Take a photo of a barcode or cover
informative
medium-paced
Overall I would say this was a worthwhile read, but not perfect. Generally I find books like this to be heavily flawed. However, I did appreciate some of the language used to talk about the mind-body connection and the importance of grounding.
challenging
informative
reflective
slow-paced
Incredibly dense but informative and helpful. I’d like to come back to it in a few months and read it again.
hopeful
informative
reflective
slow-paced
I really admire this author and can see how and why she is a leader in the military and in higher education. There was a lot going on in this book and it is definitely not optimal for lay people, but it was very good nonetheless and I’m looking forward to learning more about her program.
One of the most enlightening books I've read. It gave me a better understanding of the many facets of stress and trauma and a new way of dealing with them. Outstanding!
I read this bit by bit over several months, because I found that I got pretty emotional reading some sections and wanted to absorb and recover instead of just zipping through it. But it was engaging enough to zip through if I wanted to... every chapter had some kind of nugget of wisdom that I wanted to talk to my friends about and seek to understand better. I often recommend it to complete strangers. It is incredibly liberating to understand the neuroscience behind stress and trauma. This book helped me forgive myself for things that aren't my fault and put real solutions into practice.
I read this twice and have taken many notes. For those working through trauma I heartily suggest this book.
Oh dear, lots of notes for this one. It will take me awhile to upload all of them.
Here goes:
All research is me-search.
Mindfulness based training helps us learn how to direct and sustain our attention - and thereby stabilize awareness - so that we can become aware of, learn from, and modulate these different mind-body experiences.
Without adequate recovery after chronic stress and/or trauma, the mind-body system remains activated and doesn't return to its regulated equilibrium. Systems become dysregulated.
Extreme behavior is usually linked to extreme dysregulation - the hallmark of someone masking, suppressing, denying, self-medicating, or coping with extreme dysregulation the best way they know how.
The effects from being a stressed-out office worker are more closely related to those experienced by a combat veteran with PTSD than the usual societal narrative would have us believe.
The US is one of the most violent, stressed, and traumatized countries in the world.
About 1/4 of American adults currently have a mental illness, and nearly half will develop at least one mental illness during their lifetime - such that mental illnesses account for more disability than any other group of illnesses, including cancer and CVD.
While Americans constitute only 4% of the world's population, we consume 75% of the world's prescriptions.
Drug overdoses are the leading cause of death for Americans under 50, with opiods causing 2/3 of them.
1 in 5 Americans report overeating/eating unhealthy foods frequently because of stress.
Suffering comes in many flavors, but it's still suffering.
Discrimination, prejudice, and harassment - from any -ism - don't have to actually be experienced to create toxic effects in our mind-body systems. We can experience toxic effects through learning, remembering, and/or anticipating.
Capitalism also feeds our society-wide mixed messaging: It tends to value and incentivize productivity and profits, while disregarding, denying, and ignoring many costs and consequences of these profits.
When any of us experience stress, trauma, negative emotions, cravings, 'irrational' impulses, or the urge to make violent or harmful choices, it's really nothing more than our past conditioning playing out. It doesn't actually say anything about who we really are.
Rather than self-improvement, the most direct path to feeling better, thriving during stress and trauma, and making effective choices is actually self-understanding.
Neuroplasticity - the brain constantly rewiring itself in response to our repeated experiences, with every sensory input, body movement, reward signal, thought, emotion, stress arousal, and association between stimulus and response.
The brain can be changed and rewired without any input from the outside world. In fact, the brain changes simply from repetitive thought patterns and/or chronic stress arousal. Over time, worrying can become a habit, and the amygdalae can actually thicken, becoming hypersensitive to worry, prompting even more anxiety. Vicious cycle.
The repetition of any experience makes it easier to do - and harder not to do - again in the future. This is the basis of neuroplasticity. This is why habits are hard to start/stop.
Greater physical activity and higher cardio-respiratory fitness levels are linked with better brain oxygenation, healthier brain activity patterns, and greater gray matter volume in the prefrontal cortex and hippocampus, brain regions involved in executive functioning and explicit memory.
Since many of use spend a lot of time on autopilot, we're actually choosing to allow our unconscious habits and patterns to drive most of our repeated experiences.
For activities that require thinking brain attention, there's really no such thing as multitasking - instead, we're actually task-switching and dividing our attention.
College students using instant messenger while reading a textbook took 25% longer to read the passage - not including IM time - compared with students who simply read.
Drivers talking on their cell phones were more than twice as likely to fail to stop appropriately at intersections. Researchers concluded that 'a person who drives while talking on a cell phone...is a worse driver than an individual at the legal limit of alcohol intoxication.
While we may have genetic tendency toward a particular trait, whether that tendency actually manifests through gene expression is strongly influenced by our environment and our habits.
One of the most common epigenetic changes from chronic stress or trauma, without adequate recovery, shows up in immune system functioning.
Chronic stress arousal, especially during childhood, programs the macrophages in a dysregulated way. This alters inflammatory response.
After an hour, sustained stress arousal suppresses immunity, down to 40 to 70% below our normal baseline.
Because the ventral PSNS is deeply involved with both social engagement and recovery functions, one important implication is that if we experience difficulty regulating our stress arousal, we're also likely to have trouble creating and maintaining workable, supportive, and satisfying relationships, in both personal and professional settings.
Well-being mode is available only when the survival brain neurocepts safety and the body is releasing oxytocin, the social-bonding hormone.
Executive functioning is like a credit bank: We can deplete it through heavy use in 2 ways. 1) We might deplete it through what are called 'cold' cognitive tasks - mental tasks that require detailed attention and focus - such as reading dense text, writing a report, or completing detailed calculations. 2) We might deplete it through 'hot' regulatory tasks - conscious, top-down efforts to curb cravings, re-frame or compartmentalize negative emotions, and manage or suppress stress arousal.
Because nerve fibers in the hippocampus don't develop the fatty sheath that allows them to conduct electricity until we're about 2 years old (myelination), it's rare to have explicit memories from ou earliest years.
Executive functioning and explicit memory functions may be impaired or damaged with prolonged or high stress levels.
Tedious or familiar tasks may require greater stress arousal to create focus and motivation. This is actually one of the reasons why people procrastinate with unpleasant tasks: As the deadline looms, their stress arousal increases, eventually creating enough stress to motivate them to handle it.
Until the survival brain, nervous system, and body have an opportunity to finish the incomplete defensive strategy and discharge its associated stress activation, the survival brain continues to perceive the event as ongoing.
The thinking brain often unwittingly serves as one of the primary obstacles to a complete recovery ever happening. Instead, to manage increasing symptoms of dysregulation, most traumatized humans cope with a range of behaviors that are socially acceptable - while tragically only narrowing the window further.
Colic, which affects roughly 1 in 5 babies - may be a sign that the infant's ventral PSNS circuit is having difficulty learning how to regulate parasympathetic processes, including sucking swallowing, and bonding with mother.
Attachment style is more related to parental (especially maternal) sensitivity and attunement.
Infants may be predisposed to attend to their mothers' heightened-arousal states, such as reactions to negative, threatening, or angering events.
Hyperactive macrophages also continue to release inflammatory cytokines to turn inflammation on, long after physical trauma that triggered them is gone.
Cortisol overproduction has been linked with depression, type 2 diabetes, active alcoholism, anorexia, hyperthyroidism, panic disorder, and OCD. Conversely, cortisol underproduction has been linked with PTSD, fibromyalgia, chronic fatigue, hypothyroid, allergies, asthma, RA, and other autoimmune diseases.
Too conveniently, we judge their choices from a place of ignorance - not fully recognizing that each of us has the potential to exhibit the same behavior, given appropriate conditions. The more we collectively deny the understandable reasons for their behavior - and the more we condemn them for that behavior - the more we trap them into their current patterns and stifle their efforts to change.
In Robert Scaer's practice, the most powerful predictors of prolonged and/or severe post-accident whiplash symptoms include having experienced physical and sexual abuse, a difficult birth, intense medical treatment, or and alcoholic parent during childhood, or having experienced discrimination, harassment, or other relational trauma during adulthood.
Possible the single most important choice we make in daily life affecting the width of our window is how much high-quality sleep we get on a regular basis.
It is EXTREMELY DIFFICULT to maintain normal weight or lose weight when we're not getting adequate sleep.
People who are chronically lacking in social contacts are more likely to experience elevated levels of stress hormones and chronic inflammation. Not enough quality friendships is linked with CVD, HTN, autoimmune disorders, cancer, and slowed would healing.
Social media, junk food, alcohol, drugs, etc. usually make us feel better in the short term, which is why we're drawn to them when we're stressed. In fact, when we feel their pull, it's a clue that our mind-body system is activated and needs some recovery.
By the time salmon lay and fertilize their eggs, their chronically high levels of stress hormones have exhausted their energy stores and devastated their immune systems. As a result, after breeding, the salmon die. In other words, while their stress hormones help them mobilize enormous amounts of energy for their trek, chronic exposure to toxic tress levels eventually kills them.
We generally have little influence over our stressors. However, if we can eliminate, change, or influence a stressor without jeopardizing our goals or values, we probably should.
You might redirect your attention away from any stressed thinking brain habits that amp up stress arousal - such as rationalizing the distress away, judging ourselves for being stressed, ruminating about the stressor, catasrophizing about what-if worst-case scenarios, or comparing our experience to someone else's. For instance. you might redirect your attention instead to pleasant sounds or attractive colors in your surroundings. Or notice how your body is in contact with and supported by your surroundings, such as a chair, a bed, or the grass outside.
The first form of mental training that does provide domain-general learning is visualization of a physical skill, such as visualizing yourself running a race, performing surgery, or playing piano. Mental practice of the skill doesn't just improve muscle memory, as physical practice does. It also strengthens a more generalized understanding of the physical skill. Focused attention and open monitoring are two forms of mindfulness meditation that have been shown to confer domain general learning.
You may neither think of yourself as a warrior nor feel particularly connected to this archetype, but anytime you speak out against an injustice, protect someone else from harm, risk your life or your livelihood to stand up for a principle, you are calling on the Warrior. Warrior traditions throughout the ages, from the Tibetan warriors and Japanese samurai in the East to the Spartans and Native American tribes in the West, have offered different practices to train the mind body system to embody the qualities of wisdom and courage with a wide window. Although the list of specific warrior qualities varies somewhat by tradition, wisdom and courage show up consistently as the most important.
All warrior traditions shared a common understanding of the goal of practice - to follow the path consistently and thereby cultivate self-mastery. The path isn't about making progress or striving to get somewhere. Such striving can actually work against cultivating warrior qualities. In fact the more compulsively a warrior struggles for a particular achievement, such as winning martial arts belts or attaining particular mind states, the more attached her ego becomes to that outcome - and the less likely she can access wisdom and courage.
The strength from weight training is fungible, which means it can be employed in every facet of our lives.
We can't simply muscle the thinking brain into setting aside its expectations, comparisons, opinions, and judgments. We can only train the mind by directing the attention so that, over time, it builds the capacity to set these things aside naturally.
Wisdom requires trusting that when we fully arrive in the present moment and see it clearly, from this awareness will emerge the most perfectly appropriate response for this exact situation. When we operate from this place, it can even feel like we're not doing anything at all.
Since the survival brain is not verbal, the way that it communicates with us is through emotions and physical sensations. Whether we receive the survival brain's transmission correctly, however, depends on our capacity to notice, tolerate, and accurately interpret the message being conveyed by emotions and physical sensations. This capacity is called interoceptive awareness.
For people with narrowed windows, mindfulness practice by itself has the potential to make their dysregulation worse. In particular, a mindfulness-only training regimen increases the risk that someone with a narrowed window will become more aware of their dysregulation - but not understand how to work with it effectively. Thus, it's ethically imperative, in order not to cause harm, that the introduction of mindfulness practices in a any high-stress environment - and among people with narrowed windows - needs to be paired with skills for nervous system self-regulation.
Mindfulness alone, w/o skills to regulate the nervous system, may actually flood our mind-body system with heightened attention on the stress response, which often worsens our ability to self-regulate and exacerbates symptoms. That is, if you're extremely aware of your mind-body system and you're feeling stressed, all you may be able to do is focus on the stress, which could actually amplify the stress arousal and its cognitive, emotional, and physiological effects.
Dr. Willoughby Britton argues that Western scientific research about mindfulness has been biased toward over-representing positive results and examining potential benefits, w/o adequate attention to potential harms or risks.
Here goes:
All research is me-search.
Mindfulness based training helps us learn how to direct and sustain our attention - and thereby stabilize awareness - so that we can become aware of, learn from, and modulate these different mind-body experiences.
Without adequate recovery after chronic stress and/or trauma, the mind-body system remains activated and doesn't return to its regulated equilibrium. Systems become dysregulated.
Extreme behavior is usually linked to extreme dysregulation - the hallmark of someone masking, suppressing, denying, self-medicating, or coping with extreme dysregulation the best way they know how.
The effects from being a stressed-out office worker are more closely related to those experienced by a combat veteran with PTSD than the usual societal narrative would have us believe.
The US is one of the most violent, stressed, and traumatized countries in the world.
About 1/4 of American adults currently have a mental illness, and nearly half will develop at least one mental illness during their lifetime - such that mental illnesses account for more disability than any other group of illnesses, including cancer and CVD.
While Americans constitute only 4% of the world's population, we consume 75% of the world's prescriptions.
Drug overdoses are the leading cause of death for Americans under 50, with opiods causing 2/3 of them.
1 in 5 Americans report overeating/eating unhealthy foods frequently because of stress.
Suffering comes in many flavors, but it's still suffering.
Discrimination, prejudice, and harassment - from any -ism - don't have to actually be experienced to create toxic effects in our mind-body systems. We can experience toxic effects through learning, remembering, and/or anticipating.
Capitalism also feeds our society-wide mixed messaging: It tends to value and incentivize productivity and profits, while disregarding, denying, and ignoring many costs and consequences of these profits.
When any of us experience stress, trauma, negative emotions, cravings, 'irrational' impulses, or the urge to make violent or harmful choices, it's really nothing more than our past conditioning playing out. It doesn't actually say anything about who we really are.
Rather than self-improvement, the most direct path to feeling better, thriving during stress and trauma, and making effective choices is actually self-understanding.
Neuroplasticity - the brain constantly rewiring itself in response to our repeated experiences, with every sensory input, body movement, reward signal, thought, emotion, stress arousal, and association between stimulus and response.
The brain can be changed and rewired without any input from the outside world. In fact, the brain changes simply from repetitive thought patterns and/or chronic stress arousal. Over time, worrying can become a habit, and the amygdalae can actually thicken, becoming hypersensitive to worry, prompting even more anxiety. Vicious cycle.
The repetition of any experience makes it easier to do - and harder not to do - again in the future. This is the basis of neuroplasticity. This is why habits are hard to start/stop.
Greater physical activity and higher cardio-respiratory fitness levels are linked with better brain oxygenation, healthier brain activity patterns, and greater gray matter volume in the prefrontal cortex and hippocampus, brain regions involved in executive functioning and explicit memory.
Since many of use spend a lot of time on autopilot, we're actually choosing to allow our unconscious habits and patterns to drive most of our repeated experiences.
For activities that require thinking brain attention, there's really no such thing as multitasking - instead, we're actually task-switching and dividing our attention.
College students using instant messenger while reading a textbook took 25% longer to read the passage - not including IM time - compared with students who simply read.
Drivers talking on their cell phones were more than twice as likely to fail to stop appropriately at intersections. Researchers concluded that 'a person who drives while talking on a cell phone...is a worse driver than an individual at the legal limit of alcohol intoxication.
While we may have genetic tendency toward a particular trait, whether that tendency actually manifests through gene expression is strongly influenced by our environment and our habits.
One of the most common epigenetic changes from chronic stress or trauma, without adequate recovery, shows up in immune system functioning.
Chronic stress arousal, especially during childhood, programs the macrophages in a dysregulated way. This alters inflammatory response.
After an hour, sustained stress arousal suppresses immunity, down to 40 to 70% below our normal baseline.
Because the ventral PSNS is deeply involved with both social engagement and recovery functions, one important implication is that if we experience difficulty regulating our stress arousal, we're also likely to have trouble creating and maintaining workable, supportive, and satisfying relationships, in both personal and professional settings.
Well-being mode is available only when the survival brain neurocepts safety and the body is releasing oxytocin, the social-bonding hormone.
Executive functioning is like a credit bank: We can deplete it through heavy use in 2 ways. 1) We might deplete it through what are called 'cold' cognitive tasks - mental tasks that require detailed attention and focus - such as reading dense text, writing a report, or completing detailed calculations. 2) We might deplete it through 'hot' regulatory tasks - conscious, top-down efforts to curb cravings, re-frame or compartmentalize negative emotions, and manage or suppress stress arousal.
Because nerve fibers in the hippocampus don't develop the fatty sheath that allows them to conduct electricity until we're about 2 years old (myelination), it's rare to have explicit memories from ou earliest years.
Executive functioning and explicit memory functions may be impaired or damaged with prolonged or high stress levels.
Tedious or familiar tasks may require greater stress arousal to create focus and motivation. This is actually one of the reasons why people procrastinate with unpleasant tasks: As the deadline looms, their stress arousal increases, eventually creating enough stress to motivate them to handle it.
Until the survival brain, nervous system, and body have an opportunity to finish the incomplete defensive strategy and discharge its associated stress activation, the survival brain continues to perceive the event as ongoing.
The thinking brain often unwittingly serves as one of the primary obstacles to a complete recovery ever happening. Instead, to manage increasing symptoms of dysregulation, most traumatized humans cope with a range of behaviors that are socially acceptable - while tragically only narrowing the window further.
Colic, which affects roughly 1 in 5 babies - may be a sign that the infant's ventral PSNS circuit is having difficulty learning how to regulate parasympathetic processes, including sucking swallowing, and bonding with mother.
Attachment style is more related to parental (especially maternal) sensitivity and attunement.
Infants may be predisposed to attend to their mothers' heightened-arousal states, such as reactions to negative, threatening, or angering events.
Hyperactive macrophages also continue to release inflammatory cytokines to turn inflammation on, long after physical trauma that triggered them is gone.
Cortisol overproduction has been linked with depression, type 2 diabetes, active alcoholism, anorexia, hyperthyroidism, panic disorder, and OCD. Conversely, cortisol underproduction has been linked with PTSD, fibromyalgia, chronic fatigue, hypothyroid, allergies, asthma, RA, and other autoimmune diseases.
Too conveniently, we judge their choices from a place of ignorance - not fully recognizing that each of us has the potential to exhibit the same behavior, given appropriate conditions. The more we collectively deny the understandable reasons for their behavior - and the more we condemn them for that behavior - the more we trap them into their current patterns and stifle their efforts to change.
In Robert Scaer's practice, the most powerful predictors of prolonged and/or severe post-accident whiplash symptoms include having experienced physical and sexual abuse, a difficult birth, intense medical treatment, or and alcoholic parent during childhood, or having experienced discrimination, harassment, or other relational trauma during adulthood.
Possible the single most important choice we make in daily life affecting the width of our window is how much high-quality sleep we get on a regular basis.
It is EXTREMELY DIFFICULT to maintain normal weight or lose weight when we're not getting adequate sleep.
People who are chronically lacking in social contacts are more likely to experience elevated levels of stress hormones and chronic inflammation. Not enough quality friendships is linked with CVD, HTN, autoimmune disorders, cancer, and slowed would healing.
Social media, junk food, alcohol, drugs, etc. usually make us feel better in the short term, which is why we're drawn to them when we're stressed. In fact, when we feel their pull, it's a clue that our mind-body system is activated and needs some recovery.
By the time salmon lay and fertilize their eggs, their chronically high levels of stress hormones have exhausted their energy stores and devastated their immune systems. As a result, after breeding, the salmon die. In other words, while their stress hormones help them mobilize enormous amounts of energy for their trek, chronic exposure to toxic tress levels eventually kills them.
We generally have little influence over our stressors. However, if we can eliminate, change, or influence a stressor without jeopardizing our goals or values, we probably should.
You might redirect your attention away from any stressed thinking brain habits that amp up stress arousal - such as rationalizing the distress away, judging ourselves for being stressed, ruminating about the stressor, catasrophizing about what-if worst-case scenarios, or comparing our experience to someone else's. For instance. you might redirect your attention instead to pleasant sounds or attractive colors in your surroundings. Or notice how your body is in contact with and supported by your surroundings, such as a chair, a bed, or the grass outside.
The first form of mental training that does provide domain-general learning is visualization of a physical skill, such as visualizing yourself running a race, performing surgery, or playing piano. Mental practice of the skill doesn't just improve muscle memory, as physical practice does. It also strengthens a more generalized understanding of the physical skill. Focused attention and open monitoring are two forms of mindfulness meditation that have been shown to confer domain general learning.
You may neither think of yourself as a warrior nor feel particularly connected to this archetype, but anytime you speak out against an injustice, protect someone else from harm, risk your life or your livelihood to stand up for a principle, you are calling on the Warrior. Warrior traditions throughout the ages, from the Tibetan warriors and Japanese samurai in the East to the Spartans and Native American tribes in the West, have offered different practices to train the mind body system to embody the qualities of wisdom and courage with a wide window. Although the list of specific warrior qualities varies somewhat by tradition, wisdom and courage show up consistently as the most important.
All warrior traditions shared a common understanding of the goal of practice - to follow the path consistently and thereby cultivate self-mastery. The path isn't about making progress or striving to get somewhere. Such striving can actually work against cultivating warrior qualities. In fact the more compulsively a warrior struggles for a particular achievement, such as winning martial arts belts or attaining particular mind states, the more attached her ego becomes to that outcome - and the less likely she can access wisdom and courage.
The strength from weight training is fungible, which means it can be employed in every facet of our lives.
We can't simply muscle the thinking brain into setting aside its expectations, comparisons, opinions, and judgments. We can only train the mind by directing the attention so that, over time, it builds the capacity to set these things aside naturally.
Wisdom requires trusting that when we fully arrive in the present moment and see it clearly, from this awareness will emerge the most perfectly appropriate response for this exact situation. When we operate from this place, it can even feel like we're not doing anything at all.
Since the survival brain is not verbal, the way that it communicates with us is through emotions and physical sensations. Whether we receive the survival brain's transmission correctly, however, depends on our capacity to notice, tolerate, and accurately interpret the message being conveyed by emotions and physical sensations. This capacity is called interoceptive awareness.
For people with narrowed windows, mindfulness practice by itself has the potential to make their dysregulation worse. In particular, a mindfulness-only training regimen increases the risk that someone with a narrowed window will become more aware of their dysregulation - but not understand how to work with it effectively. Thus, it's ethically imperative, in order not to cause harm, that the introduction of mindfulness practices in a any high-stress environment - and among people with narrowed windows - needs to be paired with skills for nervous system self-regulation.
Mindfulness alone, w/o skills to regulate the nervous system, may actually flood our mind-body system with heightened attention on the stress response, which often worsens our ability to self-regulate and exacerbates symptoms. That is, if you're extremely aware of your mind-body system and you're feeling stressed, all you may be able to do is focus on the stress, which could actually amplify the stress arousal and its cognitive, emotional, and physiological effects.
Dr. Willoughby Britton argues that Western scientific research about mindfulness has been biased toward over-representing positive results and examining potential benefits, w/o adequate attention to potential harms or risks.
On the one hand, wow, cool! On the other, SOEGIOEASIHGOSEHGOSEHGOSEHGOIEHSGOHRSOGL. 4.22 stars.
PT: self-development/motivation, trauma books, books on psychology and endocrinology,
WIL
1) discussions of trauma for the traumatized in denial. There really is a need for this book. For the people who don't want to go to therapy. For the people who insist they're fine when they have nightmare disorder and PTSD. For the people who have a Reputation to maintain and ANY cracks in their exterior cannot be allowed. This is very directed and regimented speech for those who don't really want to acknowledge their vulnerabilities but want to get back to the stronger, more whole and put-together version of themselves that they lost along the way.
2) Stanley does NOT mess around. She is VERY clear and to the point, and MAN is that impactful! (It might be a bit intense for some readers, but there's something to be said for just saying it like it is, no subtlety or softness about it.)
3) Interesting information! Lots on the nervous system! Love that!! Good resource for those just learning about trauma and its anatomical impacts.
WIDL
1) (extracted from reading progress notes.) Microbiota. The overgeneralization of microbiota discussions in books makes me want to throw myself into the ocean. IT'S REALLY NOT THAT SIMPLE. And for something that regulates "70 percent" of immune response IT SHOULD BE MORE ACCURATELY ANALYZED AND DISCUSSED. also that ventral parasympathetic recalibration corresponds so CLEANLY with what I call Se establishment days makes my brain positively buzz with dopamine.
2) (extracted from reading progress notes.) G & R and chapter 13-14. "after exercise... [You] can try G and R again" uh ABSOLUTELY NOT THANKS. I mean sure it's effective but GOODNESS HEAVENS AT WHAT COST. Also, to anyone considering reading this: read chapter fourteen before you try your hand at G and R. Chapter thirteen will have you believe that you've got all possibilities covered but OHOOO there's more to it
3) (extracted from reading progress notes.) Stanley: I know you’re stressed and traumatized, and I’m here to help you through that!!
Also Stanley: [proceeds to stress and traumatize readers with horrifying statistics and overwhelm]"
NEUTRAL GROUND:
1) (extracted from reading progress notes.) This book and I are going to have a complicated relationship, and I know this because I'm 4% in and have already developed strange stomach spasms in response to the subject material. Points to the book for being quite clearly and immediately effective!! Perhaps efficacy in triggering an immediate physiological response is not the best quality in a book designed to help people heal trauma, but imma read it anyway."
UPDATE AFTER FINISHING BOOK: yea, this book and I have a complicated relationship for sure.
4.25 stars on Storygraph
PT: self-development/motivation, trauma books, books on psychology and endocrinology,
WIL
1) discussions of trauma for the traumatized in denial. There really is a need for this book. For the people who don't want to go to therapy. For the people who insist they're fine when they have nightmare disorder and PTSD. For the people who have a Reputation to maintain and ANY cracks in their exterior cannot be allowed. This is very directed and regimented speech for those who don't really want to acknowledge their vulnerabilities but want to get back to the stronger, more whole and put-together version of themselves that they lost along the way.
2) Stanley does NOT mess around. She is VERY clear and to the point, and MAN is that impactful! (It might be a bit intense for some readers, but there's something to be said for just saying it like it is, no subtlety or softness about it.)
3) Interesting information! Lots on the nervous system! Love that!! Good resource for those just learning about trauma and its anatomical impacts.
WIDL
1) (extracted from reading progress notes.) Microbiota. The overgeneralization of microbiota discussions in books makes me want to throw myself into the ocean. IT'S REALLY NOT THAT SIMPLE. And for something that regulates "70 percent" of immune response IT SHOULD BE MORE ACCURATELY ANALYZED AND DISCUSSED. also that ventral parasympathetic recalibration corresponds so CLEANLY with what I call Se establishment days makes my brain positively buzz with dopamine.
2) (extracted from reading progress notes.) G & R and chapter 13-14. "after exercise... [You] can try G and R again" uh ABSOLUTELY NOT THANKS. I mean sure it's effective but GOODNESS HEAVENS AT WHAT COST. Also, to anyone considering reading this: read chapter fourteen before you try your hand at G and R. Chapter thirteen will have you believe that you've got all possibilities covered but OHOOO there's more to it
3) (extracted from reading progress notes.) Stanley: I know you’re stressed and traumatized, and I’m here to help you through that!!
Also Stanley: [proceeds to stress and traumatize readers with horrifying statistics and overwhelm]"
NEUTRAL GROUND:
1) (extracted from reading progress notes.) This book and I are going to have a complicated relationship, and I know this because I'm 4% in and have already developed strange stomach spasms in response to the subject material. Points to the book for being quite clearly and immediately effective!! Perhaps efficacy in triggering an immediate physiological response is not the best quality in a book designed to help people heal trauma, but imma read it anyway."
UPDATE AFTER FINISHING BOOK: yea, this book and I have a complicated relationship for sure.
4.25 stars on Storygraph