What is Mindfulness?
Mindfulness is the deliberative act of being aware of what’s going on inside ourselves. It is a choice in any moment to consciously experience subconscious reaction to a situation, especially ones where we have a history of reacting in a particular way, and observing what’s occurring in our bodies, thoughts, and emotions. This also includes being aware of external situations we experience that lead to particular outcomes. Learning to use mindfulness can change our relationship to these patterned behaviors sometimes referred to as triggers in the trauma informed community.
I had a long history of study regarding inward looking and brought that to bear in a very specific manner during my darkest days of discovering what it meant to be a survivor. After a lot of healing I considered what had happened and recognized a mental process with very specific reference points. Eventually I captured the essential means of thinking that enabled me to repeat the experience, leaving me empowered even in the face of the common negative feelings associated with being a survivor of sexual abuse.
It is not that I escaped these feelings and behaviors, but was able to safely allow them so I could experience them outside of the outcome I normally attach to them. Sadness is a great example. Many things make me sad, but certain situations bring sadness that I can’t see coming. I spent years, even with all the self-aware personal work deflecting sadness when it arose. When I finally confronted my abuse or perhaps it is better to say when my abuse finally confronted me it became impossible to deflect sadness anymore. I also had little tolerance for letting sadness take over my life. Yet, I realized sadness was part of me and there were issues in my past related to trauma that I had not been aware of that kept me from working out the source of the sadness. So I started exploring and recognized that I had some very good tools, based on years and years of practice for doing just that. Now those very same tools had not given me the ability to recognize the abuse in the first place, so it was more than just the tools themselves, it was a combination of context and tool. Hammers are great on a construction site, not so good at a fine dining experience, and they do nothing for a romantic evening.
Trauma confounds context. Emotions, thoughts, behaviors, actions all become hijacked by the trauma of sexual abuse. Mindfulness brings the ability to experience emotions, thoughts, behaviors, and actions alongside the confounding influence of trauma. This enables recognition, re-framing, and separation of what is the basic emotion and the effect the trauma has had on the emotion. The emotion is still there, but you begin to have facility in managing the outfall. Eventually, with practice, the facility becomes so efficient that you begin to experience these particular emotions without the past confusion and negative consequences that we attribute to being triggered.
The act of “being with” something allows for recognizing the differing parts of that very thing. There are many reasons why it is difficult to “be” with something, especially trauma. First, is just recognizing that something exists. Male survivors have a history of not recognizing their abuse for many years after the assault, much less the personal consequences of that abuse. Secondly, the very sane and protective act of deflecting and isolating the effects of trauma make it very difficult to “see” the effects of abuse. Thirdly, effectively observing something we are naturally deeply offended and horrified by is very difficult even if it is our own emotions we are disturbed by. Fourthly, we have very little training in “being” with anything especially personal trauma. Historically, men have been taught to move on, women taught to accept, and it was rare for a child to be taught any type of self-awareness in our standard years of education. This is slowly changing and mindfulness has finally received some cultural respect as an important part of a balanced life. Mindfulness is the act of “being with” your own experience of trauma in a safe, private, and efficient way. This leads to a completely different relationship to your experience. It won’t take away the experience, but gives some freedom to not be bound by what happened. When I experience sadness now I am free to be sad and I know why I am sad, and if it is not something in the present, than I can allow it to be from the past and experienced in the present. This has led to an amazing amount of joy.