Right as RAIN

“Trauma is primarily an injury to the capacity to feel.” - Donald Kalsched, 1996 in Zender, 2020

Often when we are asked by another person how we are, we typically reply “I’m okay thanks,” and perhaps we might go on to talk about the weather.

This polite response is usually necessary, because if we were to reply how we really felt, it is very possible that the conversation would lead us towards a complex emotional landscape that neither party is prepared to venture into at this moment.

Whilst to some extent, this façade of ‘okayness’ may seem disingenuous, it is also completely natural.

Our ego is doing its job of mediating between our internal state and the external real world by presenting a persona of resilience so that we can navigate day-to-day life with an appropriate level of social approval.

The problem comes when this persona of resilience becomes so rigid and fixed that we identify with it too strongly, and so avoid discussing our own vulnerability and emotions at all cost. In short, as Gabor Maté has discussed, we trade authenticity for approval.

This may also impact on our ability to relate to others’ emotions with empathy and compassion. If we cannot feel our own emotions, how can we feel those of another?

With children or adults who have a background of trauma, this phenomenon can become more complex. There is often a very real, deep-seated fear around emotions - in ourselves and in others. Emotions may be shut down, shut off or projected by trauma survivors, not because we do not want to feel them, but because we feel them too intensely - too painfully.

This is typically because in the past, emotions have been associated with very fearful or life-threatening experiences. There has been an extra charge coming into our nervous system - like a power surge - that has tripped our circuit-breaker. This has caused our Self-Care System to become activated to the point where we are no longer ‘present’ i.e. the experience no longer has to be felt by ‘me’ (true self) - it is felt by ‘not me’ (false self).

This ‘dissociation’ is what results in trauma.

Because in reality, the emotional pain of the experience has not disappeared, it has still been deeply felt - but it has become encoded in the body and the unconscious mind - rather than processed consciously.

“Pain is unbearable when it cannot be metabolised. When a child’s sense of self is repeatedly threatened, and the child has no way to process the perceived threat, the child enters the domain of trauma. This can happen through sexual or physical abuse, but it can also happen when the child’s needs are continually denied, when the child is neglected, when the child is not seen for whom s/he is or when the child is shamed and made to feel inadequate. Anything that leaves the child feeling that the essence of who they are is defective or “bad” or missing in essential value and therefore at risk of annihilation is traumatic.” - Kalsched, 2008

Trauma therefore occurs when we are “given more to experience in this life than we can bear to experience consciously” (This quote is from a lecture Dr. Kalsched gave by the title “Glimpses Through the Veil: Encounters With the Numen of Clinical Work,” which can be viewed on YouTube.).

Being a trauma survivor has been likened to the emotional version of being a burn victim. Everything seems to hurt more than it seems to for everyone else. When we feel an emotion, especially an emotion that is very difficult for us, it can feel like we have no skin at all.

This is where the armour of a ‘false self’ comes in handy.

As discussed in my previous blog on love, our ‘false self’ is designed to protect our ‘sacred innocent core’ from further violation (Kalsched, 2019). But in so doing, there is a kind of death of the true self - a loss of vitality, a splitting, a crack - and in this opening we find the almost numinous powers of ‘dissociation’.

Janet (1901) first identified ‘dissociation’ of traumatic material from conscious awareness as a central defence against an overwhelming experience of emotional or physical distress (Lanius, 2015).

The major characteristic of all dissociative phenomena involves a detachment from reality. The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, fifth edition (DSM-5), defines dissociation as “a disruption, interruption, and/or discontinuity of the normal, subjective integration of behavior, memory, identity, consciousness, emotion, perception, body representation, and motor control.”

The term ‘dissociation’ describes a wide array of experiences, from mild detachment from immediate surroundings (e.g. spacing out, daydreaming, achieving altered states of consciousness or trance-like states), to more severe detachment from physical and emotional experiences (e.g. dissociative amnesia, dissociative disorders).

As someone who has experienced both mild-moderate dissociation and dissociative amnesia, I know first-hand that dissociation is both a gift - and a curse (See Kalsched, 2013).

The power to dissociate can bestow trauma survivors with tremendous abilities - imaginative, empathic, transcendental and even shamanistic (think Philip Pullman’s concept of the ‘subtle knife’ in “His Dark Materials” trilogy). At times, it might feel as if the normal barriers between what is conscious and unconscious are so porous that we can dissolve into another reality completely - a hidden world that others cannot perceive with their senses.

This mytho-poetic world, Kalsched (2013) suggests, is a mystery that is often at the very centre of the healing process for a trauma survivor, and yet at other times, it seems to strangely resist it.

Because, whilst this substitute world can be a refuge of self-care - it can also become a highly addictive prison of protection. A place where we hide ourselves away from the real world and from real feelings - and from our true self. What’s more, dissociation can make real life feel especially tenuous - as if it might slip like a knot through our fingers at any moment.

Imagine a version of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs pyramid, with embodied presence, felt safety and conscious awareness at the bottom and imagination or transcendence at the very top. Often, trauma survivors such as myself will invert this pyramid so that it becomes a funnel shape. In other words, our life is balanced on a tiny pinnacle of embodied presence, and the wide open gates of transcendence are flooding us with a dissociative analgesia. Whilst this feels exceptionally euphoric - the ultimate addictive high - it is also a dangerously precarious position to inhabit every day. For, if we do not have a wide safe base at the bottom, we can easily be toppled from our pinnacle and fall into a chaotic abyss of emotional dysregulation. As the American writer and professor of mythology Joseph Campbell once said:

“The psychotic drowns in the same waters in which the mystic swims with delight.” - Joseph Campbell

Trauma turns our world upside down and inside out, disrupting our ability to process feelings and meaning (Zender, 2020). Kalsched (2008) uses the image of a hydroponic garden to explain this:

“Those plants had their roots in circulating water that was highly mineralised – it was like the ambrosia of the gods – analogous to the mythic world of pure fantasy. The only problem was that these plants were slowly losing their capacity to root in real soil…in real life. Addiction is similar: you are fed on the mindaltering substitutes of pure “spirit” and so you have the most magnificent experiences, or so you think. But meanwhile you become weaker and weaker. And the more you are fed by your addiction, the less able you become to take root in the world.” - Kalsched, 2008

Through dissociation, what we are actually doing is saying “I’m okay” to ourselves, when we are very much not okay. And in this state of fake ‘okay-ness’, the inner child trapped inside the prison of the protection, is often banging their head against the bars, screaming out for help; or, trying to escape from their prison like a dangerous convict; - or, they may be paralysed and unable to move at all.

Instead, as Kalsched (2008) implies, what we need to learn is to become more rooted in the now - to widen our base with small, incremental levels of embodied presence - a felt sense of safety and conscious awareness. In doing this, we may find that our experiences of transcendence become more rich and meaningful, channeled as they are to a unified point.

When asked how children and adults can recover from trauma, Donald Kalsched (2008) has said:

“It takes great patience, great perseverance, and a willingness to suffer the unknown in ourselves and in the world....in short it takes great tolerance for feelings and feelings are what the self-care system is least tolerant of. For the trauma survivor connecting to feelings is a very frightening process.”

The only way we can be brave enough to take a tiny step outside the prison of protection is by knowing that there are other strong containers, outside of ourselves, that will keep us safe while we develop the ability to be present with the reality of painful and threatening emotions (affect tolerance).

Zender summarises:

“The work of the psychotherapist is to create an empathic field in which the trauma survivor can learn to recognize and bear feelings linked to the trauma that were previously experienced as overwhelming to the point they had to be dissociated due to the threat posed to the essential integrity of the self.” - Zender, 2020

Kalsched affirms that trauma survivors require a level of compassion and emotional safety within our relationships that allow us to dare to feel:

“…we need compassionate containers to do this work - therapy containers, friendship containers, religious containers.” - Kalsched, 2008

In addition to psychotherapy, one such container I have found helpful for my own tolerance of emotions, is a meditative practice known as RAIN. RAIN is a practice of Radical Compassion, developed by the meditation teacher, psychologist and author Tara Brach.

Brach describes the acronym RAIN as an easy-to-remember tool for practising mindfulness and compassion using the following four steps:

• Recognize what is happening;

• Allow the experience to be there, just as it is;

• Investigate with interest and care;

• Nurture with self-compassion.

She suggests either exploring RAIN as a stand-alone meditation or moving through the steps whenever challenging feelings arise to ‘ride the wave’ of emotions (similar to the third wave Cognitive Behavioural Therapy technique Dialectical Behavioural Therapy - or DBT).

I have found this practice life-changing.

One of the most difficult aspects of RAIN for me personally was ‘Allow’. In practising RAIN regularly, I came to realise that whilst I could often ‘Recognise’ an emotional experience cognitively, I really struggled to ‘Allow’ myself to be present enough to feel it somatically - from the ground up - in my body. I wanted to disown it, push it away, destroy it, scream at it, have it disappear, or blame someone else for it.

Because of my experiences of abuse, it has been really challenging for me to learn to ‘Allow’ some specific emotions back into my conscious awareness and into my body.

I began to understand that certain emotional experiences were - and still are - actually physically painful for me. To ‘Allow’ them in, required great tolerance of pain, something which let’s face it, no-one wants to experience on a daily basis!

However, what I noticed was this: when I was brave enough to ‘Allow’ an emotion in and ‘Investigate’ it fully, my body did a mysterious and quite miraculous thing. My body seemed to find a way to self-soothe - to process the pain all by itself - from the inside out - rather than seek an external source of relief.

As the Persian poet and Sufi mystic Rumi said so very wisely:

“The cure for pain is in the pain.”

This is where the final steps of ‘Nurturing’ with self-compassion act as a healing balm. Brach says:

“Self-compassion begins to naturally arise in the moments that you recognize you are suffering. It comes into fullness as you intentionally nurture your inner life…

To do this, try to sense what the wounded, frightened or hurting place inside you most needs, and then offer some gesture of active care that might address this need. Does it need a message of reassurance? Of forgiveness? Of companionship? Of love?”

‘After the Rain’, Brach suggests we try to notice the quality of our own presence and rest in a wakeful, tender space of awareness.

It is possible for children and young adults to incorporate the practice of RAIN into a toolkit of coping skills, but they may require a simpler version (e.g. I feel….I need visuals) and the support of a trusted adult to co-regulate their emotional states (e.g. using Emotion Coaching or similar). They simply do not have the developmental capacity to be able to self-regulate.

Children may also need the safe container of a therapist and non-directive therapies (such as Sandplay or Play Therapy) to create an empathic field in which they are able to bring what is unconscious into conscious awareness, at their own pace. The trauma-related images created by a child or young person in Sandplay Therapy, for example, often contain the story of what was - and still is - too overwhelming to consciously experience in its totality.

“The solution to releasing a young person from their prison of isolation and helping them to communicate their pain comes not through confronting trauma directly, but by working with its reflection. In other words, we must take care to work from the expression (or song) of trauma (transmitted to us by means of the expressive arts), slowly towards its source, not the other way around. In this way, the child or young person is not triggered into a state of immobilisation through feeling unsafe, and there is less danger that they will be re-traumatised by the therapeutic process itself.” - Ttofa, 2022

For me, like many other trauma survivors who have found somatic practices such as RAIN transformative, the gift is in the feeling of freedom and truth that comes with no longer being imprisoned in or identified with any limiting sense of self.

Through the practice of RAIN, the inner child also begins to trust that their emotional needs will be taken care of, as opposed to being repeatedly abandoned. Whereas self-abandonment can sap our energy and cause us to feel chronically unsafe, staying present with ourselves can lead to greater feelings of stability, with increased self-esteem and confidence, as well as greater trust in other people.

Being true to oneself can feel strange for a trauma survivor - it has, after all, not always been the ‘norm’ - but the more we can know that we have a choice and a voice, the more we can respect our own boundaries and know our own worth.

Other embodied practices such as yoga, physical exercise, nature-based activities, sensory play, expressive arts and grounding techniques can all be helpful in supporting a trauma survivor to develop a stronger, healthier foundation for living.

In my experience, these practices work best when they are utilised daily and can act progressively on the nervous system like a prescription over time - rather than periodically. Anything that can help an individual to feel more rooted in themselves and in the real world around them is valuable in terms of long-term resilience.

There is a Malay proverb that says, “A tree with strong roots laughs at storms” - and I believe this to be true for human beings as well.

So nowadays, when someone asks me how I am, I might still say “I’m okay thanks” and talk about the weather. But I also think of RAIN - and how true resilience comes not only from radically accepting and loving oneself, but also from feeling safe enough to brave all kinds of weather.

As the much loved Buddhist teacher and nun Pema Chödrön reminds us hopefully:

“You are the sky. Everything else is just the weather.”