dynamic trauma integration
Awakening-Informed Trauma Therapy
Trauma is not the end, it is a doorway home
(all accounts are fictional composites to protect anonymity)
Malcom’s parents fought when he was a toddler. After their divorce he was called a “problem child.” He yelled, hit his brother, ran away, broke rules, and cried uncontrollably. Caught in custody fights, he lived with his dad and his dad’s new partner. At 13 he still wet the bed and woke from nightmares almost every night. His dad sent him to a therapeutic group home because he didn’t know what else to do. His behavior got worse there: he ran away, used drugs, joined gangs, and learned to protect himself from other teens and staff. That was the first of six homes before he aged out at 18.
I met Malcom when he was 63. Over six years of regular therapy we built a caring, honest relationship. He learned ways to cope with daily stress and trauma. He made friends, earned a master’s degree, paid off debt, managed health issues, and repaired some family ties. He grew in trust, racial pride, shame and responsibility, intimacy, body awareness, and presence. He bravely worked through past trauma and began creating the life he wanted.
One session he said, “Sunyata, I remember the first day we met. I didn’t know if I’d like you. I never liked therapists. No one ever wanted to help or know me.” I asked, “What was different with me?” He said, “You sat next to me.”
we
Learn to attune with others and build secure relationships that can survive the test of time. “Others” may mean parts of yourself, other people, trees, or the state of the world. “Other” is anything that is not “me”.
Even the most sensitive and good-intentioned people can get lost in not just building healthy relationships, but maintaining them through life’s ups and downs.
Through Dynamic Trauma Integration, you don’t just learn how to build healthy relationships, you learn to relate with how you relate. You learn to build a secure connection with relating itself. This is the relative world after all. This way you can learn to create secure attachments with all of life just as it is.
me
Heal traumas, learn skills, develop insights, and integrate experiences so that can feel secure, adaptable, and confident in yourself.
Through Dynamic Trauma Integration you can not only learn about yourself, you can learn how to learn about yourself. This will make you a truly secure person who can show up in this messy world in a healthy way. This is the difference between things feeling better for the short run and growing into the life you always dreamed of but couldn’t create. It is one thing to have a momentary “ah ha” or cope with a current stress, it is another thing to trust yourself even when you don’t know what to do.
This requires learning to notice your own perceptions (how you are seeing things) and creating more conscious choice over what you are perceiving.
between
Between the “Me” and the “We” is the “Us”. Healthy relating requires being able to notice and conscious interact with the space between things. In any relationship there are at least three parts: you, the other, and the relationship itself.
beyond
curious to learn more?
Here is a deep dive into what’s unique about
Dynamic Trauma Integration
Awakening
Dynamic Trauma Integration studies how people evolve from a state of dissociation into presence, using ideas and practices from psychology, anthropology, art, and spirituality.
Dynamic Processing Model can help you develop an intimate bond with life, like a child does with a secure caregiver.
Dynamic Trauma Integration explains what and why; Dynamic Processing Method explains how.
Life changes. It's temporary, clear, awake, responsive, spontaneous, and alive — always moving at every scale.
Dynamic
Parts of life affect each other. When living creatures sense their life is threatened, they reflexively try to protect and survive. If they can’t process the threat, it becomes trauma. When people experience repeated trauma, especially from an early age, their sense of self is eroded. Psychological research on complex and developmental trauma shows how important, complicated, sensitive, layered, flexible, and resilient the self is. Seen more broadly from different perspectives, complex trauma reveals how the self isn’t the center of everything—it's just one part, like a drop in the ocean.
trauma
Life is deeply connected and not separate. It goes beyond simple opposites/binaries. The everyday mirrors the extraordinary. Self and other reflect each other. Past and future are tied to the present. Hate and love, challenge and opportunity, trauma and wholeness mirror one another and come from the same infinite source.
integration
who am i?
Psychology began with the question, “What’s wrong with you?”
Trauma psychology started asking the question, “What happened to you?”
To awaken back to innate wholeness, one of the most important questions becomes, “Who are you?”
To help you discover who you really are, Dynamic Trauma Integration uses 6 main princiles:
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Real 3D life is precious and needs to be protected for the wellbeing of all living creatures. Technology has come a long way, but cannot take the place of real life presence for our nervous system, attachment system, and interconnectedness with the natural world.
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To work through subtle traumas and awaken to your core nature, people have to get beyond the self-improvement loop. Working on yourself over and over again will only get you so far. Develop a good enough sense of yourself, then grow back into the rest of life.
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To get out of the self-improvement loop, people must learn to work consciously with their perceptions - how they see and experience things.
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At a certain point, it doesn’t feel safe to grow beyond personal identity, personal protection, personal safety, and what is known. However, to reconnect back with all of life means growing beyond these. This requires learning to feel safe not feeling safe.
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Secure attachment with people is important for becoming a whole person. As people grow, their relationships change - and when relationships change, people change. Learning to work directly with the changing nature of relationships helps people grow beyond self-improvement and personal safety.
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People were never meant to live separately from the rest of life. To fully awaken, people need to learn to attach with all of life like they attach with other people. This includes elements of life like trees, air, space, time, directions, animals, colors. In this way presence isn’t bound to a particular object, it’s free.
“I do sincerely want to thank you for all your help thus far. I don’t think I’d be able to handle this in such stride without all the work we’ve done together. You have truly changed my life for the better in so many ways.”