Robin Shapiro

"Intimate relationship is the best source of resilience and growth and hope for the future."

Trauma & Attachment Therapy BLOG
Robin Shapiro's musing about trauma, attachment, and affect-based therapies,
and her book: Trauma Treatment Handbook: Protocols Across the Spectrum

Robin shares notes from UCLA conference speaker Daniel Siegel: A System's View of Disintegration & Integration

P.A.R.T.T.T.T
when fully
Present we can
Attune to the client or others and
Resonate with others and develop
Trust which is important because it activates the smart ventral vagus so the social engagement system turns on so that we can
Track what's going on in moment to moment experience which allows the
Truth to come out and creates
Transformation/healing.

We help clients become open systems: self-organized: chaotic moving toward complexity, flexibility and adaptable: energized and coherent.

Coherence comes from integration.

When not integrated we move toward rigidity (avoidance), chaos (flooding) or both. It's all about the mind regulating the energy and information flow.

Calming exercise: Put one hand on your heart, the other on your abdomen. Hold them there for a while. Try switching hands to see if you prefer one over the other. Most people do.

"There's a distinction between awareness and mental activity: Awareness is the infinite possibility of neural firings."

In trauma, mental activies get locked into rigidity and chaos and pull humans into limited possibility. With unresolved trauma, rigidity and chaos imprison the person's possibilities. Good therapy transforms the brain of the the client to totally shift their center of attention and stay present to the self and watch self and make sense of it. The labeling of the internal state downregulates the limbic system. The client knows that "this" is not "that". Integration is the capacity to sit with core awareness and sit with anything that comes in.

You can use mindfulness practice to help people distinguish between mental activity and true awareness. Ventral integration--being in touch with the bodily state: Track it and you transform. Supress it and it screws you up.

We are designed to be interdependent and interconnected. There's hope for we as humans to move from chaotic & rigid states to integration, kindness, and peace.