Raja Selvam, Ph.D., on the faculties of Peter Levine’s Somatic Experiencing professional training programs and Santa Barbara Graduate Institute, lectures and teaches internationally. With graduate degrees in business and statistics, and a doctoral degree in marketing, Raja is currently a PhD candidate in clinical psychology at Pacifica Graduate Institute. Raja’s increasingly eclectic approach draws from bodywork systems of Postural Integration and Biodynamic Cranio-Sacral Therapy, body-psychotherapy systems of Somatic Experiencing and Bodynamic Analysis, Jungian and Archetypal psychologies, psychoanalytic schools of Object Relations and Inter-Subjectivity, Affective Neuroscience, and Advaita Vedanta, a spiritual tradition from India. His current interests are trauma and attachment on one hand and trauma and spirituality on the other.
The interviewer: Arabella received her B.A. in Psychology from Stanford University, completed one-year’s M.A. coursework in clinical psychology, and spent many years in business management. A Buddhist student and practitioner for thirteen years, Arabella has written a book on Buddhist reform that is in its final editing stages.
This interview touches on the work that Raja’s organization Trauma Vidya – www.traumavidya.org – has been doing among tsunami survivors in Tamil Nadu, India since the December 2004 tsunami, to provide quick relief from symptoms of post-traumatic stress, symptoms that Raja says are commonly misunderstood as needing prolonged care by specialists, a condition hard to come by in post-disaster settings in developing countries. But it more broadly probes Raja’s personal interest in working in the field of helping others to heal from severe trauma in which the survival physiology of an organism is stretched to the limit. .
Arabella: How has the breadth of your experience as a student of business, psychology, and Advaita Vedanta – described in your biography (above) – led to your focus on trauma and helping people to heal from it?
Raja: Oh, I don’t know. I really don’t know. Too complex an answer, really! In fact, an attempt to answer that question might come in the way of what I really want to communicate in this interview about healing from severe trauma and the general misconceptions about it in psychology! I might start sounding like John Kerry!
I’m going to New Delhi in November for the first Indian Disaster Management Conference – organized by the National Disaster Management Authority (NMDA) established after the tsunami -to present on the work we have done in India among tsunami survivors. And we have an eleven-minute presentation with a four-minute follow-up in its mental health track. So, I have to be really clear about what I want to accomplish in way of communication to an audience that has imported the misunderstanding and bias that conventional Western mental health has brought to the treatment of post-traumatic stress.
So, let me tell you, for about two minutes, what my basic thrust is, and then you can shoot from there. How does that sound?
Arabella: Great!
Raja: So essentially, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder is more about dysregulation in the body and brain systems that regulate the biology of life than it is about affected feelings, meanings, memories, and behaviors. And when that is addressed, it is possible to bring people back from the symptoms very quickly. And conventional modalities – because of where they come from – focus on memories, meanings, feelings, and behaviors. Even though conventional modalities do help (doing something is almost always better than not doing something), and at times the work with meanings, feelings, memories, and behaviors are important in certain contexts, they provide often only an indirect way of working with traumatic stress with questionable outcomes with the possibility of re-traumatization. The direct way uses most the self-regulating capacities in the human brain and body. It’s the same system that helps heal a bone miraculously when you put it in a cast after it breaks.
Our thrust in India has been that post-traumatic stress is not something that we need specialists to care for, in a long-term setting, in order to be resolved. It can be resolved by teaching those affected the right understanding and self-help strategies with which they can mobilize their own inner resources to heal themselves, as we are finding there repeatedly through follow-up research. The very same inherent resources that heal broken bones and fight disease are mobilized (by the survivors themselves) to treat the symptoms that they are suffering from. And that’s the thrust we’ve been really trying to bring home to the situations where it’s confused with all kinds of conventional mental health strategies developed for other therapeutic goals that do not have to do as much with post-traumatic stress.
Does this make sense?
Arabella: Yeah! Yeah, perfect sense.
Your organization Trauma Vidya – www.traumavidya.org – describes its mission statement as, “to provide relief to those suffering from symptoms of traumatic stress through education, training, treatment, and research.” How do you do this?
Raja: We go to the villages and we tell people: “We come here not to give you money, or medication, but to help you to find a way to heal yourself from the shock of the tsunami. Because the tsunami is a big life threat it leaves the nervous system in shock and terror, and the body in constriction, and this can lead to all kinds of symptoms like sleeplessness and rapid heartbeat, anxiety and the like! And the cure for it is within you…like your bones have an ability to heal themselves when broken, with minimal care. So what we have come here to do is to teach you how to help you heal yourself. Are you interested?” If they are not interested, we treat other people who are interested in learning and in doing the work themselves.
If they agree to it, then we teach them how to use their own brain to pay attention to their body, their nervous system and such, in a way that the shock, the terror and the constriction can come to the surface and dissolve. We then teach them how to stabilize themselves so that the changes have a better chance of being imprinted. Then, we teach them how to do it by themselves at home. And then, we go four weeks later, six weeks later – and we ask them whether they’re doing it, whether they’re having difficulty doing it, and how they are doing in relation to the symptoms. And we also go back eight months to a year later to find out how they are doing as well to gather evidence so that we can convince more organizations work that with traumatized populations of all kinds, not just tsunamis, to train in and teach the simple approach we have developed based on self-healing abilities that nature has bestowed upon us through evolution.
This is how we train them to treat themselves and measure their outcomes, and the outcomes have been quite positive so far. Even with the control group that we had the second time we went to India – we’ve been to India three times now since the tsunami; twice to treat tsunami survivors directly and once to train eighty individuals from thirty organizations that work with traumatized populations of all kinds including those inflected with the AIDS virus, actually eighty two potential local trainers that included my mother and sister! So, does that give you enough information?
Arabella: Yes. Over time, what is the success rate of your short-term trauma treatment, and to what do you attribute it?
Raja: We are really surprised how much more effective it is in India than even among Hurricane Katrina survivors, for example! We are still analyzing the data from the second group – at the National Institute of Mental Health and Neurosciences in Bangalore (NIMHANS), India, a prestigious academic research institute that was chosen by the Government of India as the nodal agency for disaster mental health in the aftermath of the tsunami. In the data from the first trip we found, at six weeks after the treatment, about 73 percent of the 465 presenting symptoms we treated among around 200 tsunami survivors – the exact numbers are on our webpage under the research section – showed sustained improvement from some improvement to complete resolution. And more or less the same pattern, just slightly less, we found at the eight month mark when we went and interviewed them again! We don’t know the exact figures as they are being tabulated, but the results were more or less the same with some attrition.
It has all been remarkable and beyond our expectations really and I think there are a number of reasons for the success. One is that people in India have community resources; they still live in community and have not been disrupted. And there is also a great deal of spiritual resources in the population. And I think Indians are also open to this approach because it’s not lost in all kinds of mental health frameworks that people know here that they swear by as needed ingredients for healing severe trauma. You know, they’re really suffering and we say, “Well here it is!” and they are very open to trying it. And I think that these three factors have actually helped us there!
Actually, let me add this. I think the results are not so surprising because even TFT (Thought Field Therapy) for example – it’s a very simple technique that taps the meridian points, to reduce the shock in the nervous system to help to discharge it – is reported to be doing extremely well in man-made post-disaster settings such as wars in other countries like Bosnia. And we are really not so interested in demonstrating the Trauma Vidya approach or the Somatic Experiencing (SE) approach, originated by Peter Levine, and made popular in his very readable and empowering book Waking the Tiger: Healing Trauma on which Trauma Vidya’s approach is primarily based, is the best approach to healing trauma. What the results point to is that when you work with the body directly – without focusing necessarily on all the feelings and meanings and memories and behaviors that might be involved– and trust its self-regulating capacity, the success rate is much higher! I think that’s the basic point I would like to communicate and drum it home: the focus on the body and brain and their inherent self-healing ability and the ease with which this can be translated into self-help strategies for survivors from all kinds of traumas. And the follow-up research makes it difficult for people to dismiss it out of hand which is often the case when people not trained in the body run into claims of effectiveness of strategies that are based on the body.
It doesn’t matter what the treatment is as long as people are paying attention to the body and working with the nervous system directly to help bring back self-regulation. And the most self-regulating of all systems are the lower brain structures that govern life in the body. So, I think that I would emphasize that much more! I would be happy to have an approach that works very well based on Somatic Experiencing, because I happen to train trauma professionals in the approach in more than ten countries across the globe, but we want to get across the larger point that we need to pay attention to the body and its self-regulating capacity and the need work with it directly. And not confuse all these other frameworks for the real work that needs to be done simply because one has been trained that way with an anti-body bias of conventional Western psychology at large!
Arabella: So, to bring our attention back to the body.
Raja: And the nervous system, the survival physiology and how it gets caught in dysregulation, basic orientation, flight, fight, freeze/dissociation, and basic terror/aggression and physical constriction dynamics. They appear to be much more important in setting after setting in the resolution of traumatic stress than all those other higher brain things we have been trained to focus on.
I’ll give you an example. There’s a woman that we worked with, and this woman had lost 42 members of her immediate family in the tsunami – father, mother, brothers and sisters, their families…including her favorite daughter. And she was very depressed. And she couldn’t go to work because she was too afraid to go near the ocean to buy and sell fish. When we saw her a year after the tsunami, she had not been to work since the tsunami because of her fear of the ocean. She was afraid to go near the water. So, when she came in, we said to her, “The grief of the loss of so many people is going to take much time to resolve. However, it doesn’t mean that you have to suffer from loss of appetite and sleeplessness, and fear of going near the sea to work, et cetera, for as long. Those we can teach you how to reduce as much as possible as soon as possible through your own efforts.”
And so we taught her how to contact her body and contact the arousal in the nervous system and discharge it, while tolerating the enormous grief that we sensed in her in ourselves bulging our hearts, noting the various mechanisms that are trying to make the discharge happen but cannot quite do it in the traumatic overwhelm that is understandable given the extent of the trauma, she herself was carried away by the waves and survived. With a little more attention, specifically placed where the traumatic energies might be stuck but typically try to free themselves and dissipate through inherent self-healing mechanisms, based on a scientific understanding of the neurobiology of trauma and trauma healing mediated by the autonomic nervous system, they started to release – like shaking down the legs and arms and so on. We then helped her to stabilize. And she left in an o.k. place, but we thought – given the enormity of the loss of human life– we didn’t know whether the post-traumatic stress symptoms would dissolve because of the great emotional stress that she’s been under. Emotional stress is also ultimately physiological stress as the emotions are also physiologically based in the very physiology that also ensures our survival. Excess emotional stress can also induce post-traumatic stress symptoms for that very reason, something psychology is just beginning to understand to some extent. We did not think that she had a good prognosis for quick change in her traumatic stress symptoms.
What we found, to our surprise, was that four weeks later – when we went to interview her – she had gone back to work, buying fish near the ocean and selling it later in the local market, a week after the treatment! She still said that she was depressed and cried a lot, but she was able to go back to work near the ocean and even sleep a little better than before. And that really surprised us, because we didn’t expect that outcome. It was a most difficult case by all measures! But the surprises kept coming in the form of so many other cases where people healed so quickly.
There’s a boy with a nosebleed and one with a heart dysregulation. We just taught them a little bit – taught them how to discharge high arousal in the nervous system brought about by triggers that reminded them of the trauma and then come to a place of stability – and four weeks later, the boy with a nosebleed didn’t have nosebleeds, and the boy with a heartbeat dysregulation no longer had it either!
Some of these cases I talk about in my article Treating tsunami survivors for trauma (also featured in this newsletter.) Detailed case histories with photos and the specifics of the treatment/training we provided tsunami survivors can be accessed by readers under the photo essays under the section on projects in our website, www.traumavidya.org.
Arabella: In that article you mention the effectiveness of touch in healing. Owing to litigation over the use of touch – and sometimes its misuse – in psychological counseling, many therapists today refrain from touching clients. What are your thoughts on this?
Raja: The whole idea of touch is a big one, especially in the U.S. Culturally, it’s different there. In India, so long as people are being touched in what is considered to be a medical context, its o.k. But we are training trainers locally who cannot touch people easily, as easily as we can coming from the outside, to teach survivors self-touch in a way that’s supportive. At times it’s not as good as another nervous system touching them and helping to regulate them – to support them to find the self-regulation within themselves – but we find that self-touch is better than no-touch, right?
Arabella: Right! (Laughs.)
Raja: And we teach them how to touch each other within the family. That can be healing. So it can be done in the context of people whose touch is familiar and acceptable. When we were in India it was s o.k. for us from abroad to just go up and touch them because they didn’t mind, they thought that we’re medical professionals no matter how much we explained that we were indeed a different breed! But you cannot go to the villagers with whom you work on a regular basis and just touch them, especially cross-gender touching. So we taught survivors and those who work with them the value of self-touch, and that seems to be working quite well. It’s amazing what self-touch can do! It leaves survivors with a resource that they can readily use. Now, please note that this whole approach can be implemented without touch whatsoever. It is just that touch is so expedient and effective that it is almost unethical borderline criminal not to use it when it can relieve so much suffering so fast.
Arabella: You reference “self-healing tendencies,” propensities Peter Levine ascribes to animals in his book Waking the Tiger; Healing Trauma. What do you believe has occurred in the human species to cut us off – to an extent – from those natural methods of healing from trauma still possessed by animals?
Raja: We still have them, as we have had them for eons; it’s just lack of understanding and then some misunderstanding based on some very limited models of the psyche and its processes. We still have them; we tap into them all the time. We just don’t understand them.
We have an ability to reflect, to think about what’s happening inside and outside of us – and between our inside and the outside. We have theories, and many such theories are partially correct and some are partially quite wrong, but most of them appear to be incomplete in their understanding of how the body can regulate itself back to health. Most conventional body therapies and body psychotherapies, while they compensate perhaps overcompensate for the gross neglect of the body by conventional Western psychology at large, appear to by and large manipulate the body to achieve their therapeutic goals, and lack adequate understanding of the self-regulating capacities of the brain and body aspects of the psyche of human beings, especially after severe traumas.
And what happens in the traumatized brain –it happens amongst animals too, when animals are symptomatic the same thing happens – is that the brain gets stuck in a particular pattern of trauma. You know the saying, the neurons that fire together, wire together! The symptoms remain locked in place due to those patterns of firing even though the threat is no longer there and the whole thing can become more entrenched neurologically over time. And it seems that, at times, people have difficulty because, to their disadvantage, they don’t understand that they can retrain their brain to go beyond what they are sensing all the time. Like the tongue. We all know that if we have a shaky tooth – a loose tooth – which the tongue should leave it alone, right? Our dentist tells us this. Our common sense tells us this. But the tongue keeps touching it, right?
Arabella: Right. (Laughing.)
Raja: In the same way, the brain can do something to the symptom in such a way that it doesn’t help to heal it like focusing on it too much or avoiding it altogether. So, we teach people. One of the important things that we have to teach the trainees in the professional trainings in Somatic Experiencing – of which I’m a trainer – also very important in teaching the survivors in the Indian villages as well- is teaching them how to pay attention to their symptoms, their dysregulated physiology, in such a way that the self-regulating tendencies are not covered rather found and encouraged and that the symptoms are not made worse.
Arabella: If you were to leave us with a suggestion for how we might self-heal from any trauma we have experienced, what would it be?
Raja: Trusting that your body and brain, especially the lower brain and associated body structures and processes, have the ability to heal the symptoms of traumatic stress. And that some of the symptoms that happen in the short-term like shaking are indications that the process of self-regulation is actually happening.
There are many things you can do. Not to panic about these unusual signs that occur in the body after a trauma – but to notice them as normal processes in an abnormal situation – prevents further panic from setting in. And then, trusting that if you pay attention to the whole body – as opposed to a single instance in the body that’s troubling you a lot – you might actually start to experience and encourage self-healing tendencies sooner. For example, you might start to feel good in the body when one part of the body is feeling really bad. And by holding both the good and bad feelings in your awareness, you might actually help the body to start the self-regulation process and get it back in place – back to equilibrium – much more quickly.
Arabella: How do you teach SBGI students – as well as those at the Foundation for Human Enrichment, the non-profit educational, research, and outreach institution founded by Peter Levine– to prepare themselves for work in the field of healing others?
Raja: ‘How do I teach them?’ – are you talking about the content of the training, or…?
Arabella: Ah, yeah – or, what are your secret ingredients, what do you personally bring to your teaching of these techniques that helps to prepare your students in their work with healing others?
Raja: Oh. Trust in self-regulation, really. Allowing self-regulation. In stressing that point over and over again – and I have to say this because, you know, even conventional body-oriented psychotherapies, even when they tend to the body, they don’t rely as much on self-regulation! It’s too oriented toward operating on the body from the voluntary centers of the brain! And to really go deeper and tap into enormous wells of self-regulation requires letting go of all those strategies! You must trust, and let go into these self-regulating tendencies! Which is of course some times hard to do when people are already stuck in certain modes of processing due to their training, as in teaching old dogs new tricks, something that we do not have to deal as much with when we treat the simple folks in the fishing villages in India.
Self-regulating tendencies are much more powerful because they also tap into the energy systems around us that our body is based on. Of course, I’ve just made a switch from the Western model to the Eastern model.
Arabella: (Laughs.) That’s o.k. We’ll let you do that!
Raja: O.k. That’s one of the things we can easily do in India because people are quite used to energy. And we can call it whatever it is! It’s the spontaneous expansion and spiraling of phenomena within the body that, when we get used to it, will allow us to tolerate and facilitate much greater healing than we would experience from working on the body with a technique or when we just remain focused on the physical body only even if when we are focused on its considerable self-healing tendencies. The villagers would say that they felt God move within them again spontaneously and we would say yes please stay with it.
Arabella: I agree. As we conclude this interview, what non-dualistic teaching – pertaining to our need to care for others – can you share with us from Advaita Vedanta?
Raja: Advaita Vedanta is based on a basic premise that awareness is enough, that a singular awareness is the only un-altering reality there is, out of which manifests this apparent duality of you and me and everything else. And to grasp that eternal truth about one’s nature in the face of transient traumas or life itself one happens to find oneself in is the biggest resource that a human being can have. In fact, it’s considered to be the biggest achievement of the human psyche.
In order to reach that level, there are many different qualifications. None of them, actually, are together sufficient, but they appear to be sometimes necessary but then again not always! The psyche appears to be too complex to offer easy recipes for enlightenment! However, one such qualification is the ability to tolerate opposites in the body. If you want to think about opposite experiences – extreme experiences – it’s hard to imagine something more extreme and opposite than a traumatic experience when compared with normal experience. So when we work with trauma, and learn to tolerate the extremes – the fragmentation that can be produced by the survival physiology of the body – and also to tolerate the expansion that can come in the polarity of it, then we are able to tolerate any number of extreme experiences both in intensity and polarity. That gives us the ability to remain a witness in the most chaotic of situations, inside and outside us. That ability at the basic level of the body also appears to give us the ability to tolerate experiences that are dependent on it, such as feelings. And that’s what I think that Advaita Vedanta would bring to it as a perspective on the usefulness of SE or Somatic Experiencing to healing trauma as well preparing people for other achievements by the psyche.
Arabella: Wonderful! Thank you so much Raja.
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