From Wisdom 2.0 2019 in San Francisco.
16:35 min
CLEAR ALL
In the midst of trauma, everything means something. Signs and symbols appear. You’ve noticed them before, you’re a writer, but now you see them everywhere.
Argues that a primal wounding of the human spirit occurs in earliest human life that disrupts fundamental relationships and leads to anxiety, loneliness, and alienation; and shows how this wounding can be redeemed through therapy and through living one's life differently.
How each of us can become a therapeutic presence in the world. Images and sounds of war, natural disasters, and human-made devastation explicitly surround us and implicitly leave their imprint in our muscles, our belly and heart, our nervous systems, and the brains in our skulls.
Now, more than ever, people want to engage in meaningful dialogue about race and racism. It’s a vital goal, but how do we translate intention into practice? In the therapy world, what are clinicians of color telling their white colleagues?
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We’re seeing an explosion of medical research into psychedelics. Psilocybin, or shrooms, to treat major depressive disorder. Ayahuasca, a psychotropic plant medicine from the Amazon, and ibogaine, a potent hallucinogen from Africa, to treat addiction. LSD for anxiety.
Through this treatment plan, the patient was able to “reconceptualize her trauma” and “was able to move through difficult memories and emotions rather than letting them consume her,” explained U of O associate professor, Monnica Williams.
These substances are being touted as a game-changing intervention for mental health. But it’s not clear if their promise will be accessible to all.
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In addition to the tragic losses of life and health and jobs, we are grieving the losses of weddings, sports and the ability to buy eggs or get a haircut.
A top expert on human trauma argues that we vastly overestimate how common PTSD is and fail to recognize how resilient people really are. After 9/11, mental health professionals flocked to New York to handle what everyone assumed would be a flood of trauma cases. Oddly, the flood never came.
Most genetic studies completely ignore the science of epigenetics, which is how the environment actually turns certain genes on or off.
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