emotions as gently as possible, the trick being having our frontal cortex alive and working, receiving it’s information from the senses within the body. Allows us to have enough distance to not dissociate or suppress them – the most primitive and the most conscious held together.
 
Thanks Turgon, I was still sorting out some thoughts on this material and:

Why does it take so long to remember non-verbal trauma? The word memory is used in a narrow way. The types of memory involved in trauma cannot be remembered in the same way a declarative memory can. They are remembered not as memories as we normally think of it, but as reaction patterns in the body and emotions that erupt seemingly out of nowhere.
- they mention procedural memory and seem to draw a something out that has stuck in mind. That is that procedural memory can be what we refer to as flashes of images. Next that the flash of image can be disconnected from or perceived to be separate from patterns of bodily symptoms or emotional reactions as you say.

I think I've seen this disconnect and it's resolution. In a group setting, that didn't include somatic experiencing in a big way that I was aware of, there was an ambulance officer/paramedic.

His wife's complaint was that he was a reactive hot head when they were working on a project together on the farm and it frightened her to the point that she would cry.

His immediate thought that he could recall from emotional patterns was, if I remember correctly, was that he was the youngest sibling and the only boy and his older sisters were nasty to him, but since he was a boy he didn't feel supported in the family because he was supposed to man up and take it on the chin.

In some of the stories that they related in the group, they mentioned minor injuries like that he had skinned his knuckle. Given his profession it would be reasonable that injuries and blood might trigger him so it was decided to follow that to see what turned up.

He was instructed to do some deep breathing and relax and pay attention to any images that come to mind and was told that the images may not have any emotional content, that they may just be pictures in his mind.

What he described was that as a little kid - didn't specify age - he was in a farm accident where his throat was cut and his jugular vein severed and the image flash was of being in an ambulance being furiously worked on to prevent him from bleeding out.

Thing is his response as he related that story was to sigh, and relax as he said something along the lines of 'ah, so that's it. The other thing is that this seems to be a significant story, but he didn't think it was significant enough - or didn't make connections between that experience and his recent emotional reactions. Could be that his story about the relations in his family also had an impact or something. Could also be that he thought that the situation with his farm accident as a kid had been resolved and no longer had and impact on emotional reactions and bodily symptoms - he survived it after all.

The interesting thing about his sigh is that in this thread on the book Accessing the healing power of the vague nerve the exercises given to stretch the vagus nerve and are held until there is a sigh, cough or yawn. So maybe the signs of resolution in the emotions and body can be that subtle.

Not sure if I'm on track with this, just trying to tease out procedural memory specifically and the disconnect in general.
 
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