Pathways to Healing

Discovering Healing After Trauma

by Elaine Zablocki

As human beings, we all experience trauma. In his latest book, The Transformation: Discovering Wholeness and Healing After Trauma, James S. Gordon, MD, writes, “Trauma comes sooner or later, to all of us.” He notes that while we see headlines for people who experience war and natural disasters, we all cope with trauma in our daily lives: illness or disability, the loss of a job, losing loved ones, the natural process of growing old. He writes, “the good news is that all of us can use tools of self-awareness and self-care to heal our trauma and, indeed, to become healthier and more whole than we’ve ever been.”

Under Presidents Clinton and G. W. Bush, Gordon served as the chair of the White House Commission on Complementary and Alternative Medicine Policy. In 1991, he founded the Center for Mind-Body Medicine (CMBM), a community of healers who aim to make self-awareness, self-care, and group support central to all healthcare. For more than 25 years, he has led CMBM teams relieving psychological trauma throughout the world. In this book he draws upon years of experience in many different situations: after hurricanes and tornadoes, during and after wars, in communities affected by school shootings, and with active-duty US military and veterans. “If you want to help an entire traumatized population, you need to be able to rely on many people, not just the few available psychiatrists, psychologists, and clinical social workers,” he writes. “Intelligent people of goodwill – rural high school teachers – could, with supervision by experienced clinicians, use our approach as skillfully as any MD or PhD.”

In this book Gordon describes many different methods people can use to heal from trauma, such as active meditations and mental imagery, connecting with animals, slow deep breathing, or participating in a healing circle. Many of these methods have been used for millennia in the great spiritual traditions.

The Biology of Trauma

Gordon explains the biology of trauma in a way that gives us all a more vivid understanding of how modern stress affects our bodies. The fight-or-flight response, which increases heart rates and blood pressure, helps us successfully challenge a wild animal, like a wolf or a tiger. Or, it helps us run away. It is a helpful response to a crisis situation. Our nomadic ancestors experienced the fight-or-flight response for short periods of time during acute emergencies.

Nowadays, we may find ourselves living with a long-term crisis. War. A failing marriage. Someone with an abusive household or an ominous medical diagnosis lives with stress for months or years. This long-term trauma exhausts the adrenal gland, diminishes the immune system, and damages vital brain connections. “These responses can persist even when the actual trauma is long over,” Gordon writes. “The gazelle grazing on the plain and the mouse retreating to her mouse hole forget what has happened. We humans can carry [traumas] with us. Our large complex brain may replay an endless loop of traumatic memories.”

Gordon describes his visit with Kosovo Albanians who had fled Serbian ethnic cleansing. They remembered how they had seen their family members massacred before their eyes. Their hearts have been racing; they cannot sleep. Gordon leads the group in “an expressive meditation that includes dancing and shaking, pausing to relax and breathe, and then moving again.” Our ancestors,” Gordon says, “shouted and danced and whirled and jumped when something terrible happened. They moved their bodies and let go of their tensions.”

The Trauma-Healing Diet

After discussing the various ways trauma damages people, Gordon offers a chapter on “The Trauma-Healing Diet.” This largely organic, whole food, plant-based, high-fiber diet will be familiar to most Townsend Letter readers. “This chapter tells you what you need to know to reverse the damage and heal yourself,” he writes. “Everything we eat – and I mean everything – can either enhance or hinder trauma healing. If you’ve been self-medicating with comfort foods the first few days of healthy eating can be difficult…. after five or six days however, your gut will be calmer…you will be more focused and energetic, better able to sleep.”

This chapter is particularly valuable because Gordon discusses many specific foods and supplements and connects their healing effects to the specific biology of trauma. He recommends using a high-dose multivitamin supplement, vitamin D, selenium and zinc. “Sometimes you’ll quickly feel the benefits of the trauma healing diet,” he writes. “Sometimes the effects will be gradual and subtle. You can know that it’s providing a firm foundation for your comprehensive trauma-healing program.”

This book includes so many different healing methods that every person who reads it will find new ways to support their own healing, growth, and recovery from trauma. Gordon closes it with a ritual to celebrate what we’ve learned from listening to and practicing these suggestions. He invites us to spend some time writing on two pieces of paper. The first one lists everything we want to leave behind, and how it feels to let go of it. The second piece is for everything we’ve learned that we want to remember and bring with us. We burn the first piece of paper. “Take a little time to choose the place,” he writes. “It will become like the places that indigenous people have always chosen for ritual and ceremony, special to you, dedicated to the changes, the transformation that you’re experiencing and will continue to experience.” We keep the second piece of paper and review it when we need to remember the tools that work best for us and support us as we meet our daily challenges.

Resources

The Transformation: Discovering Wholeness and Healing After Trauma, by James S. Gordon, MD.

Gordon’s website at https://jamesgordonmd.com includes interviews, videos, and his schedule of future public events.

Gordon is the founder and executive director of The Center for Mind-Body Medicine (CMBM),

which has trained thousands of clinicians, educators and community leaders in the skills of self-care and group support. For more information about CMBM programs, go to https://cmbm.org

Elaine Zablocki is the former editor of CHRF News Files.