Healing Trauma with 2nd Gear or with 3rd Gear ?

Hi

My main objective is to heal some painful traumas that cause me to have unstable and very painful mind states.

Through 3rd Gear (Vipassana) I feel I can fix these problems directly by observing and allowing the energies associated with the traumas, this gives me a feeling of control and progress.

But, 2nd Gear sounds faster / easier and I have done a few sessions with in and can get the knack of it ... my questions is will 2nd Gear also heal trauma, or is it just going straight to enlightenment. Will I be able to use 2nd Gear to step by step heal the traumas ?

thanks for your expertise

RF

I have found that observing the body is one way to work with that stuff. For example, I may have had some stressful experiences in the past in connection with work. I begin to feel anxious feelings in the body when I get up in the morning. There is some attempt at thinking my way out of this, and I'll have planning thoughts, thoughts about the past, etc. The mind races, the body gets more and more tense, more anxiety etc.

If I keep my attention on the bare sensations in the body, however, I can start to really come to a deep understanding of how these thoughts trigger this pain. I can actually recondition the thought process this way - seeing deeply that these thoughts are not helpful and are causing me pain. Normally I escape into the mind away from the pain. However, this causes a loop and the more I look away from the pain the worse it gets.

Eckhart Tolle's "The Power of Now" was a big help in sorting out a lot of this stuff for me. I began to see how thoughts condition emotions and how they are related and how simply attending to the emotions as bodily sensations robbed them of a lot of their power and began to relieve me of a lot of the burden I'd been carrying around for a long time.

Hey RF,
As much as I love Buddhist practice, it's been my experience that the meditation technologies offered by it don't work particularly well with healing trauma. At worst, they can exacerbate the issues and at best they offer the trap of a spiritual bypass.

You will most likely have much better luck with western modalities such as EMDR or somatic experiencing. I've just seen too many people (including myself here) try and employ Buddhist techniques to deal with trauma and got horribly destabilized. Buddhist liberation technologies were designed on the assumption that the folks who would be doing them were pretty stable - if you are not, they can make you seriously crazy. The only exception to this that I've seen is metta practice. That can really help stabilize people as they take on tough emotional work.

with much compassion,
-o

Owen that sounds like really sound advice.

I just looked into somatic experiencing. It sounds similar to what I sort of stumbled into and was trying to describe above. Feeling the traumatic reactions on a bodily level. Sounds like a really cool technique.

Somatic experiencing (like Levine's Healing Trauma / Waking the Tiger) seems to me to be a superficial Vipassana directed at a particular goal of trauma healing.

Vipassana works at a more profound level. My experience is to within a Vipassana session to recall traumas (just a flash of a memory of an event or a particular pain or mental state) will direct the process towards it, and hopefully restructure / free up the energy by the trauma. It seems to work.

My view is that having so many traumas within me, some simplistic ideas of healing just won't fix them deeply enough, Vipassana is a much more serious surgery at the energetic level beneath. I have realised that the scale of the problem is not one that can be tackled with talking / thinking / or understanding, there is just too much, and I need a more powerful technique.

But, my real question was what effect Self-Enquiry has on trauma, if it works similarly to Vipassana, or not ?

"Somatic experiencing (like Levine's Healing Trauma / Waking the Tiger) seems to me to be a superficial Vipassana directed at a particular goal of trauma healing.

Vipassana works at a more profound level. My experience is to within a Vipassana session to recall traumas (just a flash of a memory of an event or a particular pain or mental state) will direct the process towards it, and hopefully restructure / free up the energy by the trauma. It seems to work.

My view is that having so many traumas within me, some simplistic ideas of healing just won't fix them deeply enough, Vipassana is a much more serious surgery at the energetic level beneath. I have realised that the scale of the problem is not one that can be tackled with talking / thinking / or understanding, there is just too much, and I need a more powerful technique.

But, my real question was what effect Self-Enquiry has on trauma, if it works similarly to Vipassana, or not ?

"

I've spent a ton of time doing both and SE isn't superficial Vipassana. It's an entirely different technique. SE, done properly with somebody qualified goes very deep and is profoundly healing.

Trying to use Vipassana to heal trauma is a high stakes game and can seriously screw you up. You do NOT want to be in the dukkha nanas while dealing with repressed crap. People go off the deep end that way.

Self-Inquiry probably won't work on trauma as it's designed to liberate, not to heal. At best it could put you upstream from suffering for a while, but the danger is cultivating another dissociated state. With trauma survivors dissociation is the core of the problem.

Please don't make the same mistake as I did by doing insight practices before dealing with trauma. It will only provide a quick route to screw up your life.

Metta,
-o

"Trying to use Vipassana to heal trauma is a high stakes game and can seriously screw you up. You do NOT want to be in the dukkha nanas while dealing with repressed crap. People go off the deep end that way.

Self-Inquiry probably won't work on trauma as it's designed to liberate, not to heal. At best it could put you upstream from suffering for a while, but the danger is cultivating another dissociated state. With trauma survivors dissociation is the core of the problem.

Please don't make the same mistake as I did by doing insight practices before dealing with trauma. It will only provide a quick route to screw up your life.

Metta,
-o"

I agree with the above post. Please take good care of yourself, including working with specific trauma treatment modalities before going deeply into contemplative practice. 2nd gear (dwelling as the witness) in particular is notoriously used as a place to hide out from difficult mind states, so it's essential to establish a solid baseline of mental health first.

RF,

Trauma is tricky. I agree with the others that contemplative practices are not always good for working with trauma-related issues. 2nd Gear (Witnessing) is particularly dissociative. Dissociation is common when trauma-related panic episodes occur, and it is not generally believed to be a good option for coping with trauma-related mental suffering.

Also, it really depends on what you mean by "trauma". There's a big difference between "my girlfriend broke up with me" trauma and "I watched my mother get hit by a car and die" trauma (the spectrum is quite wide). Therefore, it would not be responsible or ethical for anyone in this forum to recommend any specific type of treatment, as that can only be accomplished by seeing a qualified mental health professional and undergoing an assessment. I highly recommend that you do this.

Lastly, (if I may contradict my previous ethical edict)... avoid EMDR. There is no clinical support for the "eye-movement" aspect of the treatment, and there are better types of "desensitization and reprocessing" treatments available. Just my opinion.

Jackson

P.S. Full disclosure '“ I'm a first year graduate student in the field of evidence-based counseling psychology.