The Wisdom of Trauma: How to Find the Root Cause of Your Core Wounds
Bamboo Growth Newsletter #43
First, this movie is on replay only for this weekend for free with all the teaching series. Please watch it here. Www.wisdomoftrauma.com. My apologies for this quick article and all grammar and other errors. I wanted most of all for you to see this movie this weekend while you can.
This is one movie that will change your perspective about yourself and others. The world is now waking up to the range of effects of the range of trauma. This movie is 90 minutes to help you begin to understand parts of you that you probably never understood before and also your unconscious-driven behaviors. The impact and pervasiveness of trauma such as developmental trauma and intergenerational trauma are now just being understood.
The Wisdom of Trauma The Movie
The synopsis for the movie reads: “Trauma is the invisible force that shapes our lives. It shapes the way we live, the way we love, and the way we see the world. It is the root of our deepest wounds. Dr. Mate gives us a new vision: a trauma-informed society in which (people)…seek instead to understand the sources from which troubling human behavior and diseases spring from the wounded human soul.”
Why is the movie called the Wisdom of Trauma? First, one needs to understand the greatest wound of trauma. [MHS1] According to A. H. Almaas, who Gabor Mate believes is the best spiritual combined with psychology teacher, “the fundamental thing that happened and the greatest calamity, is not that there was no love or support in childhood. The greatest calamity, which is caused by the first calamity, is that you lost the connection to your essence. That is much more important than whether your mother or father loved you or not.” Gabor Mate explains: “In other words, the fundamental trauma was the loss of connection to yourself. And as I’ll be telling you, when I talk about trauma, that disconnection from the self IS the greatest wound.”
The Wisdom of Trauma YOU
The wisdom of trauma is that our trauma can lead us back to ourselves, our true self. By following the path of how we became traumatized, we are able to find out that we are disconnected to ourselves and how to reconnect to ourselves. As Dr. Mate says, “the wisdom of trauma means, is that our traumas, how they manifest, how we relate to them, can teach us to be ourselves, can restore that connection that we lost in the first place.
Recognizing and connecting back to your true self is according to some, the most important step in your spiritual growth. Michael Singer in The Untethered Soul: The Journey to Beyond Yourself: “There is nothing more important to true growth than realizing that you are not the voice of the mind—you are the one who hears it. If you don’t understand this, you will try to figure out which of the many things the voice says is really you. People go through so many changes in the name of “trying to find myself.” They want to discover which of these voices, which of these aspects of their personality, is who they really are. The answer is simple: none of them.”
Over the last 3 months, I have taken an in-depth dive into trauma. Trauma is much more pervasive in our society than we think. When we think about trauma, we mostly are influenced by our thinking of shock trauma, i.e. PTSD, caused by war and people having flashback memories. However, trauma is not an event that happens to you. Trauma is what happens inside of your body and mind. As such, there are many traumas that society is now understanding such as developmental trauma, complex trauma, attachment trauma, and intergenerational trauma. Trauma probably personally affects 95% of all of us. We just don’t know it until we understand what is trauma and why it’s important to understand the disconnection to ourselves and how do we fix it.
Discovering My Own Trauma and the Pervasiveness of Trauma
In the first 3 months of this year, I combined everything I learned into a coaching package: RIM, Clear Beliefs, Canfield, Self-Compassion, Optimize.me. The results have been astonishing to both the clients and me. I will release shortly some of the feedback when I get permission. I really wanted to know why the program worked so well. What was the medical/psychological research that would give me an explanation of what I was doing and why my friends were really feeling alive, had peace of mind, became healthier, happier, exhibited sky-high confidence, had more passion in their relationships, and took action on living their life mission.
At the same time, I was also looking to understand better core wound because I was not given permission by one of my teachers to use their material to explain it. So I had to find another explanation of the core wound. In looking for that explanation, I learned about trauma.
It was then that I stumbled on Jeffrey Van Dyke’s Core Wounds work (he has now changed into a marketing consultant), Jeffrey Young schema therapy (https://schematherapysociety.org/Schema-Therapy), trauma via Peter Levine (author of In an unspoken voice: how the body releases trauma, Waking the Tiger, and Trauma and Memory), developmental trauma via Dr. Bruce Perry (author of The Boy Who Was Raised as a Dog and currently co-author with Oprah Winfrey of a newly released book on trauma, What Happened To You, ), and eventually healing developmental trauma by Dr. Laurence Heller (creator of NARM and author of Healing Developmental Trauma.).
Complex Trauma and the World Finally Acknowledging Trauma Research
These explanations became more clear to me when I actually read the definitions of Complex trauma in the ICD-11.
The US-based world is familiar with the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM; latest edition:DSM-5, publ. 2013), which is a publication by the American Psychiatric Association (APA) for the classification of mental disorders using a common language and standard criteria. When the DSM was published, the leading trauma experts such Bessel Van Der Kolk (author of the Body Keeps Score) argued for the inclusion of a definition of developmental trauma. This was excluded in 2013 and also the definition of complex trauma.
In 2018, the World Health Organization (WHO) published the first major revision in 26 years, the 11th revision of the International Classification of Diseases, known as ICD-11. The ICD-11 revised the definition of Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) to comprise six symptoms grouped into three symptoms clusters (Re-experiencing in the here and now, Avoidance of traumatic reminders, and a Sense of Threat).
Complex trauma has been defined as having both PTSD which results from shock trauma and also developmental trauma symptoms. So to have complex trauma, you actually need to have more severe symptoms than PTSD.
A diagnosis of Complex PTSD (CPTSD) is comprised of the core PTSD symptom clusters plus three additional clusters:
1. Affect Dysregulation,
2. Negative Self-Concept, and
3. Disturbances in Relationships or Interpersonal disturbances.
These three clusters collectively represent ‘Disturbances in Self Organization’ (DSO). Brewin et al. reviewed the existing literature on ICD-11 PTSD and CPTSD and found strong support for their construct validity. These three clusters also represent what has traditionally been called developmental trauma.
Discovering The Root of All My Issues: I had Developmental Trauma
Once I understand that developmental trauma had 3 main symptoms: negative self-concept, affect dysregulation, and interpersonal disturbances, I was quickly able to see that I had these issues.
The first was interpersonal disturbances which I was able to heal via self-compassion via Kristen Neff. This is what had created my loving inner world in 2019 and where I wrote about this in Creating A Loving Inner World. With affect dysregulation or emotional issues and feelings, I worked on improving my capabilities via RIM in 2019/2020. For Negative Self-Concept (or Distorted Self-Identities), I used Clear Beliefs in 2020/2021 to heal and change my beliefs.
I also noticed that I was more connected to myself. I was more aware of the connection to myself via meditation, connected to my emotions via RIM, and more loving to myself because I had a more positive self-concept via clear beliefs, and kinder to myself and others via self-compassion.
With this in mind, I understood that I had all the symptoms of trauma, so I must have had developmental trauma. I had solved my trauma by solving the symptoms one by one, even though I had not started out to solve trauma. I basically solved my developmental trauma by solving the symptoms and then I learned I had developmental trauma. I now had a solution for developmental trauma if the things I did for myself worked for other people.
With all my friends/clients when I tested the process, I began to recognize that they all suffered from the same symptoms, and by combining what I had learned and applied I was able to help them too. I then searched for more information to help me understand why this was working. In retrospect, they all suffered from trauma and I was able to use the wisdom of trauma to facilitate their own process of development.
The NARM Framework for Trauma
Dr. Laurence Heller (creator of NARM and author of Healing Developmental Trauma.) provided the first real framework though for helping me to understand the healing process of trauma. While all the other books emphasized what trauma was, how it was caused, and why you needed more than talk therapy to heal trauma such as somatic experiencing, it was Dr. Heller’s framework that helped to understand that there could be a framework to developmental trauma.
What Dr. Heller was able to provide was the identification of 5 main core needs that were affected during developmental trauma. Based on the fact that we could not get those needs met, the child then tries to get those needs met by creating an adaptive style. This then has implications in our vagus/autonomic nervous system. We also take on shame-based identities (self-image that is hidden i.e subconscious) and also a false adaptive behavior (pride or ego-based) self-identity.
So based on developmental trauma, each of us takes on an adaptive style that consists of a core wound and also an adaptive ego-based self-identity. The two biggest core needs that were not met were that we often got disconnected from ourselves and also disconnected from our emotions. Also, we take on these shamed-based negative identities. This was in line with many other spiritual teachers such as Jeffrey Van Dyk and Lion Goodman at Clear Beliefs who were teaching that we all have a core wound. In order to overcome or hide, we take on an adaptive behavior or entire operating system for our entire life—a core wound operating system that runs our life as we move away i.e. fear-based system. And last, and not least, we had disrupted attachments.
In the NARM based chart, the blue represents the negative or distorted self-identity (our core wounds operating system), the orange represents our dysregulation and disconnection, the green our interpersonal disturbances or disrupted attachments.
In the chart, we can see that the 5 core needs are connection, attunement, trust, autonomy, and love-sexuality. Connection takes on two parts: connection to self, and connection to our physical body and self. When we disconnect from ourselves, we have difficulties relating to others. This leads to feelings of helplessness and chronic fear. We also feel shame at existing and feeling like not belonging. In order to counteract these feelings of shame, we develop ego or pride-based adaptive behaviors such as pride in being a loner or not needing others.
Disconnecting though also naturally often leads to the lack of attunement i.e. capacity to know our physical needs (lack of physical attunement or physical dysregulation) or emotions (lack of emotional attunement, affect dysregulation). When we are not attuned we often take on negative self-identity or image that we are not worthy or deserving. In order to overcome this, we often either have pride in not being needy or we can make ourselves indispensable by being needed (Gabor Mate as a doctor says this is often the case with many doctors and nurses).
Once we disconnect to our emotional body, we disconnect from our social engagement system found in the vagus nerves and autonomic nervous system. This then leads to trust issues, autonomy (especially boundary) issues, and love-sexuality needs not being met. These are all the result of attachment issues that relate to others.
So trauma affects connection with our spiritual selves (the greatest trauma), connection with our emotional and physical selves (connection and attunement or dysregulation), and connection to others or disrupted attachments (trust, autonomy, and love-sexuality).
My Own Framework
The NARM framework gave me more information because it broke down and correlated the 3 main symptoms. However, this framework was a little too complicated to both communicate and to understand how to help others.
I also realized that I had many more tools that helped with the symptoms of trauma. The interesting thing is now that I knew that the symptoms resulted from trauma, I was able to look for the original events that caused the trauma.
For example, for negative self-concepts, I notice that Compassionate Inquiry, which I learned in a course with Gabor Mate, was very good at finding the root cause or core wounds, or sometimes, RIM was good at finding the root cause.
A Mission-Driven Operating System
In addition, I noticed that once people had eliminated the core wound-driven operating system, they were at a loss to see how else to operate in the world. It was at that point that I noticed that using Canfield's mission-driven and goals framework was extremely helpful for people. I was able to replace the core wound-driven operating system with a mission-based operating system.
Then people were motivated to use their natural gifts in ways they like to use them in service to create the world they wanted to create. This really helped my clients to plan and create a life they wanted to live. This increased their motivation by magnitudes. In addition, other tools like values work helped to create a further framework on how to make decisions and what was important to the clients. Gratitude, love, self-mastery, wisdom, curiosity, courage became better understood and guiding lights.
The AHA Moment
I also then recognized that while the tools were “healing” the trauma symptoms, what I was really doing was building the capabilities and capacities that trauma had stunted or frozen.
For example, affect dysregulation just meant that my emotional systems needed to be developed further. So my emotional core network was developed and via neuroplasticity, my emotional brain network increased its capabilities and capacities.
In order words, when we heal developmental trauma and the symptoms associated with trauma, what we are really doing is building capabilities or capacities that got interrupted from being developed when we were kids. So, this leads right back to my evolved mind concept. What we are doing is building the core brain networks
Above, you will see the trauma symptoms and the tools to heal trauma. I have added some of the other tools like visualization to round out other tools used to build the core brain networks or the evolved mind. Healing trauma framework is a great way to understand what are the systems of the brain that needs to be developed or heal. For example, when we connect to our true selves, what we are doing is increasing our awareness. When we have better attachments (i.e. healed interpersonal disturbances) what we are doing is increasing our ability to have empathy and the salience networks and the social engagement system of the polyvagal nervous system.
In other words, as I wrote here, as the Buddha says: “in order to master life, you need to teach your mind to be calm, kind, and creative”. Implicit in this understanding is that you need to be connected to your true self.
The TrueSelf Mission Process
Therefore, I was able to create a system that helps people to discover their core wound and adaptive behavior operating system. More importantly by healing trauma and also increasing and integrating their brain networks, I am able to help create and live their life mission. This is a 3 Stage Process:
Stage 1: Assess and Discover
Stage 2: Heal and Integrate
Stage 3: Create and Live Mission.
I called this framework the TrueSelf Mission Process and created the 9 steps to walk through the process. This now forms my main coaching 10 session practice to help facilitate others to reconnect to their true self and create and live their life mission.
In the future, I will discuss more the process and also dive more into trauma such as the neurobiology of trauma, attachment theory, polyvagal theory, and integrating parts work.
The 9 steps are illustrated below, with some examples of the tools used in the process.
