The Okayness of NOT Being Present and Mindful

Sometimes checking out is a necessary form of self-care.

Some things you probably know about me by now: I’m a survivor of sexual assault--I was kidnapped at gunpoint by a serial rapist when I was a teenager.  Also, I’m a writer--I write books and lead creativity workshops for kids, with a special focus on trauma and resilience. 

Something you might not know about me by now:  I’ve been a practicing Buddhist for about seven years, two of which I spent living and working at a meditation retreat center.  

Meditation and mindfulness have been invaluable to my healing journey. I feel very strongly that mindfulness and embodiment teachings are powerful healing resources for all trauma survivors.  But I also feel strongly that anyone who teaches meditation and/or mindfulness, and any community that promotes these practices, needs to have an awareness and understanding of trauma.  

Nearly 70% of adults will have experienced a traumatic event in their lifetimes.*  Not all of those people will develop more extreme versions of trauma response, like PTSD (post traumatic stress disorder), but a certain percentage will.  So, in any group of people, including meditation groups, there will be individuals who have experienced unresolved trauma.

“Just sit with it” is a catch all response to pretty much everything that comes up during meditation practice.  And it’s a great response--for people who aren’t working with unresolved trauma. Any community, organization, or individual that wants to share the wisdom and power of meditation practice needs to understand that survivors can’t be asked to “just sit with it.”  At least not at the beginning.   

People with unresolved trauma can experience a variety of symptoms, including body sensations, an overwhelming sense of unsafety, negative thoughts and beliefs about themselves and the world, patterns of physical and emotional numbing, and more.  Someone with unprocessed trauma who does not have any other resources or tools, when instructed to “just sit with” or investigate any of these symptoms on their own, will likely become very dysregulated. Dysregulation means an impairment of metabolic, physiological, or psychological processes.  In other words, their bodies and minds go haywire and they are susceptible to entering trauma states of hyper- or hypo-arousal.  Hypoarousal means they shut down, go numb, or dissociate. Hyperarousal means hypervigilance, panic, and defensiveness.  When someone is overwhelmed by trauma symptoms in this way, certain parts of their brain actually shut down and they are no longer living in the present.  Instead, they’re stuck in a kind of trauma- based reality.     

For this reason, teaching people how to come back to their physical bodies and be in the present can be a very helpful aspect of healing trauma and helping them get free of that trauma-reality.

But at the same time, encouraging them to come back to their bodies and the present moment needs to be done with extreme care, awareness, and transparency.  By transparency I mean being up front and clear about what meditation instruction entails, how the process works, and what it DOESN’T include--like therapy, relief from trauma, or a way out of acute suffering.  Meditation instruction is NOT an all-purpose solution to life problems, or a cure for psychological wounds.

The need for extra care and awareness comes from the fact that for some people who have experienced unresolved trauma, coming back to the present and to their bodies is not a safe thing to do. The traumatic event is still active in their bodies. Asking them to come back to the present moment in their bodies is akin to asking them to relive the trauma, without any of the structures or supports needed for dealing with something of that magnitude. 

One thing that makes it more difficult for those of us who want to create a safe container for all meditators is that, like me, not everyone who sits down to meditate is even going to know that they have unresolved trauma issues.  In my case, I didn’t realize that the trauma I had experienced was not fully processed. It happened a long time ago. I did a ton of therapy around it. And I had been meditating for years with no ill effects. In fact, I thought I had fully embraced Buddhist teachings about “letting it go” and that it was over and done with, that it wasn’t a part of me anymore. 

What I didn’t understand was that because of the trauma, my body and mind weren’t fully integrated. I spent most of my time in my head, where I felt safest, and did everything I could to avoid uncomfortable feelings, most of which tended to arise in my body.  At a certain point, in order to maintain the illusion of having “let it go,” I had to become even more disconnected from my body. I functioned in this state of hypoarousal for years, thinking I was really getting the hang of meditating, and not at all realizing that I was still carrying all this trauma crap around in my body and was actually just numbing it out. 

Things blew up in my face during my first solo retreat. Turns out I actually had gotten pretty good at meditating, at least good enough to relax so much that I started to really connect with my body, feel what was going on there, and that’s when all hell broke loose.  Because for years, I had been avoiding my body and all that it held. So to return to it all at once, with no conscious awareness of what lay in wait there, the parts of me that had been compartmentalizing the trauma, keeping me separate from my body (and the traumatized aspects of self) for years, began to feel threatened.  And I started having panic attacks. During the retreat. I had to call my parents to come get me in the middle of the night. And it wasn’t just one panic attack. It was panic attacks every day for months. It sucked.  

Much of what made it so difficult was that I didn’t understand what was happening.  I thought meditation had made me crazy, which was a horrible feeling. Meditation had been such a safe haven for so long and now it was triggering this hellish experience that was, in ways, the worst thing I had ever felt. Because the defenses I had so carefully constructed around NOT feeling the initial trauma had been torn away. By a practice that I had previously thought of as sheltering and healing.  And I wasn’t anywhere near being ready to deal with the trauma that had been uncovered. So in many ways it felt like a betrayal.

The teachers and meditation instructors around me at the time were very kind and tried to help in every way they could but, like me, they didn’t understand what was happening, even when I told them there was trauma in my past. They didn’t know how to explain it or to effectively help me, and I felt like something terrible had happened, like I’d done it wrong and meditation had broken me or vice versa. It turned into a major crisis of faith.  

It took me a  few years before I met a meditation instructor who had experience with trauma and could help me put it all in a constructive context.  Once she talked to me about how trauma is stored in the body and mind, and how really deep relaxation or meditative states can unlock that stored stuff, I began to understand.  And that’s when I started to feel safe again. And once I felt safe and not broken or insane, I could finally start admitting that the trauma still had a hold on me. Only then did I seek out the right kind of somatic, body-based trauma treatment that I needed. 

Keep in mind that all of this happened more than 20 years after I was attacked, after the initial trauma occurred.  Point being, there is no time limit on how long unprocessed trauma can stick around in your system. 

Once I found the right meditation instructor and the right treatment, the mindfulness and embodiment I had learned previously became a tremendously helpful aspect of the healing process. But I needed to feel safe first. And this, hopefully, is what trauma-awareness can help others feel as well. 

Since there are some survivors who, like me, won’t realize the trauma is still active--or even that it’s there to begin with--meditation teachers and practitioners alike need to be more aware of the ways trauma might surface and the ways which those experiencing it and those around them can respond to it more effectively.  For example, being advised to sit still and not speak--which is the majority of what happens in a shrine room--might not be the best thing during the early stages of re-accessing an old trauma because it so closely resembles freeze responses or positions of helplessness. There need to be alternatives and resources available to help survivors feel safe on their own terms, so that eventually they can return to the cushion with confidence.

As ever, I can’t claim to have many answers at this point.  I’m writing and talking about my experience in the hopes of stimulating conversations that will generate the ideas and answers we need. But just as a starting point, these are some ideas suggested to me by trauma therapists:

1.) During actual meditation practice, to put the attention somewhere other than the body, until trauma issues are more resolved.  This is because the trauma is held in the body. We can avoid unintentionally triggering it by putting the attention elsewhere. 

2.) If you are a meditation or mindfulness teacher, to become trauma-informed and track students so that you can identify when trauma is coming up and use alternative approaches to meet their needs.  

3.) And of course, to be able to recognize when someone’s issues are beyond our skill-set and refer students to someone else, without a sense of “you don’t belong here because you can’t do what everyone else is doing.” Rather, recognizing that the shrine room is just one aspect of mindfulness and compassion.  Sometimes the kindest thing we can do is help someone find other support people and practices.  

As I mentioned, though, these ideas are just the beginning.  My hope is that we can start mobilizing resources and compassion to devise new, powerful ways of relating to trauma within ourselves and the world around us.  

All you need to do is take a look at the news or scroll through Facebook to experience the pervasiveness of trauma--and no, you don’t need to experience an event first hand to be traumatized by it. 

One example of where tools for working with trauma are needed: I recently talked to the superintendent of a middle school in St Johnsbury, Vermont, as well as a representative of North East Kingdom Human Services, also in St johnsbury.  They both described trauma amongst the kids they serve as an epidemic.  I knew there was more trauma around than we realize, but I never would’ve guessed that the idyllic rural area where I live was experiencing trauma of epidemic proportions.  This is just to say there is a need for understanding and a willingness to work with trauma everywhere.  And who better to lend a hand than compassionate, trauma-aware practitioners of mindfulness and meditation?

*Numbers vary but I got this one from the National Council for Behavioral Health:  https://www.thenationalcouncil.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/Trauma-infographic.pdf