😌#9: The Post Traumatic Growth Guidebook - Book Summary & Key Takeaways
😌#9: The Post Traumatic Growth Guidebook - Book Summary & Key Takeaways
What are the 3 stages of healing? What is Post Traumatic Growth? What is our Window of Tolerance and how do we stay inside it? What are the biggest myths about the journey of healing?
Hello courageous people and welcome to the ninth edition of the newsletter! ❤️🙏
I hope you have had a tremendous week and that you’ve got something nourishing or fun planned for your Friday night and weekend!
This week, our featured book is 📚 The Post Traumatic Growth Guidebook 🖋 by Arielle Schwartz, PhD. It is chock full of practical mind-body tools to heal trauma, foster resilience and awaken your potential.
Like the title suggests, it is very much a guidebook with a lot of exercises. I got a lot out of it in terms of understanding how we move through and between different phases of healing, and will certainly be returning to this as a reference guide for all the practices as well.
Let’s go! All text in italics are quotes taken directly from the book.
A recommendation from Arielle that is reiterated again and again throughout this book:
“Remember, if any practice in this book triggers emotions that feel overwhelming, you can always close the book, increase your support systems, and return when you feel ready. Listen to your body and mind for feedback along the way.” - page 45
🧎♀️What are the three stages of healing?
The book is split into these main concepts, with about fairly even amounts of the text, exercises and resources devoted to exploring each:
⛽️ Building internal resources to reestablish safety and stability
☁️ Working with traumatic memories and attending to our pain
🤗 Blooming and awakening into Post Traumatic Growth, fulfilling our potential and reconnecting with the world.
However these don’t happen in a linear fashion. Our lives will be a constant cycle of moving back and forth between these different phases, depending on what is happening and what we need. It is possible to find ourselves experiencing all three stages within a single day.
The most important thing is being able to recognise the stage we are in at a given moment, so that we are better able to connect ourselves with the resources we need.
⛽️ Stage 1: Building internal resources to prepare for dealing with trauma
“The first stage involves developing the resources to handle challenging emotions, disturbing symptoms and distressing memories. The goal is to reestablish a sense of safety and stability.” - page 9
This is entirely about stability. If we are feeling overwhelmed, anxious, depressed or in crisis, what we need is to take the time to replenish ourselves and our resources. We cannot expect ourselves to do the taxing and difficult work of attending directly to our pain unless we are stable and safe.
⛽️ Tools and Exercises to re-establish safety and stability:
These exercises and more covered in detail on pages 43-94.
🖐 Sensing your body: increase awareness by doing a body scan for pain, numbness, warmth, cold, anxiety, calmness, excitement.
🌳 Safe or Peaceful place: cultivating a physical or imagined place in which you feel completely safe
📦 Create your container: visualise placing your pain into a container that is big enough to hold it - a file, a box, a room - that you have control over when you open it and choose to attend to it.
🪑 Orienting to safety: focus on an aspect of your surroundings that is safe and calming. It could be holding something, noticing the smell of a candle, feeling the floor or chair underneath you and stating “I am safe”.
🧘♀️ Balanced Breath, Relaxing Breath, Invigorating Breath (more on this later)
⬇️ Grounding into the floor: release your body and relax into the floor, letting it support you.
🍀 Grounding in nature: take your shoes off and explore how it feels to press your feet into the sand, grass or dirt. Be present and notice how it feels.
🤝 Grounding in Relationships: who are the positive people in your life who have stood by your side? Who brings a nurturing presence? Spending time with them can be another type of grounding experience.
☁️ Stage 2: Attending to our pain and traumatic memories
“The second stage of trauma treatment involves processing the emotions, sensations, memories and beliefs associated with the trauma. The goal is to restructure the role that trauma has played in your life and, in turn, lessen its emotional impact.” - page 9
This stage is the one that most often needs the support of a professional. It is hard, difficult work but the rewards lie in finally being able to be free of limiting beliefs, and taking so much of the pain and sting out of experiences that have been taking their toll.
Most people feel afraid of and intimidated by this process - so if that’s you in reading this summary, you are not alone!
☁️ Tools and Exercises to attend to our pain and traumatic memories:
These exercises and more covered in detail on pages 95-150.
🪟 Explore your window of tolerance (more on this later)
😌 Reprocessing the past: this means taking specific memories, trauma or pain, filing them away properly and associating them with new context of safety. One way of doing this is through EMDR, but it also happens during our Rapid Eye Movement (REM) sleep.
🌓 Pendulation: is a way of changing our focus—like a pendulum—between painful or difficult memories and then returning our attention to our present space, or to a positive feeling until we feel grounded again. Alternating our awareness like this builds our tolerance to spend time with distressing memories without becoming overwhelmed.
🤬 Dialogue with your inner critic: using three chairs, one to represent a wise observer, one to be the criticised part of yourself, and one to be the part that is being critical. Have a conversation between the three parts to better understand the intentions and feelings of each.
🙋 Healing through movement: While thinking of a difficult memory, notice if you feel the urge to move your body in some way, or making a sound. This can help achieve satisfaction or resolution, and release tension from the body.
😶🌫️ Working with an Unknown Memory: Sometimes we don’t know why we feel a certain way, or we might not have a specific memory of something having happened to us. Allow yourself to explore the sensation without the pressure of having a clear story attached to it.
👵🏼 Transgenerational Healing: Think about your family. Are there any traumatic events that happened to your parents, grandparents, great-grandparents or other relatives? By considering these possibilities it can open a window for resolution to occur by identifying potential events and sources of certain feelings.
🕳 Working with the shadow: Shadow work is the process of attending to our traumatic wounds. Our shadow is make up of the parts of ourselves that we don’t want to show anyone, that we never want anyone else to see. Shadow work involves acknowledging these parts of ourselves, and transforming in the process.
🤗 Stage 3: Blooming into Post Traumatic Growth
“The third stage of trauma recovery focuses on creating a new sense of self that is not defined by the trauma. The goal is to reconnect with other people, engage in meaningful activities, and lead a life worth living.” - page 9
Overall, this is about being on the quest for wholeness:
“The deep inner work of healing from trauma eventually allows you to emerge back into the world with your gifts—your unique contributions to the world.” - page 185
This stage can also manifest as associating meaning or purpose with our traumatic experiences (note this does not mean that the traumatic experiences become the entirety of our identity).
🤗 Tools and Exercises to bloom into Post Traumatic Growth:
These exercises and more covered in detail on pages 151-184.
📈 Making meaning out of suffering: A reflective exercise. Explore how difficult events have changed you, particularly for the better. Think about how you were able to discover and develop strengths as a result.
🌱 Identifying your values: Think about what it is that you value. For example, being creative, being outdoors, spending time with people, volunteering. How can you move towards aligning your current life and behaviours with these values, and close any gap that might exist?
💪 Exploring your strengths: Identify which strengths characterize you, for example: creativity, open-mindedness, love of learning, bravery, persistence, integrity, kindness, fairness, leadership, humility, forgiveness, gratitude, humour, hope, and having a sense of social responsibility.
🤔 Setting your intention: What are you seeking to create more of in your life? Write down your intentions and how they align towards your goals.
😄 Enhancing positive emotions: Reflect upon a positive change that you have uncovered through this process. Channel the positivity and accept it as it flows through your body.
🙏 Growing through gratitude: Cultivate a gratitude practice or habit.
🎨 Creative self-expression: Explore expressing yourself through art, music or dance. It could even be through going to a concert, the theatre or a museum. Notice the feelings it evokes.
🖋 Write your Hero’s Journey: This is about owning your story and taking on the narrative.
🌸 What are the 5 ways we can notice Post Traumatic Growth in ourselves?
Tedeschi et al. 2018:
💪 The realisation that we are stronger than we previously believed
🙌 Becoming more accepting of ourselves
💃 Having an increased appreciation for life
🙋♀️ Developing new interests or passions
🙏 Discovering new spiritual perspectives
Perhaps you have noticed a couple of these in yourself? Or in a loved one who has been working on their recovery over many years!
🪟 What is the Window of Tolerance?
“The window of tolerance is a zone of optimal arousal in body and mind. When you are inside your window, you are better able to respond to your emotional and physical needs.” - page 95
In order to engage in Stage 2 of healing (outlined above) we want to be inside our Window of Tolerance. Inevitably, we will end up outside of it at different points though, so this section is dedicated to recognising when that is happening and how to deal with it.
🤩 How can we tell if we are hyperaroused or hypoaroused?
💥 Hyp-ER-aroused is being “keyed up” and overstimulated.
It means that your sympathetic nervous system (SNS) is stuck in defensive mode. Here is what to look out for:
💥 I have difficulty relaxing or sleeping
💥 I feel irritable or angry often
💥 I sometimes cry uncontrollably or feel completely overwhelmed
💥 I feel restless or jittery
💥 I feel anxious or panicky
💥 I have nightmares or wake up in a fright
💥 I feel “on guard”
💥 I feel like I can’t get enough oxygen
💥 I sweat profusely
💥 I grind my teeth or clench my jaw
💥 I experience muscle tension in my arms and legs
💥 I have difficulty focussing my mind at work or in school.
😞 Hyp-O-aroused is being exhausted or in a state of shutdown.
It means your parasympathetic nervous system (PNS) has activated its primitive dorsal vagal complex. (Don’t worry about the science of this too much, but I have included the technical terms in case anyone wants to dive deeper!) Here’s what to look out for:
😞 I feel tired or lethargic
😞 I feel hopeless or depressed
😞 I feel emotionally dull or numb
😞 I feel ineffective or powerless
😞 I feel foggy or dizzy
😞 I have difficulty remembering things
😞 I find it difficult to talk sometimes
😞 I sometimes “go away”
We move between the different branches of our nervous system (the PNS, SNS and sub-systems) based on the perceived safety of our environment. The key takeaway here, is that the better we are able to:
1. identify if we are outside of our window of tolerance; and
2. if we are hyper or hypoaroused,
Then we can select the most effective strategies to get us back to our Window of Tolerance and optimal arousal—aka happy place!
🏎 How can we use our breathing to “rev our engines” when we’re 😞 hypoaroused?
There is a reason so many people bang on about breathwork and breathing exercises. That is because it is one of the most effective ways to change how our nervous system is functioning!
We can “rev our engines” by utilising our Invigorating Breath:
“Start by taking several long, deep breaths.
Focus on bringing your breath into your upper chest.
Take a deep inhale, and then release the breath with a quick exhale.
Repeat this breath three or four more times, and then allow your breath to return to a natural rhythm.”
- page 68
This will raise the alertness in our nervous system, helping us to feel more awake and energized.
🛑 How can we use our breathing to “put on the brakes” when we’re 💥 hyperaroused?
By utilising our Relaxing Breath:
“Start by taking several long, deep breaths.
Now, begin to inhale to a count of 4 and exhale to a count of 6.
Over time, you can experiment with lengthening your exhalation to a count of 8.”
- page 67
Through maximising our out breath we take back control and bring ourselves back down into optimal arousal.
The more we practise shifting gears in between our states of arousal and using our breathing to our advantage, the more easily we will be able to voluntarily shift our state in the future.
🙅♂️ What are the 3 biggest myths about healing?
There are a lot of myths and misconceptions out there about healing, and Arielle makes the point to debunk a few of the biggest, most pervasive ones.
🕰 Myth #1: Time heals all wounds.
The idea that it simply takes time to heal is a concerning misunderstanding about what is required to recover from trauma. While time can lessen the intensity of pain, you need to take an active role in your healing process in order to recover from trauma.
😫 Myth #2: That you must aggressively confront the most disturbing parts of traumatic events by reviewing them in great detail.
Exposure techniques can be too direct for many individuals and, in some cases, they can lead to re-traumatization.
🙄 Myth #3: The belief that you “should be over this by now”.
If you struggle after a traumatic event or do not rebound quickly, you might feel as though there is something wrong with you. The fact that you are hurting is not a sign that you are doing anything wrong. There is no timeline for healing from traumatic life events.
- pages 34-35
🪡 How do we integrate these parts of ourselves, when they have been separate for so long?
The quest for wholeness as Arielle puts it, means that at some point we bring all the parts of ourselves back together again. This can be extremely challenging and confronting, especially if we have worked hard to keep the traumatized parts of ourselves hidden away so nobody (ourselves included!) would see them.
“You are no longer a victim; rather, you are the brave and courageous protagonist who, with the right support, wise guidance, and hard work, finds a way through trauma and into triumph. As the master of two worlds, you know the territory of pain and the realm of possibility.” - page 178
This means we can emerge back into the rest of the world with our own unique gift and perspective, and use this also to contribute to the wellbeing of others if we so choose.
🌷 Finally, I will leave you with this:
“Buddhist teacher Thich Naht Hanh (2014) informs us that in order for the lotus flower to grow, it must have its roots in the mud. He uses this as a reminder that we must make use of our suffering in order to find our happiness.
He cautions that we do not want to get stuck in the muck, which can lead us to only see our suffering. However, if we avoid our pain, then we also avoid our growth.” - page 144
I hope this has been helpful to you! As always, I am here for you and am happy to provide a willing ear if you have any thoughts or reflections bubbling up after reading.
Until next week,
❤️🙏 Eleanor
Additional links and resources:
If you are struggling, please reach out to a support service or professional:
🤝 Human Rights list of Mental Health Support Services
🖥 Arielle Schwartz’ website with blog, resources and free e-book
📱 Facebook - Follow Dr. Arielle Schwartz - 21k followers
Next week’s book
Coming out next Friday 1st April 2022 is edition #10, featuring:
📚 No Bad Parts: Healing Trauma & Restoring Wholeness with the Internal Family Systems Model
🖋 by Richard C. Schwartz, PhD (are he and Arielle Schwartz related? Married? I’ve tried to find out the answer - total coincidence I’ve chosen these one after another!)
If you’re not already, subscribe now to get the next edition straight to your inbox! 📬