I'm almost through Waking the Tiger, by Peter A. Levine. I'm not going to go into a full summary in this post, but I will start posting a few of the insights from the book that I think will be most transferable to the PATHS/RDT modality.

The basic premise of the book is that trauma in humans is the result of a natural physiological process gone awry with the help of our conscious minds. Like other mammals, humans have the instinctual (reptilian) brain, the limbic (emotional or mammalian) brain, but we also have the neo-cortex to complicate and enrich life.

Levine believes his method of re-negotiating traumas through the "felt sense" of the body is the way to bring the natural process out of the frozen deer-in-the-headlights phase, to a healthy resolution. Levine also believes that the hysterics of therapies that make a person re-live or re-enact the original traumatizing experience actually can re-traumatize a person. Those methods aren't a whole lot better than the unconscious re-enactment traumatized people do when they continually sprain the same ankle, create the same lousy job, or get in the same car "accident," over and over again.

What can this do for PATHS, or a PTSD module?

1. The module can help the person manage the effects of trauma: the emotional dysregulation can be corrected through the right behavioral and biochemical instructions to the brain, weird symptoms can be managed, etc. This will enable a person to function a whole lot better and gain insight into the landscape of their trauma, so that the "re-enactment compulsion" (what Lynn Grabhorn calls the "vibration forever seeking its match") is switched off to allow the person to at least quit screwing up their life before the root is addressed.

2. Address the physiological root of the trauma, what Levine's method aims to do, but swifter and more effectively with use of RDT. The way I understand this, the problem is less about certain "triggers" for a person, it is more about addressing the physiological reasons why a person can never seem to respond to the "trigger" a different way, despite all the cognitive and emotional work on that issue in the world. The physiological picture of trauma is the person is physically stuck in the "freeze" or deer-in-the-headlights response.

To be continued....