My Approach to Working with PTSD

Bevis Nathan Talks About Somatic Experiencing
Uploaded by madeupdesign. – Explore more science and tech videos.

Ready for Anything

The particularly interesting bit for me came at 24:15 in the video, when McDougall talks about a woman named Emily Baer who in 2007 ran the 100 mile Hardrock, the toughest endurance race in the world, and what she did while running the race. Here’s another bit on this same story, from the Telluride Watch, July 29, 2007:

For most of the first time Hardrock runners, just finishing is great but then there are those that are out for personal bests like Emily Baer, women’s second place finisher, eighth overall and Silverton local. Baer, who has finished the Hardrock five times, had her personal-best, improving her time by four-and-a-half hours and finishing in 31:41.34, all the while nursing baby Bernard at aid stations.

We have cultural norms and expectations around weakness, pain, and suffering, and we in the West are still transitioning out of centuries of considering women as second-class citizens. I love stories like Baer’s because they challenge those notions of what we are and are not capable of.

Thanks to @AnatomyTrains for the link.

1. In his essay The Myth of Sisyphus Albert Camus brought up the notion that Sisyphus, condemned for all eternity to repeat pushing a rock up a hill only to have it roll down again, could still have a smile on his face and be happy. I think there’s a connection between the sort of process of acceptance and working with one’s situation that Sisyphus does that exists in the cultures of the Tarahumara and other long-distance runners that McDougall is describing.

In a paper due out this year in the journal Emotion, Mr. Kraus and his co-authors, Cassy Huang and Dr. Keltner, report that with a few exceptions, good teams tended to be touchier than bad ones. The most touch-bonded teams were the Boston Celtics and the Los Angeles Lakers, currently two of the league’s top teams; at the bottom were the mediocre Sacramento Kings and Charlotte Bobcats.

I’m glad the article gives a shout-out to Tiffany Field and her associates at the Touch Research Institute at the University of Miami; they’ve done a marvelous job at generating and summarizing the research into touch.

While I’m excited that there’s more and more evidence to show that positive touch is not only good, but necessary for us, I’m sad that we even need science to go in that direction. I’d like to think that most everyone knows that a hug can do more than words to help with a loss, or that a gentle direction with the hands can help a child learn a new skill like rolling out dough or swinging a baseball bat.

Original Article: Mind – New Research Focuses on the Power of Contact (NYTimes)

• Great summary article: Study links anger to cold feet
• Full text: Relationship between gender role, anger expression, thermal discomfort and sleep onset latency in women

My clinical experience agrees with the findings of this study. And personally, I strongly resonate as well: I’ve suffered from cold feet and hands for much of my adolescent and adult life, regularly had sleep onset latency, and have spent years working on issues of assertion, aggression, and anger. When I’m centered, grounded, and present to my emotions and reactions, my extremities are warm and I’m able to fall asleep easily. When I’m stressed and withholding, I run cold and falling asleep – especially falling back asleep after my daughter wakes up in the night – can be extremely difficult.

In her summary article, Lisa Barger asks whether this research holds true for men as well. Obviously I think it does, though I imagine that proportionally fewer men have these symptoms since there are more societally accepted ways for men to turn their anger outward.

The finesse is in the hands. Dr. Kato’s moved with confidence and grace that became all the more apparent when he worked across the operating table from someone less deft. An anesthesiologist said Dr. Kato had “soft hands,” reflected in the monitors tracking the patient’s pulse, breathing, electrocardiogram and blood pressure. When soft hands cut, stitched and moved organs around, the monitor readings held steady, but they spiked up and down when rough hands took over.

We can presume the patient was unconscious under a general anesthesia¹ and would therefore have no conscious memory of the differing responses, and yet the unconscious (autonomic) systems of the brain were responding to the surgeons’ hands. So might there be some unconscious, implicit memory of the surgery stored within the mind/body system that might lead to difficulty later?

1. In 0.1-0.2% of surgeries, the patient has some degree of consciousness, called “anesthesia awareness“. Though rare, this can be traumatic for the patient and result in symptoms of post-traumatic stress. Part of my practice works with these issues and how to help people prevent that from happening in the first place.