The Next Step... Life Pleasure in Advanced Recovery

By Steven Hoskinson, MA, MAT

Saturday, January 2nd, 2010 | Originally published in the CuttingEdge Winter 2010 Newsletter

One of the main premises of my approach in Somatic Experiencing® (SE) is that trauma is an unintegrated resource. This is a central issue for the next step for the recovery community. Having discovered helplessness, most have discovered help in community and higher power. What about one's personal access to empowerment and joy in living? As I work with people in recovery, I am awed by the degree of courage and character written in the faces and hearts of my clients.

And yet my own honoring of what it took to leave the heroin, the alcohol, the sex addiction, the many substances, often falls into the cleft between myself and those seeking a next step. It is as if a hidden program comes online that says, "Beware of feeling too good." This can lead to an often unrecognized hypervigilance to do the right thing. It is difficult to "let go and let God" when there's one place not to go: too much of a good thing. However, the line at the border designating "too much" is often drawn, for safety's sake, too far on this side of enjoying life. It's as if a person's system has identified the danger area, and then erected multiple layers of fences to keep the person away—and thus safe.

In other words, possible triggers toward relapse are encased away from experience so they might not explode into destruction. Often these potential triggers are actually related to important energies of interest, engagement, excitement, and pleasure. The question of how to safely distinguish and engage in healthy pleasure—and how to integrate it—is the topic for consideration. Those in early recovery have a host of prerequisite learnings and un-learnings to undertake and a foundation to establish; the consideration now is for advanced recovery steps.

In the recovery community, we are fond of quoting Einstein: "We can't solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them." This raises the question of right effort and the question of the efficiency of work in self-development. In our SE training, we distinguish between the efforts of "doing," which characterize the early stages of treatment. Classically known as ego strengthening, agency and goal-directed behavior are antidotes to helplessness and feeling out-of-control. We help people learn to control compulsive and destructive patterns of thinking, behaving, and feeling. The key tool is learning to direct attention to the external environment and internal experiences that give a boost to functioning and one's sense of self. This involves tools of psychological intervention, for example, from the cognitive-behavioral field, and the beginning practices of mindful awareness gleaned from wisdom traditions. Furthermore, since trauma means a loss of control, the support gained from these top-down approaches are key tools for a person seeking to avoid being overwhelmed by traumatic feeling. However, these are only necessary pre-conditions for the work to follow, which involves finding the inner, intrinsic support that comes from learning how and where to let go of control—especially of directed attention.

The important dimensions of experience are the ubiquitous conditioned patterns of inhibition vs. disinhibition. (For example, a therapy client begins to be angry [activation] but then breaks down into tears [inhibition]. This keeps overall activation from getting out-of-hand and thus stays within a limited range.) Whereas the dilemma for earlier recovery involves problems in impulse control, or too little inhibition, the dilemma for mature recovery is tending toward an overinhibition of organismic experience, or the inhibition of cycles of feeling and excitation/arousal. This inhibition clips arousal cycles and prevents them from reaching a threshold for deactivation. Gradually learning to allow the fuller experience of, say, excitement (in the positive sense) or agitation (in the negative sense) is absolutely essential for re-establishing equilibrium and resilience. To really feel excitement means to feel it in sensation, in the body. To feel in the body, however, means to potentiate the experience. There is a natural threshold for these cycles that practitioners learn in my SE trainings. Activation going up to that threshold of arousal is the trigger for de-arousal. Going over that threshold can re-enact traumatic cycles of upset. So, clearly, the balance of how much is too much is central not only to those in recovery, but also for those who treat those in recovery—and it is subtle.

Our human nervous system functions according to patterns of activation-deactivation. The notion of synchronized oscillation is becoming more and more known in science as the heart of organismic functioning. As a rhythmic process, it is seen in the coordination of the 10,000 cells of the heart's pacemaker, in the rhythm of the heart pumping and resting, in the circadian rhythms of our activation-deactivation related to light and dark. These rhythms, from the smallest single nerve cell to the largest cycles based on internal clocks, are the nested rhythms forming the foundation of our being. In fact, the harmony of these rhythms, the organism in synch with light and dark, sun and moon, winter and summer, is the organismic experience of wholeness and well-being. The de-synchronization of these results in illness and dysfunction. For those wishing to advance their recovery, what must be recovered is the fullness of the rhythmic experience of living: the spontaneity of approach and avoidance, of joy and sadness, of play and work, of excitement and silence. The re-establishment of balance in these rhythms means also the completion of incomplete survival responses. These are the high-energy nervous system motor programs of self-protection (fight, flight, and freeze) that naturally take precedence over living simply in the moment. (See my previous articles in the CuttingEdge, summers 2006 and 2008: www.themeadows.com/cuttingedge).

Thankfully, The Meadows has embraced many tools for this recovery and employs many therapists with the skills to work through both the complexity and simplicity of this process. Having trained them, I know them personally and have been warmed by their sincerity and authenticity. This is important because, as you can tell from the description above, training in this process goes beyond cognitive ideas; it becomes a matter of deep feeling and a way of living. Indeed, the success of living, in the end, depends on finding the right support at the right moment—and learning when to hold on and when to let go.

Saving oneself from endless cycles of disintegration by addiction too often means sacrificing one's access to unencumbered pleasure, and working too hard. The next step, then, is to gently and gradually probe the boundaries of the sensate experience of healthy pleasure. The sensate experience of healthy pleasure is otherwise known as coming to our senses. This new way of thinking is not even thinking per se, but what Eugene Gendlin called the "felt sense." Coming into this clarity is like a fluidity of being: Perception is open, thought is calmed, and sensation and emotion are oriented to the here-and-now. On the other hand, the high-octane reward of achieving goals, ticking things off my to-do list, is a pale simulation of pleasure in the living process of organic completion. Living more from instinct—guided by practices of ancient wisdom—will be truly possible only when our emergency survival programs have deactivated. Happily, the tools for organic deactivation are available. With the resulting relaxation, an orientation to normal human pleasures can emerge: family and friends, movement, food, water, being in nature, connection with all of life. In one word: love. Says Pangyun: "My magical power and miraculous gift: drawing water and chopping wood." We would only add, "...and enjoying every moment of it." ∞

About the Author

Under the auspices of Hoskinson Consulting in Encinitas, California, Steven Hoskinson, MA, MAT, is an international consultant and trainer for clinicians and trauma treatment providers. Steven is a Senior International Instructor for the Foundation for Human Enrichment and has done research in creativity, myth, and spirituality. His perspectives include evolutionary, developmental, cognitive-behavioral, and systems approaches within a mindfulness framework. Other major influences include personal mentoring with Peter Levine, PhD; more than 20 years of experience in the contemplative arts; and a decade as a practicing aikidoist. www.HoskinsonConsulting.org