And psychologists as well as practitioners, therapists and people doing all manner of different kinds of healing work with trauma survivors have learned that there are all these different ways that people can heal. But many of those ways are not only through the mind, right? They’re accessed through changing our habits and behaviors, through shifting our relationships with people and through different types of therapies that also some of them have an element of mystery to them, right? Hypnosis, meditation, therapeutic treatments that involve light and sound, and all these kind of engage the full bodiness of our neurological systems that we actually … The nervous system is not just in the brain, it extends throughout our entire bodies.
But it’s not a one-way street, the nervous system sends messages out through our entire bodies. But the body can also send messages back to the nervous system and cause automatic reactions. That’s often what is happening when we talk about somebody being triggered or somebody being activated.
A PTSD trigger is not the same thing as a defensive reaction in a political context. But it has a really close physiological relationship. And so I ended up sort of transferring some of that research onto the question of like, how do we approach defensiveness or mental, emotional, spiritual blocks when we’re trying to unlearn or when we’re trying to have transformative conversations? Or get to a place of political transformation collectively. That there’s just a lot that we can learn from trauma practitioners, trauma therapy and trauma science about that. Because trauma is sort of the most extreme version of the casual day-to-day defensiveness, polarization, expressions of I’m not open to this. It’s like a pretty similar physiological reaction in the body just at a smaller scale.
