“What wants to happen?”. Renegotiating trauma.
By Pablo Das (HHC, SEP)
Professional links in bio.
I did my own personal trauma resolution work for a number of years. The system that helped me is called Somatic Experiencing. It’s the same system I work in with my clients. One of the things that I found to be most transformational was the process of slowly walking through an experience and re-imaging its outcome. My teachers call this “renegotiation” of trauma. Traumatic events are usually overwhelming. They are too much for us to handle at the time. They move too quickly. They are disorienting. We don’t have an empowered or self protective response. An experience like that can leave us stuck in time with a feeling of helplessness, a sense that injustice has been done or a transgression has been made without a response. We’re left managing any number os symptoms as a result.
Humans do not like this experience. We do not do well to have been transgressed against, overwhelmed or victimized.
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When we renegotiate a traumatic experience, we slow things down. We start before the event and move slowly through in our minds. We stop to fill out the sensory details. We notice what there wasn’t time to notice before. And we keep all of this within threshold, careful not to overwhelm the system. We may even break up the exploration over weeks or months. Somatic experiencing is thorough and often slow paced.
One of my favorite questions in the process of renegotiation is “what wants to happen?” Here we pause and sense into the impulses we have now, that we missed before. Sometimes we override our intuition. We continue when we should have changed course. We didn’t want to disappoint or insult someone else. We didn’t trust ourselves. What if we hadn’t overridden? What if we’d have said no? Or “stop” or just walked away? How would our nervous system have held those choices? We get to experience that in a renegotiation process.
Often, what comes with the process is a leaning into aggression. This can surprise people who expect me to show up as a Buddhist. Frequently, what our system requires to heal, is to aggressively push back against someone, sometimes with violence. Our Buddhist ideals of compassion and kindness are one thing, what our “wired for survival” bodies and minds need to heal is quite another. So we lean into aggression in this contained way. Sometimes we discover how uncomfortable we are with our own anger. There’s a lot revealed in the process. We also discover how these survival energies are shamed in our spiritual communities. My approach is to welcome these self protective energies, bring them on board and then insert the kindness, compassion and forgiveness (if it’s appropriate) on the back end.
I always say that one of the primary trajectories of healing from trauma is the move from conditioned states of helplessness, victimhood and disempowerment to states of agency, self possession and empowerment.
My favorite moments in these processes come when I ask people “if literally ANYTHING could happen, what wants to happen?” Sometimes the answer is ridiculous, absurdly violent, involving fictional or cartoon characters or members of rock bands. Sometimes we kick the person off the planet. Sometimes we imagine help where it wasn’t before. And in the new response there can be this reorganization within us, one we can feel physiologically. almost like a cellular reorganization. We get to make new stories, experience ourselves differently. And we may find the compassion and forgiveness that we long for along with a new sense of self respect. And all of it is shared and witnessed and processed in real time with your Practitioner. As trauma expert Bessel Van Der Kolk said, trauma almost always happens in relationship to others and only heals in relationship with others. We can’t usually do this work alone.
What’s magic about renegotiation is that the new memory can feel more real than the thing we originally experienced. In that way, we become unstuck. Freed from the thing that once was too much, too fast and to which we were unable to respond to. In renegotiation, we find or develop what we couldn’t access back then.
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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.
See professional links in Profile.