CASTIMONIA

Sexual Purity Support & Recovery Group

trauma

By

When Trauma Gets Trapped in the Body

Originally posted at: https://www.theepochtimes.com/mkt_breakingnews/when-trauma-gets-trapped-in-the-body_2959875.html

BY CONAN MILNER

Imagine if the sound of footsteps made you fear for your life. It’s a feeling that author Karen Stefano suffered with for more than 30 years.

“When I go out on my runs, I’m very conscious of anybody running behind me and the sound of feet slapping concrete,” Stefano said. “Sometimes, I want to pat myself on the back about how I cope, but then I go through episodes where I think, ‘I haven’t grown at all. I haven’t gotten over this.”’

Not all footsteps trigger a panic attack, but Stefano never knows when her fear will strike. She recalls one episode a few years ago, when she was walking down the street on a sunny San Diego morning. It was a safe area. Plenty of people were milling around. But when Stefano heard the sound of a man jogging behind her, she became overcome with dread.

“I spun around and almost screamed at the poor guy. He was just mortified and apologized profusely even though he had done absolutely nothing wrong,” she said.

Stefano explores the source of her fear in her book, “What a Body Remembers: A Memoir of Sexual Assault and Its Aftermath.”

In the summer of 1984, Stefano was a 19-year-old sophomore at UC–Berkeley. One night, as she was walking to her off-campus apartment, she heard the footsteps of a man who would cast a long shadow on her life.

As she made her way to her apartment building just before midnight, Stefano saw the man on the street. At first, she dismissed his presence—probably just a grad student—but once she heard his footsteps change course and follow her into her building, she felt a twinge of concern. A few moments later, the man’s wild blue eyes met hers and his motives became clear.

“My body knew his intentions,” she said.

The man cornered Stefano in the tunnel-like concrete hall that led to her apartment. He revealed a knife, and grabbed her 110-pound body tightly from behind. He held the knife to her throat with one hand and covered her mouth with the other. She was stunned at first, but then she began to scream. Her attacker struggled to silence her, but her screams only grew more ferocious.

As the sound of neighbors opening their doors crept into the hallway, the attacker released her. She fell to the ground as his footsteps trailed off into the night.

Mark of Shame

Stefano sustained little physical harm—just a puffy bruise on her lips where her assailant gripped her mouth—but even today, the aftermath still lingers like a scar that refuses to heal. She says the worst part is the shame that accompanies it.

“Back in 1984, PTSD was not a well-known term. It was just coming into the lexicon. I certainly didn’t know there was a name for what I was going through. I didn’t cope. I just denied what I was experiencing with the mantra: ‘I’m fine.’” Stefano said.

Part of what generates shame for a victim following trauma is a loss of control. First, you find yourself at the mercy of high-stress circumstances. Then, your panic gauge seems to be broken. Days, weeks, or even years later, when it’s objectively clear that there’s no danger in sight, your body may still react as if another threat is just around the corner. You try to convince yourself that everything is fine, but your body is still stuck on high alert.

“There is a societal pressure to project an image of having it all together,” Stefano said. “But you don’t just get over it, as much as you’d like to.”

Why does fear maintain its hold on us long after the traumatic event has passed? According to Erica Hornthal, a licensed clinical counselor and board-certified movement therapist specializing in PTSD, your body isn’t working against you. It’s just trying to protect you.

“At the heart of it is safety,” Hornthal said. “This is a survival mechanism that we’ve had since the beginning of time. It’s that very primal part of us that we forget is there sometimes, but that’s the part that’s really trying to keep us safe.”

Hornthal describes a panic attack as a kind of flashback, plunging you into the past to relive the feelings of a traumatic event, even when your environment poses no actual threat. She explains that memories aren’t formed in the same way in trauma as they are when we’re not under stress. So when we confront a trigger that resembles the traumatic event—like footsteps, for example—those same fight-or-flight feelings can come flooding back.

“The body doesn’t know everything is OK. It’s just responding to the stimulus,” Hornthal says.

Giving Voice to the Pain

Hornthal says that when trauma victims are faced with losing so much control, they often blame themselves as a way to regain some control. However, this only amplifies the shame.

“We can internalize it, and make ourselves feel like we brought it on. We will rationalize that it was our fault: ‘If only I would have done this or hadn’t done that,’” Hornthal said.

According to Stefano, we can only counteract this shame by finding a voice for those feelings.

“By talking about it, you take away the shame,” she said. “Secrets don’t help you heal. It’s only by shedding some light on our issues that we can make them go away. We can make them more manageable, then we can help other people.

But being able to process and talk about these feelings can take a lifetime, especially if you don’t have the skills or the support necessary when the trauma first strikes.

Stefano says her panic came and went over the course of her life on its own mysterious time frame. It slowly faded a few years following the incident. And it seemed to disappear completely during the years she worked as a criminal defense attorney. During that time, she represented many violent individuals, some of whom committed sexual assaults similar to the one she suffered. But Stefano says she didn’t feel any panic, only compassion.

“It’s a paradox, but I came to develop compassion for these very flawed human beings,” she said. “I was honest to God the only person on earth fighting for them. Many of them didn’t have a family. They didn’t have money. They didn’t have any prospects. They were severely psychologically damaged, and the prosecution was out to string them up.”

Stefano’s panic returned with a vengeance about five years ago, when she was enduring several new traumas: financial problems, a devastating divorce, and her mother’s dementia. During this time, the old memories and panic attacks related to the assault of her college days came flooding back. The difference was that now she had acquired wisdom, perspective, and knowledge she lacked when she was 19.

“That’s when I started to actually do some beneficial coping mechanisms, like going to therapy,” she said.

Hornthal sees a similar pattern in her patients. She says even those who think they’ve processed their experience and have successfully moved on are often forced to confront these feelings again.

“They’ll say, ‘I thought I processed this. Why is it coming back?’ It’s because a part of your brain is still storing it,” Hornthal said. “As we’ve seen with the recent Me Too movement, people are coming out 15 or 20 years later to tell their stories, and it’s often because they’re just not able to speak about it [until then].

Listening to the Pain

In addition to talking with a therapist, Stefano has also found relief through running, and EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing)—a proven trauma recovery method that involves lateral eye movements.

We typically think of talking as the primary mode of processing an experience, but movement may be a significant part of the puzzle. Experts say the body also needs a way to voice its own story in order for us to truly move on.

As a movement therapist, Hornthal believes addressing the physical body is essential for trauma recovery. She says movement is what allows the stuck feelings to resurface so that we can vocalize them.

“That’s what it takes to release those trapped emotions, and for us to really rewire, reintegrate and change the brain,” Hornthal said. “Movement is the first language that we learn. As we get older, typically our higher brain takes over, and we can start to rationalize why we feel a certain way. We don’t necessarily listen to our body like we used to.

In addition to moving our body in ways to release the trauma, we also need to be open to what our body has to say once the feelings come bubbling to the surface. Most of us tend to ignore the signals our body gives us, but it’s especially difficult when it’s trauma-related because the messages our body has to deliver in these cases can be very painful.

“It’s about identifying those feelings, and when you’re working with trauma and people who have experienced incredible pain, a lot of it is painful,” Hornthal said. “It feels counterproductive to feeling better. Why would I want to sit in my misery? I just want to feel good.”

It’s certainly not fun, but it’s necessary. Because unless we take the time to sit in our discomfort and acknowledge the pain we feel, it will continue to haunt us.

Stefano sees the same dynamic playing out in her most recent trauma: her mother’s death. She died just a few months ago, and Stefano says she’s watching herself do the same dance of denial she did when she was 19. She says she knows better now with everything she’s learned, but still finds herself avoiding the pain.

“I believe our minds will do anything to avoid pain and processing pain,” Stefano said. “But if your mind keeps pushing it down because you don’t want to feel the pain, your body is going to make you address this one way or another. It says, ‘We can do this the easy way, or we can do this the hard way.”’

By

Sex on the Brain: Frequent #Sex Might Have Cognitive Benefits | Psychology Today

Frequent sex might enhance our performance on certain cognitive tasks. A growing body of research on both humans and animals published in the last decade points to this conclusion, including a new study in the Archives of Sexual Behavior. Here’s a look at the accumulated evidence and what it suggests about how sex might benefit the brain.

First, a 2010 study published in the journal PLoS ONE discovered a link between sexual activity and neuron growth in male rats. Specifically, rats that were permitted to have sex daily over a two-week period demonstrated more neuron growth than rats that were only allowed to have sex once during the same amount of time.

Building on this, a 2013 study published in the journal Hippocampus — which also focused on male rats — found that daily sexual activity was not only associated with the generation of more new neurons, but also with enhanced cognitive function.

Research on humans has yielded similar findings. A 2016 study published in Age and Aging looked at how the sexual practices of nearly 7,000 adults aged 50-89 related to their performance on a number sequencing task (which measured executive functions, such as problem-solving) and a word recall task (which measured memory ability). It turned out that both men and women who had engaged in any kind of sex over the past year had higher scores on the word recall test. Furthermore, for men only, being sexually active was linked to better performance on the number sequencing task.

Likewise, a 2017 study published in the Archives of Sexual Behavior examined how sexual activity was linked to performance on a common memory task in a sample of 78 heterosexual women aged 18-29. Specifically, scientists looked at whether their frequency of sexual intercourse was associated with memory while controlling for several other factors, such as grade point average, menstrual cycle phase, oral contraceptive use, and relationship length. The results revealed that women who engaged in more frequent sexual intercourse had better recall of abstract words on the test.

Last but not least, a new study out this year (also in the Archives of Sexual Behavior) that involved approximately 6,000 adults age 50 and over explored how sexual frequency was associated with performance on two episodic memory tasks administered two years apart. Participants who had sex more often had better performance on the memory test. It’s worth noting that more emotional closeness during sex was linked to better memory performance, too. However, it’s important to point out that memory performance declined for everyone over the course of the study and being sexually active did not prevent this decline. What this means is that while sex is linked to a higher baseline for memory performance, it doesn’t necessarily prevent cognitive decline in older age: We’ll all experience it at some point, whether we’re sexually active or not.

As always, more research is necessary, especially research that can help to establish cause-and-effect in humans and that explores what actually happens in the brain in response to frequent sex. That said, the overall pattern of findings to date is consistent with the idea that sex may very well be beneficial for our brains and our cognitive performance.

References

Leuner, B., Glasper, E. R., & Gould, E. (2010). Sexual experience promotes adult neurogenesis in the hippocampus despite an initial elevation in stress hormones. PLoS One, 5(7), e11597.

Glasper, E. R., & Gould, E. (2013). Sexual experience restores age‐related decline in adult neurogenesis and hippocampal function. Hippocampus, 23(4), 303-312.

Wright, H., & Jenks, R. A. (2016). Sex on the brain! Associations between sexual activity and cognitive function in older age. Age and Aging, 45(2), 313-317.

Maunder, L., Schoemaker, D., & Pruessner, J. C. (2017). Frequency of Penile–Vaginal Intercourse is Associated with Verbal Recognition Performance in Adult Women. Archives of Sexual Behavior, 46(2), 441-453.

Allen, M. S. (2018). Sexual Activity and Cognitive Decline in Older Adults. Archives of Sexual Behavior.

By

You Need to Accept the Reality of Failure

SOURCE:  Rick Warren

”There is no one on earth who does what is right all the time and never makes a mistake” (Ecclesiastes 7:20 GNT).

In America, failure is almost the unpardonable sin. We idolize success.

But that kind of pressure creates major stress on people. The fear of failure has many different faces. It can cause you to be indecisive, a workaholic, and a perfectionist who clings to safety. Because we’re afraid to fail, we shun all kinds of risks.

For many of us, that fear of failure has an iron grip on our hearts. Even some of the best and the brightest people in the world are the most impacted by a fear of failure.

That’s why I urge you to internalize this one simple message: We’ve all made mistakes. It’s not just a “you problem”; it’s a human problem. The Bible says, “There is no one on earth who does what is right all the time and never makes a mistake” (Ecclesiastes 7:20 GNT).

Not only have you made mistakes in the past, but you’ll also make more in the future. I guarantee it. Even playing it safe and refusing to take risks is a mistake. As a pastor, I hear people ask all the time, “What if I fail?” I want to ask them, “What do you mean ‘if?'”

You’ve already failed many, many times in life. So have I. You’re a failure in some area of your life right now. And you’ll fail a lot more in the future.

Even superstars stumble. The greatest professional basketball players only sink half their shots. The best professional baseball players will get out two out of every three at-bats. Failure is normal.

You’ll never overcome your fear of failure until you fully accept the reality that you’re not perfect.

The Bible says there is only one failure you need to fear: “Be careful that no one fails to receive God’s grace” (Hebrews 12:15 NCV).

You need grace. We all do!

Only when we let go of the fear of failure will it let go of its maddening grip on our lives. Once that happens, we can fully accept the grace of God

By

Rejection: When the Unexpected Betrays

SOURCE:  Christine Caine, from Unexpected

Forgiving Freely

Loss is the uninvited door that extends us an unexpected invitation to unimaginable possibilities. — 

Craig D. Jonesborough

I once had a dear friend whom I loved wholeheartedly and with whom I shared so many fun times. We had endless heart-to-heart talks about God, ministry, life, family, fashion, movies, books, food, and of course, coffee. We shared an incredibly strong bond. We could talk about the most serious issues on earth one moment and then be laughing hysterically the next. She was one of those people with whom I didn’t have to second-guess my words or filter my responses. There was simply an ease between us. And we had just enough differences to keep our friendship interesting, engaging, and evolving. She was one of the people I could call for anything, a true BFF.

Until the day she just wasn’t.

She cut me off. No warning. No conversation. No explanation.

I felt… Bewildered. Confused. Shocked. I tried to make sense of it all, but no matter how many memories and conversations I relived, it still didn’t make sense. I had let her into my inner world, into my heart. I had let her into the space where she had the power to wreck my heart, and she did. I had trusted her, bared my soul, risked being seen by her, and she had rejected me. Perhaps there is no greater pain between friends than the pain of being seen and then unexpectedly rejected.

When she cut me off, I felt so lost about what to do, what to say, and how to respond — just like a middle school girl. I felt as though I had been knocked off my feet, dumped on the floor, and left gasping for air, and I needed God to help me catch my next breath. I needed him to help me process the hurt and wrap my mind around what seemed incomprehensible. How could she do this? She was my friend. I loved her and had shared so much of my life with her. We both loved Jesus and wanted to see His Kingdom flourish. How was this possible?

Rejection was the last thing I expected from someone I had trusted the most. I felt like King David when he penned gut-wrenching words about his own dear friend:

If an enemy were insulting me, I could endure it;

if a foe were rising against me, I could hide.

But it is you, a man like myself, my companion, my close friend,

with whom I once enjoyed sweet fellowship at the house of God,

as we walked about among the worshipers.

— Psalm 55:12-14

Like David, I felt gutted to be on the receiving end of a severed relationship when I wasn’t even sure why it ended. And all of it triggered the rejection of my past. That was the Achilles’ heel of my soul — all the rejection and abandonment I had experienced as a child, all the shame. My knee-jerk response was to shut down and pull back. To draw a line in the sand and never let anyone cross it again. To erect a wall around my heart and never again let anyone in.

But I knew better and I wanted to do better. I knew the consequences of hardening my heart, and I didn’t want to grow bitter and resentful, judgmental and critical. I didn’t want to get stuck in emotional quicksand.

I knew I needed to start with forgiving. After all, that is what I spend my life teaching others to do. But it is never as easy as it sounds, especially when our heart is broken. I knew I couldn’t let what happened to me become what I believed about myself. Just because someone hurt me didn’t mean I was unworthy, unlovable, or unkind. It didn’t mean I was worth less or worthless. It didn’t mean I was not a good friend or capable of being a good friend. But that’s how I felt — no matter how many times I tried to refute all the lies bombarding my mind. If I were a good friend to her, she wouldn’t have cut me off without an explanation. If I were a good friend to her, she would hear me out and make time for me. If I were a good friend to her…

But I had been a good friend to her. I had done the best I knew. And regardless of what I might have done wrong, I truly loved her and wanted the best for her. I wanted our friendship to last. I never imagined it ending — especially not like this.

If I were going to move beyond this pain and not get stuck in this one dark moment of my life, I knew I had to quit obsessing over past events and fall into the arms of God, letting him help me sort through all my emotions — and get control of my runaway-train thoughts.1

When I reached out to my friend to talk and find a resolve, it was to no avail. She didn’t want to talk it through with me. She had simply shut down, and shut me out.

Invite Jesus In

None of us starts out in life planning to be hurt — or to hurt others — but it happens. People fail us — and we fail people — repeatedly. It happens in our childhood and continues all the way through our adulthood. Our lives are intertwined with everyone around us — just as God designed — but we are all a part of a flawed humanity. None of us ever arrives, so it stands to reason that every time we open our hearts to one another, every time we’re thrown together into each other’s worlds, we will, quite possibly, hurt one another.

Whether it occurs in our dating, marriage, work, or friendships, it is going to happen. I’ve heard so many stories from women who started out their careers full of enthusiasm and talent only to be devastated by life-altering criticism that postponed or derailed their success. They didn’t know how not to believe everything someone in a position of authority said and how not to let it define who they were. So they minimized their talent and settled for a less fulfilling position. They believed the lies that they were not smart enough, not gifted enough, not savvy enough.

I’ve listened to stories from women who married the love of their life only to have the marriage eventually crumble. Because of all the hurtful words thrown at them, they believed they were a failure and that they were unworthy of a loving relationship.

Just because we experience failure, it doesn’t make us a failure — but that’s hard to process when we don’t know how.

My own aunt was married for twenty-five years when she learned her best friend had been having an affair with her husband for eighteen of those years. She was devastated, and it was so hard watching her internalize lies about herself because of their deceitful actions. She agonized over not understanding how she never knew. She questioned everything she’d ever done or said that might have made both of them betray her. She obsessed over what she could have done differently, believing she was the one who had failed.

We have all been through deeply painful situations where words or actions significantly wounded us and threatened to derail us — whether it was from a friend, a spouse, a colleague, or a mentor. When we were…

  • Blindsided by a divorce
  • Upstaged by a coworker
  • Shamed publicly by a leader
  • Financially ruined by a business partner
  • Judged by a family member
  • Rejected by a lifelong friend
  • Betrayed by a ministry partner

We’ve never forgotten those times when we lost our peace, joy, and hope and sometimes our vision, passion, and purpose.

Unexpected emotional wounding is so deeply painful because it is… unexpected. It hits when our defenses are down and our trust levels are up. How critical then to understand that even when people leave us and hurt us, God never leaves us nor forsakes us.2 He understands what it feels like to be kicked in the gut, to have the wind knocked out of us — and He cares. He promises to be there for us and to help us.

If your heart is broken,” writes the psalmist, “you’ll find God right there; if you’re kicked in the gut, He’ll help you catch your breath. — Psalm 34:18 MSG

Even when people are unfaithful, God is always faithful.

Every time we’re deeply hurt, we’re faced with the opportunity to let that wound define us — for a season or for the rest of our lives. Maybe we’ve altered our course, scaled back our dreams, or given up on them all together. Maybe we’ve believed something about ourselves — consciously or subconsciously — that may not be true.

Reframe Your Question

I remember when the initial shock of my friend hurting me began to subside, and I slowly realized that I had to work through all my hurt without her. It was a defining moment in my healing, a moment of reckoning, of turning my attention from how deeply hurt I felt to how I could get better. But I really wasn’t sure I could do it alone — and be as healthy as I wanted to be — and so I decided to get help.

When we get a hit out of nowhere that threatens to knock us out, we need wise Christian counsel.

I’m a big believer in going to Jesus and to safe people who can help us process unexpected wounds. Because of my past wounds — like those from my childhood — I knew I was vulnerable in this area, so I reached out to a Christian counselor who could help me. I knew that ultimately Jesus is the only one who can truly heal our deepest hurts, but I also knew the value of having someone help me sort out my perspectives and my heart.

Unexpected hurts often reveal unexpected pain, and, as strange as it may sound, I wanted to take advantage of this opportunity to be healed of anything lurking under the surface of which I might not have been aware. I’ve been on this journey long enough now to know that when I feel a certain type of heart pain, it is an invitation from God for a deeper healing He wants to do in me. I have been so broken, wounded, and fragmented that I am a constant work in progress. I’ve learned to lean into this kind of pain when it happens — even though I know that doing so will hurt — because I so desperately desire the healing I know is on the other side.

I know that God sometimes uses relational fractures to show us where we are out of alignment with Him; maybe our affections are misplaced. It’s so easy to have unrealistic expectations of others — to inadvertently want them to love us as only God can — and to set our friendships up for failure.

We can’t expect people to be Jesus to us. It’s too unfair.

Jesus is the only true friend who can love us unconditionally and really stick closer than a brother.3

So, it was then, with a counselor’s help, that I slowly quit asking, Why, God, why? — because honestly, sometimes we may never know, and because that question usually just spirals us into a dark hole that leads nowhere. Instead, I started asking, Jesus, where are You in this? What can You show me through this? What can I learn from this?

It wasn’t the first time I’d been unexpectedly hurt, so I knew there was always something God wanted to do in me. He didn’t cause the hurt — my friend did — but God is always eager to use our circumstances to bring more wholeness into our lives, if we will let Him. God is good; God does good; and God uses all things for my good.4 These are truths I believe with all my heart. So, as I invited Him in, I knew He would use this for my good somehow.

Reframing my questions changed my perspective. It turned my focus back toward Jesus — where real answers come from. It reconnected me to hope — which meant I was looking forward now and not backward at all the emotional wreckage in my wake. It also set my heart in a direction of letting Jesus mold me further into being the kind of friend I had always wanted.

Only Jesus could heal me completely, so I took the time to tell Jesus of the loss I felt — like part of my life was missing — and He walked me through the sorrow of how much all of this had hurt me. I grieved the loss of someone I had come to love dearly. I grieved the loss of not having to second-guess my words or filter my responses. I grieved the loss of having a friend who understood me implicitly and let me be myself. I missed all the time and space she filled in my life. I missed all the laughter we shared. I missed all the deep conversations we used to have. I missed the random texts and jokes and prayer requests. And I told Him all of this. I allowed myself to be in touch with how I truly felt by being honest with God and myself.

And as I did my part, God began to do what only He could do — heal my heart.

——————————————————————————————————————–

1. Unashamed by Christine Caine, chapter 8, “He Healed My Mind,” pp. 133–47.
2. Deuteronomy 31:16; Hebrews 13:5.
3. Proverbs 18:24.
4. Romans 8:28.

——————————————————————————————————————–

Excerpted from Unexpected by Christine Caine, copyright Christine Caine.

By

10 Tips to be a Better Listener

SOURCE:  Aaron Karmin 

When people are upset, the words they use rarely convey the issues and needs at the heart of the problem.

When we listen for what is felt as well as said, we connect more deeply to our own needs and emotions, and to those of other people.

· Listen to the reasons the other person gives for being upset.

· Make sure you understand what the other person is telling you—from his or her point of view.

· Repeat the other person’s words, and ask if you have understood correctly.

· Ask if anything remains unspoken, giving the person time to think before answering.

· Resist the temptation to interject your own point of view until the other person has said everything he or she wants to say and feels that you have listened to and understood his or her message.

When listening to the other person’s point of view, the following responses are often helpful:

Encourage the other person to share his or her issues as fully as possible.

· “I want to understand what has upset you.”

· “I want to know what you are really hoping for.”

Clarify the real issues, rather than making assumptions. Ask questions that allow you to gain this information, and which let the other person know you are trying to understand.

· “Can you say more about that?”

· “Is that the way it usually happens?”

Restate what you have heard, so you are both able to see what has been understood so far it may be that the other person will then realize that additional information is needed.

· “It sounds like you weren’t expecting that to happen.”

Reflect feelings-be as clear as possible.

· “I can imagine how upsetting that must have been.”

Validate the concerns of the other person, even if a solution is elusive at this time. Expressing appreciation can be a very powerful message if it is conveyed with integrity and respect.

· “I really appreciate that we are talking about this issue.”

· “I am glad we are trying to figure this out.”