Healing trauma:
Attuning to the positive parts of life.
By Pablo Das (HHC,SEP)
It’s well documented that human beings have something called a negativity bias. Negativity bias is a psychological tendency in humans to more readily remember negative experiences over positive ones.
When I was teaching in a large Buddhist community, somebody had the idea to conduct and online survey of the entire community, which included direct feedback about the performance of its teachers. At some point I was handed a report which contained something like 85 comments that had been collected from people in the survey about how they felt about me. The vast majority of the comments were very favorable, but two were critical. I cannot tell you for sure what any of the positive comments said, but I can tell you word for word what the critical ones said (“I hate when he sings” and “I wish he’d can the jokes”).
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This is how negativity bias works. It’s probably a survival instinct. It makes sense that we might evolve to be highly attuned to events that are threatening to us. This way we can recognize them and respond to or avoid them in the future.
When a traumatic event happens, a version of this negativity bias can happen in a pronounced and profound way. We become extremely sensitive (or hyper-vigilant) to any conditions that remind us of the event that it’s almost as if we’re stuck in it.
This is why people who have been to war have a easily trigger-able fear response to loud sounds. It’s why some people have come to my trauma and mindfulness workshops and discovered that they feel most comfortable facing the door. It’s why members of marginalized communities can have an almost censorious attunement to language or power dynamics.
Trauma can have a dark effect on our psyche leading us to see what’s wrong in the world, what’s shameful about ourselves and threatening about others. We can become highly attuned to the negative, project past experiences into the present and see threat where it isn’t.
It’s important to counter the negativity bias and hyper vigilance by consciously attuning to joy, beauty and the positive things in life and letting those things have a positive impact on our nervous systems.
In the training I received in trauma resolution (Somatic Experiencing), the first thing we did was work with the conscious direction of our attention by looking around the room and noticing what our eyes are most drawn to. Eventually we’re asked to land on something that feels stabilizing and notice the internal response. Usually this simple act has a grounding and calming effect, one we can allow to be integrated into our system.
We do so, in part, to train hyper-vigilant nervous systems that you can take in the good without anything bad happening. You can have the direct experience of settling and regulating and let go of the activation associated with always being on guard for the next threat.
In meditation practice one of the things you notice is that what gets your attention has a profound impact on how you feel. Cultivating the ability to consciously direct your attention to the breath, to a point of contact or to sounds all have different effects on you. More profoundly, the types of thoughts you allow to take over your awareness have deep impact on your wellbeing. If you think kind thoughts about yourself or others, that has a very different impact than when your mind is captured by stories of conflict and judgement with others.
Here the point: what gets our attention has an profound impact on how we experience the world, ourselves and others. It’s very important that we develop a capacity to orient to that which is positive, grounding and non-threatening as a way of countering the negativity bias, or hyper-vigilance. It’s important that we let good and positive things touch us. We can do that consciously.
There have been periods of my life when I’ve been very conscious about what I don’t allow my awareness to engage with. I spent two years off social media. I limit or highly curate my engagement with news media. I have limited my contact with negative people. I’ve reoriented my political engagement away from constant outrage, social media comment wars and virtue signaling to concrete meaningful acts.
Instead of social media and news, I go on hikes in nature, I’ve taken up photography, I listen to jazz records from front to back and practice gratitude which is simply a practice in orienting to what’s good about life.
What we give our attention to makes all the difference. Cultivating the capacity to navigate our minds and attention away from threat and the negative, is part of our healing.
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Pablo Das is trained as a Buddhist teacher and as a Holistic Wellness coach (HHC). He is a practitioner of Somatic Experiencing (SEP) and is an advocate for a trauma centered, Buddhist approach to recovery from Addiction Patterns.
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