Storying Trauma

Sensemaking Forum: $35 per 1.5 hours

Personality

Body-Mind Awareness as a Social Self

Personality develops from networks within the brain as well as interpersonal experiences in our social world. How is your personality expressed? Experienced?

"The Enneagram of personality system describes nine fundamental or "core" patterns of personality that each have unique ways of processing emotions, directing thought, and driving behavior" Daniel J. Siegel, M.D.

Trauma

Personal Wound & Bio-political Tool

As human bodies increasingly become a primary site in the struggle for political power, hierarchy of suffering gets defined by the State, with compassion becoming a tool defined by power. What trauma gets recognized? Who decides? "There are high stakes not only in studying how and why people are injured, but in assessing, articulating, and even challenging hegemonic modes of diagnosis, rehabilitation, recovery, and redemption." Eric Wertheimer & Monica J. Casper

Somatic Narrative

Personality and Trauma Patterns

A primary location for our body story is housed in implicit memory (one of several types of memory), which begins in the womb and works throughout our lifespan as an operating system that reacts to patterns below the level of conscious thought. "What if the patterns that have shaped how you think, feel, and relate could become gateways to freedom instead of limits?" Daniel J. Siegel, M.D.

Human Development

Grounding & Growth

Human development, a biological and relational process, offers windows of change throughout the life span where increased vulnerability acts as an opening for transformation.

"Interpersonal experiences shape the mind as it continues to develop throughout the lifespan...Interactions with the environment, especially relationships with other people, directly shape the development of the brain's structure and function." Daniel J. Siegel, M.D.

(Dis)Ability

Normality as a Tool of Exclusion

What is defined as normal was created institutionally by people in power to categorize others. The "tyranny of the average" situates the body as the site of an oppressive struggle. "Much of what passes for normal in our society is neither healthy nor normal" Gabor Mate, MD

Embodied Participation

Agency & Integration

The capacity to act with intentionality (agency), rather than reactively, is dependent upon relational integration (being "seen" and "soothed" by others), as well as our ability to regulate our nervous system. "Once our body-mind understands how to engage safety and connection, expansion becomes the imperative, both for our well-being and the world's."

Daniel J. Siegel, M.D.