The Great Sphinx of Giza is a statute that was created in antiquity by the Egyptians. This statue is a portrayal of a creature that’s half-human and half cat. If we think about ourselves as though we’re part human and part animal, like the Sphinx, this gives us a concept that we can use to describe certain feelings that can get trapped in the animal part of us. Put simply, trauma causes us to experience ourselves like The Great Sphinx: as a dissociated riddle that is always in a state of conflict. To release trauma and overcome our animal nature, we have to have an opportunity to safely feel the feelings involved with being an animal with flesh and bones. We have to put those feelings into words. When we feel the feelings that our bodies experience and put those feelings into words, we release trauma. Once trauma is released, it is gone permanently.
Our bodies were designed to shake off trauma and stress, but the human mind, namely the left hemisphere of the brain, often prevents the body from acting out certain feelings or states of stress in favor of behaving in a certain way socially. Be sure to watch this video that shows what it looks like when an animal shakes off trauma to better understand the energies that get trapped in the body when we don’t have a way to release it.
When we talk about trauma, what we’re talking about are experiences that happen to our bodies that are too strange or too painful for us to put into words. A lot of people use the word “stress” to describe ongoing states of low-level trauma. Trauma can happen as a result of something as mundane as a dental appointment or as sensational as war. Indeed, trauma is subjective and whether the body experiences something as traumatic or not depends on each person’s individual makeup.
While a cat may experience trauma, cats are not able to put their traumatic feelings into words. Humans can put feelings into words though. Our ability, as humans, to put our feelings into words allows us to read, write, and transmit information across centuries to other humans. But the disconnect between the body’s ability to feel and sense and the brain’s ability to think in words is one of the primary, initial types of dissociation that makes humans unique in the world of animals.
Cats can sense danger. Unlike dogs and other animals, cats can never be fully tamed. They are always wild and always able to hunt and fish and survive in the wild, even if they’ve been thoroughly domesticated. Humans are similar. Perhaps this is why the ancient Egyptians chose to portray The Great Sphinx as part human, part cat. We are thoroughly domesticated, but humans also retain their ability to be wild, savage creatures in order to survive.
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What is Dissociation?
Humans are able to dissociate or mentally disconnect one part of themselves from other parts of themselves. Imagine a balloon that’s filled with water as the Core Self. Now imagine squeezing some of that water into two separate parts of the balloon by twisting it in the middle. Depending on the size and shape of the balloon and the amount of water in it, you might be able to produce a number of different compartments to represent different sub-selves or sub-personalities.
One of the first dissociations that happens in humans takes shape around the age of 2 years when a child begins to really learn how to talk. Newborn babies learn first how to make sounds to get their parent’s attention so that the child can get what it wants and what it needs. But then, children start to form words and phrases and eventually sentences. Even before a child knows the meaning of all of the words that they’re speaking, they can sing and form the proper sounds and rhythms of speech. Later, through experience in the world, the meaning of the words becomes clear to the child.
One of the major differences between learning a native language and learning a new language as someone who already knows how to speak fluently in another tongue is that native language is acquired through experience. New words in a new language are learned through study and comparison with the original, native language. When we learn our native tongue, we start as very young children to form words and sound bits that initially make no sense yet. We feel the words before we know what they mean. We notice intonation, body posture, and facial expression before we can learn the precise definition of words.
Between the ages of 2 and 5 years, children become like The Great Sphinx. The part of them that feels and that senses things is one part of them – one compartment of the balloon – the wild animal part of them – another compartment of the balloon – might be more like a cat. The part of them that thinks and that communicates using words is a new part that develops at this age as, the domesticated part of us that knows how to follow rules. By age 5, children are thoroughly dissociated into at least 2 parts or sub-personalities psychologically: a part or a sub-personality that has powerful feelings and sensory experiences and another part or sub-personality that can put those feelings and sensory experiences into words, produce logical concepts out of a body of disorganized information, and logically think about things.
Though the wild animal part of us is the part that knows how to survive no matter what the conditions are in the natural world, in modern society, we place a lot of emphasis on thought, particularly logical thought that’s expressed in words. The left hemisphere of the brain is the part of us that emphasizes logic and words. This is the part of us that can construct a story about something that happened to us (or about something that happened to another person) with a narrative arc that includes a beginning, a middle, and an end. Sometimes though, people live through storylines that are traumatic or strange, or that challenge consensus reality in some way. When this kind of story happens to a person, and that person lives through something that’s hard to put into words or something that other people (or the person themselves) don’t want to hear about for one reason or another, the body can, under certain conditions, get stuck in the process of reliving the feeling of the story over and over again until it can be put it into words and shake it off. Once the feelings involved in the story can be described to oneself, the story of what happened can be released from the process of perpetual looping.
What’s traumatic for one person may not be traumatic for another person. For example, Dr. Peter Levine, a trauma expert, described a story about a group of children who had been kidnapped and imprisoned underground. There were children of all ages in this underground hole. One day, two of the children leaned on a post in the middle of this deep hole. The post held up a big tarp and when they leaned on the post, the post fell and the tarp then fell in on the children. The two kids (who were about 10 years old), knew what was happening when the tarp started to fall and they saw the opportunity to escape and ushered themselves and the other children to safety. Once they were all above ground, the children who’d initiated the escape were alert and they yelled to the other children to run to safety. The other children, in contrast to the kids who initiated the escape (albeit unintentionally) were in a stunned, zombie-like state. In the years that followed, psychologists studied this group of children and found that the kids who had initiated the escape did very well and overcame the trauma. The children who were not actively involved in rescuing themselves, in contrast, developed symptoms of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD).
At this juncture, it’s important to explain that PTSD is a treatable problem if you work with the sacred indigenous medicines. Trauma-informed therapies like Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing / EMDR, guided meditation, and brain entrainment can be incredibly powerful in treating trauma that is within conscious awareness, but the sacred indigenous medicines are key to overcoming PTSD in a permanent way.
Click here to do a free trial of EMDR online.
Because humans are creatures that naturally dissociate into different sub-personalities or parts from a very young age, we tend to continue to dissociate into additional parts or “sub-personalities” as we grow into adults. Humans who live in urban environments tend to be more dissociated than humans who live in tribal or very isolated environments. Modern humans in the industrialized world must be able to fluently move from one complex social situation to another without accidentally forgetting the different rules that are required for each situation. We aren’t allowed to act out how we feel or even admit to the feelings that we experience in the various social situations that we have to navigate in our lives. For example, you might need to go to a place of religion and speak to people in that location and follow their rules on one day of the week but on another day or days of the week, you might need to go to a school or to a workplace and follow a very different set of rules. The rules for one location and one social group are often in conflict with the rules for the other social groups in the other locations. Trauma that happens at school might require the creation of 5 or more sub-personalities that are dissociated from the Core Self, for example. Normally, we pay no attention to these conflicts because different parts of us, different sub-personalities, step forward so that we embody the rules and proper behaviors expected of us in these different social situations. But in the modern world, humans travel, sometimes long distances and we have to be able to manage our own behaviors in social situations that are foreign to us.
Modern humans have this ability to dissociate from the Core of who we actually are. Psychological dissociation can be used intentionally as a way to maintain an extreme form of social flexibility and control over ourselves but it can also be something that happens unintentionally and even unconsciously as a pathological condition that’s completely out of our control and that makes us inflexible, rigid, and unable to adapt to new conditions. Essentially, whenever we talk to ourselves, there is literally one part of us talking to another part or parts of us.
Normal Dissociation
Every individual is made up of a system of dissociated psychological units that function a bit like an internal family. When Lydi and I studied hypnotherapy, we learned about different categories of sub-personalities. In hypnotherapy theory, there are sub-personalities that are fully functioning units of ourselves, except that these units are usually very focused in terms of their skills, their knowledge, and their appropriateness in terms of setting. I might, for example, have a sub-personality that deals with angry people at work. I may only embody this sub-personality for a few hours every month of my life. Let’s say that this sub-personality developed when I was 6 years old when an adult got angry with me about something and I stepped up with this sub-personality and defended myself. So this part of me is stuck at age 6 in a state of dissociation and it only has experience in the world with angry situations requiring self-defense. This sub-personality’s experience is thus very limited and because this part of me is not integrated, it doesn’t have access to any adult experiences that I’ve had outside of angry situations.
Also, angry sub-personalities, as a general rule, exist to protect more vulnerable sub-personalities that feel other emotions like sadness. This idea is cleverly depicted in the Disney movie Inside Out. We have all of these sub-personalities inside of us. Rather than have just a few sub-personalities though, as in the movie Inside Out, modern humans can have hundred of sub-personalities. Each sub-personality that is not integrated with the Core Self is constructed out of emotional content and when we embody it (when this emotional content steps into the autonomic nervous system to take over the body) it functions on the basis of the emotion that it carries, the limited experiences that it may have had in the world, and it remains the same age that it was when it was originally created. As such, sub-personalities tend to be younger than our body’s age and also significantly less mature.
When we integrate an angry part of us, the entire clique of sub-personalities that the angry part protects also integrates. Anger is always about self-protection. Sometimes anger is necessary and important for self-protection, but sometimes anger gets in the way of positive relationships and our ability to feel happy. For example, when a person has an angry sub-personality that must protect a group of sad or scared child sub-personalities, this psychological configuration often causes relationship problems. On the other hand though, when a person feels angry because someone wants to cause them harm right now, this is a good and sacred form of anger that’s necessary and beneficial.
In hypnotherapy, Lydi and I also learned about introjects. These are internalized, fully functioning analogue psychological representations of real people. In other words, they’re like the imagined version of your mother or your father or people who’ve managed to achieve psychological importance in your inner world for one reason or another. Most people have an introject of their mother and their father that’s fully operational inside their mind. These introjects can step forward at times and talk to us and say things and we actually respond emotionally to the introjects as though they were the real person standing in front of us. But an introject often does not say or do what the actual person they represent would say or do in the real world so introjects cause problems for us and they deserve deeper examination as disruptors of our internal peace.
When Lydi and I were studying hypnotherapy, we had to explore our own introjects. I realized that I had an introject of a female classmate that I was regularly competing with athletically and in terms of business inside my own mind. Once I became conscious of this introject, I started really interacting with her in a more intentional and conscious way. I looked up the real person that this introject represented at one point to find the real-life version of her and I found that the introject in my head was a lot different than the real person. So every time I went out for a jog, I would purposely and intentionally imagine this introject saying things to me that were more like what the real version of this female classmate would say to me. I based the imaginary dialogue on what I could see about her real life. This caused the introject to dissolve within a relatively short period of time. That was a huge change for me at that time. I no longer had someone inside my head competing with me every time I went jogging or every time I tried to do a new business venture.
Parents often take the form of an introject as well. Once, when I was packing for an extended international trip to a third world country, I noticed my mom and my brother as introjects judging my packing. Neither of them have done travel to third world countries and because I was studying introjects at the time, I noted this and spoke back to the introjects (an inner dialogue) to point out their lack of experience with international travel and packing for extended trips. The introjects disappeared. Each time they showed up after that, I paid conscious attention to them and tried to imagine what my actual mother and my actual brother would say in real life. Eventually, like the female classmate-introject, the introjects of my mother and brother also went away.
Multiple Personality Disorder / Dissociative Identity Disorder
In the United States and Europe, psychologists and psychiatrists recognize a mental disorder known as “multiple personality disorder” or “dissociative identity disorder” / DID. A person with multiple personality disorder has a number of different sub-personalities that are in extreme conflict with each other. But everyone had sub-personalities that are dissociated from the Core Self. And sometimes normal people who are relatively functional in the world behave a lot like a person with multiple personality disorder / dissociative identity disorder / DID. We’ve all been taught that DID is rare, but is it? I don’t think so.
In my master’s and doctoral degree program in psychology, we had to learn all of the different diagnostic categories and names for the various pathologies. We also learned that the categories and labels for mental illness exist primarily for the insurance companies to create boundaries around funding for treatment. Nonetheless, I learned all of the diagnostic labels for mental illness. My degree required study into individual as well as family and child psychology so I learned about individual psychology as well as pathological group and family behaviors.
Later, when my daughter married my son-in-law, Naing Naing (pronounced Nine Nine), a young man from Myanmar, I realized how limited my degree had been in scope. His culture had no knowledge of psychology or mental illness. He had no word for “addiction” in Burmese, for example, which was unfortunate because he was addicted to drugs that he’d been given by employers who were trafficking humans, including him. The lack of words and information about psychology made him vulnerable. Giving him words to describe his experience empowered him to overcome his addiction.
But Lydian and Naing Naing had a lot of problems in their marriage beyond just his addiction. Naing Naing didn’t have words to describe the experience of human trafficking and this condition that he was under of being “owned” wasn’t something that we were initially aware of as people from a different culture. About two years after Lydi and Naing Naing met, just prior to the COVID pandemic we all moved to Myanmar for 6 months and lived there. It was at this time that Lydian started to notice how Naing Naing would change his posture, his vocal intonations, and even the shape of his face whenever he manifested certain negative behaviors. She started naming each sub-personality and we all accepted the idea that Naing Naing had multiple personalities.
Naing Naing doesn’t have multiple personality disorder anymore though. When we first met him, he had deep internal conflicts, an addiction, and later, he had a psychotic break. During the 6 month period of time when we lived in Myanmar, I let go of conventional psychology and decided that it was time for me to look for other ways to view the human psyche. Conventional psychology is only useful for insurance reimbursement or as communication with others sometimes as long as the communication is not damning or judgmental.
I talk more in-depth here about Naing Naing and how he guided Lydi and I toward trauma-informed therapies through his own life ordeals. Rather than leaning on conventional family psychology, Lydi and I studied constellations therapy, hypnotherapy, and Internal Family Systems by Dr. Richard Schwartz. By the time that Lydi met Naing Naing, Lydi and I had already spent almost a decade studying ways in which people in third world countries and some more developed nations were able to heal serious diseases like cancer. We’d already noted that trance states were important, but it wasn’t until we did an internship with a curandera in Mexico that we started learning about shamanism and sacred indigenous medicines as a powerful model for healing mental as well as physical illness.
Naing Naing’s uncle had been an exorcist in Myanmar which is the equivalent to shaman among the Bamar. At one point, right after Lydi and Naing Naing got married and shortly after we were able to return to Mexico (finally – it was very difficult to get Naing Naing into Mexico where we live permanently), Naing Naing got very depressed and he felt like he needed to go back to Myanmar. He was deeply conflicted. He clearly loved Lydian but he told her that he intended to leave and return to his family of origin in Myanmar. He went and did Sapito with the curandera that Lydi and I were studying with and she told Lydian that Naing Naing would have to go back to Myanmar “to become a man”. That night, he had a dream that his uncle put a red string around his wrist and told him not to take it off. He felt this dream as though it was a nightmare and when he woke up, he awakened Lydian and told her the dream.
The next day, Naing Naing left.
Lydian wasn’t sure what to do. She tried to stay behind in Mexico and stop loving Naing Naing but she couldn’t do it. She decided to follow him.
On the day when she was packing to go to Myanmar to be with Naing Naing, I pulled a book off our bookshelves called The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down. Before moving to Mexico, in the U.S., we’d had a full library of thousands of books that we’d collected. But when we moved to Mexico, I chose only about 100 books to bring with us. I had started reading The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down a few years prior on a trip to Cambodia, but I hadn’t gotten very far. So as Lydi was carefully packing her bags on our kitchen table in Mexico, I pulled this book off the shelf and opened it to the page that was dog-eared from our trip to Cambodia. On the second paragraph, the author talked about soul loss bracelets made with red thread to prevent the soul from leaving the body during states of extreme fright or stress.
This was how I learned about the connection between the shamanic idea of soul loss and the diagnosis of multiple personality disorder / dissociative identity disorder / DID in conventional psychology. The next day, when John and I dropped Lydian off at the airport in Mexico City, I downloaded the book Soul Retrieval by Sandra Ingerman.
Though we had been working with shamanism all along, we had never called it shamanism because we had always been working in a foreign language with healers who called themselves by various labels. Trance states and hypnotherapy, as it turned, was shamanic medicine. And if I simply looked at all of conventional psychology diagnostic labels through the lens of multiple personality disorder as the model of mental illness, I could see that soul loss and the language of shamanic medicine was directly translatable in all cases.
Nowadays, Lydi and I work with all mental illnesses as though it were some form of multiple personality disorder / dissociative identity disorder and soul loss. Cancer and diabetes can both be viewed as forms of soul loss though the manifestation of soul loss is a bit different in these diseases. Ayahuasca is a sacred medicine that has an excellent scientific reputation and logical backing for being able to cure cancer, for example, in part through its ability to release trauma and integrate soul parts / sub-personalities. When Naing Naing left for Myanmar that day, Lydi and I had already written books about how to cure cancer, based not only on travel to over 50 countries to observe traditional, shamanic healing ceremonies, but we’d also used that information to cure cancer when John developed melanoma right after we’d moved to Mexico. We’d been advising clients on how to cure cancer using traditional herbalism, orthomolecular medicine, and treatments that targeted the physical body at the exclusion of emotions, but this new information about soul loss really transformed our whole concept of disease and mental illness. We’d noticed already that most of the clients that contacted us were most interested in talking about trauma, but it wasn’t Naing Naing left that we finally started to connect the dots between modern medicine, alternative therapies, and shamanism in order to save our own family.
Naing Naing, of course, eventually came home and after a lot of work with the sacred medicines, he was able to overcome his trauma. He stopped being a person who was afflicted with multiple personalities that were constantly in conflict. His psychosis went away. He and Lydi later had a baby and he’s a husband and father now despite all of the trauma that he’s suffered in his life.
Sometimes sub-personalities will imprison other sub-personalities in a psychological sort of imprisonment. These sub-personalities are known as “exiles”. A person with an addiction, for example, might place addicted sub-personalities who like to “use” in exile. Sometimes those exiled sub-personalities will escape from prison. We then call that a “relapse”. When a person suffering with addiction uses nothing but willpower to try to overcome an addiction, exiled sub-personalities often escape and “run amok” during relapses that involve a release of built up stress. The exiles carry the weight of the negative emotions from traumas that we’ve suffered, but often, other sub-personalities know the actual story of the traumatic experience. Still other sub-personalities carry anger or fear or sadness in order to distribute the trauma into dissociated parts that don’t communicate with each other. This distribution / dissociation protects the Core Self from the traumatic experience, at least for a period of time.
In hypnotherapy, everyone, including very healthy people have at least 10 to 15 dissociated sub-personalities, but people with multiple personality disorder / dissociative identity disorder have sub-personalities that are in extreme conflict with each other. When there are a lot of exiled sub-personalities, the Internal Family System can get seriously overloaded. Nutritional deficiencies can cause a deficiency of dopamine that makes it impossible for the left-hemisphere of the brain to communicate with and receive information from the body. Correcting nutritional deficiencies is always important in treating trauma. Toxin exposure to things like bromide or organophosphates, among other things, can exacerbate issues like dopamine deficiency. Sacred mushrooms like Amanita muscaria can be used to balance the dopaminergic system during the period of time when the left brain begins communicating again with the felt sense of the body.
The human mind is not organized logically but rather we create sub-personalities that we embody through the autonomic nervous system in order to meet the demands of modern society. Through dissociation, we are able to tolerate massive doses of trauma before reaching critical mass. A particular psychological dissociation into a clique of sub-personalities (an angry Protector, an Exile, and parts that carry various aspects of the emotional content of the trauma) might initially occur as a result of a trauma or ongoing stress, but nutritional deficiency can also provoke dissociation. Toxic exposure can definitely create a situation where the autonomic nervous system has trouble releasing trauma and processing it naturally. Herbs can be helpful and trauma-informed therapy like Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing / EMDR or hypnosis / guided meditation, but if you’ve reached critical mass and you have a physical disease or a mental illness that’s impacting your daily functioning, the sacred indigenous medicines are the type of treatment that you should learn more about.
Click here to learn more about the DreamLight.app, a guided meditation and brain-entrainment tool for trauma treatment at home.
Having multiple sub-personalities is a very normal condition. When you’re at work, you might behave in a particular way without being fully conscious of your actions, the intonation of your voice, the words that you choose to use (your jargon or vocabulary), your posture, your facial expressions (or lack thereof), etc. are likely different than your posture, facial expressions, and voice intonations at home. You can become conscious of this unconscious behavior in yourself and you can also notice it in other people. Maybe at work, you tend to be nervous or irritable, or stressed but at home, your personality changes and you’re more relaxed or even humorous.. Or maybe you seem distant or angry to the other people who live with you. The intonation of your voice might be very different, you might have a very different posture and different facial expressions that only your closest loved ones get to see. Now that you’ve read this material and you’re conscious of this fact in regard to human psychology, you might be able to notice the “switchover” from one sub-personality that comes out at work and another sub-personality that comes out at home or in other social environments. You might especially begin to notice that sometimes people are very generous or friendly and then they “switch” into people who are quite the opposite. It’s hard to make sense out of people who “switch” like this from one sub-personality to another very quickly unless you understand that the psychology of a human being is not logical and linear, but based on sub-personality embodiment. If you understand that a person can “switch” like this from one personality to another, you might avoid that person if they seem to have the posture of a sub-personality that’s unfriendly and instead wait to approach until they embody their friendly sub-personality.
Scientists have discovered that a person with multiple personality disorder who has a deep conflict or unconscious sub-personalities, can have one sub-personality that has diabetes while another sub-personality does not. This fact challenges modern medicine as well as modern psychology. If we can “turn on” diabetes and also “turn it off” by switching from one sub-personality to another, then we have to rethink diabetes and other major diseases. If diabetes, for example, is a disease that only one or two sub-personalities embody and express, can we integrate those sub-personalities and release the trauma that the sub-personality carries in order to cure this disease? Diseases like cancer have also been observed to have a similar profile in terms of trauma and sub-personalities. So are these diseases really physical in the sense that we should treat them exclusively with physical medicines or are these diseases also emotional and ultimately based around trauma?
Everyone is diabetic for a short period of time every night during a healthy sleep cycle. Whenever growth hormone is released, the body halts insulin release. During growth hormone release, we’re dreaming. One of the most powerful phases of dream-sleep is Rapid Eye Movement (REM). REM sleep involves the rapid, back-and-forth movement of the eyes signifying that the body and mind is processing trauma and stress. This is identical to the trauma-informed therapy that we’ve mentioned a few times above: Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing / EMDR. The only difference between EMDR and REM sleep is that during REM sleep, the body also releases growth hormone, it stops releasing insulin, and the eye movements happen automatically.
Whether or not you do EMDR eye movements intentionally during your waking hours to process trauma or during a normal REM sleep as an automatic processing activity, back-and-forth eye movements provoke left-hemisphere to right-hemisphere brain communication. We regard the right hemisphere of the brain as the representative of the autonomic nervous system and the felt sense of the body. The right hemisphere of the brain works with emotions and symbolic thought. So when the eyes move right-to-left, back-and-forth in order to process a specific body of information, the right-brain and the left-brain communicate about their two different perspectives on the issue. The right-brain is emotional and symbolic while the left-brain is logical and oriented toward narrative (beginnings, middles, and endings).
In addition to this right-brain, left-brain communication, EMDR and REM sleep causes the eye muscles to produce a type of movement that causes the tiny muscles in the top vertebrae supporting the skull to make tiny movements that release pressure on the cranial nerves that feed the autonomic nervous system. The autonomic nervous system is autonomous and it manages all of our organs and all functioning of the body that happens unconsciously. We feel emotions in our organs, after all. We use organ-specific words to talk about emotional content. For example, we might say that we were “heart broken” or that something was “gut wrenching”. We might speak about a major scare as something that “gave you a heart attack”. Or you might say that you felt like you were “falling off a cliff”. We describe emotions as sensory-based experiences that are based in the physical body. So adjusting the cranial nerves that feed the organs that we ultimately reference as the source of our emotions can have an important impact. The cranial nerves pass through tiny foramen, or holes, in the bottom of the skull. These specific eye movements re-adjust the skull bones and the upper vertebrae to improve communication between the brain and the body.
During psilocybin trips, people often find that their eyes move far to the left or far to the right and the eyes remain there for a time during certain “cycles”. The mushrooms have, at times, told me to “look away” from certain bits of material. Moving my eyes very far to the right or to the left can literally adjust the skull bones and the vertebrae in a way that improves the functioning of the whole body.
Though EMDR is a real miracle of modern trauma-informed psychology, psilocybin is a much more powerful treatment for trauma release.
Click here to buy psilocybin microdosing capsules here.
The Core Self and the Goal of Trauma-Informed Therapy
A sub-personality can be “triggered” to step forward to animate the body by something in the environment, but all of us have a Core Self as well. The Core Personality is not a sub-personality, but rather, the original personality that exists from the time we’re born. This original personality, the Core Self, is also referred to as the Ideal Inner Parent or the Inner Healer. This is the part of us that’s wise. The Core Self in our inner world, acts as a parent to the other sub-personalities that have dissociated from the Core as a result of trauma.
Sometimes a sub-personality will masquerade as the Core Self. If you lived through something very difficult in your life that required you to behave in a manner that went against the way your Core Self wanted to behave, you might have to work harder to get to Core Self embodiment using trauma-informed therapies.
That being said though, we all have sub-personalities. Dissociation itself is not always a bad thing. I moved to Mexico as a middle-aged adult, so I have one or more sub-personalities that speak Spanish. Sometimes it’s hard for me to get those sub-personalities to step forward because I have English-speaking parts of me that often prefer to deal with challenging situations.
Ideally, the Core Self manages all of a person’s sub-personalities, but the Core Self is not always the part of us that steps forward for embodiment. The goal of trauma-informed therapy is to get to a point where you feel okay as an individual, your body is healthy, and where your relationships are okay and healthy. Ideally, you won’t be addicted to anything. You won’t be controlled in an abnormal way by anything outside of yourself. You’ll have access to your intuition if you need to use your intuition. You’ll feel hopeful rather than feeling oppressed or stressed.
Trauma-release therapy using the sacred medicines, but also EMDR, is all about finding meaning in the story of what’s happened to you. As trauma is released and as sub-personalities are integrated, you have access to more of your own wisdom from the most difficult challenges that you’ve faced in your life. Conflicts that you’ve had within yourself or with other people in your life can dissolve and dissipate like dust in the wind.
The goal of trauma-informed therapy is not to get rid of dissociated sub-personalities, but to be able to pull the Core Self forward at will. The goal is to use this human technology of dissociation in a way that serves us rather than having dissociation rule over us. If you are working to overcome a serious physical health issue, a primary goal is to reestablish hope and the ability to literally have dreams at night. The goals are similar to mental health issues. For many people, the first 40-60 hours of work with the sacred medicines at a psychedelic dose has to do with restoring hope in the magic of our human existence and our ability to heal.
The most amazing thing about watching people work with the sacred medicines has to do with the fact that Lydi and I never know exactly how people will heal themselves. The sacred medicines work through methods that are beyond what humans currently understand. Lydi and I know about our own experiences but we’re also constantly learning new things from the people who work with these medicines. The real magic takes shape when people begin to trust the medicines. At that point, a person can take responsibility for their own experience and that represents new opportunities in terms of what’s possible.
Ancestral Trauma and How We Haunt Ourselves
In the model that Lydian and I use to work with trauma, the Core Self is the part of us that gets to be released to go to “a better place” when the body dies, but if some of our energies have gotten exiled in one or more vortices as a result of trauma, these parts of us may stay behind, trying to tell the story of what happened. Dissociation that involves exile from the Core Self is a condition that’s similar to how Christians describe hell…as a situation in which the exile does not have access to the god-like Core Self.
Ancestral trauma is basically a vortex of energy that consists of an ancestral story that was not passed down to us in verbal form because no one wanted to talk about it or no one was able to put it into words. The loss of a child, for example, may not have been spoken about within the family. Some children who were lost were not recorded as members of the family or they were not given names.
In the language of Constellations Therapy, a child or any person who is left out of the historical narrative of the family is an “exile”. So we can use the word “exile” to describe a sub-personality in our Internal Family System, but we can also use the word exile to talk about a real-life person, living or ancestral, who is disconnected from the External Family System. In the ancestral lineage of the External Family System, an exile will try to make itself known energetically in order to release itself.
If the story of a child or any person in the family is not included for any reason, the energy of this exile will try to repeat itself in future generations to recreate the story of what happened to him or her.
Grandparents, parents, and children feel the story of what happened in generations passed. As a child, my mother felt my grandmother’s grief from her own mother dying when my grandma was 18 years old. My grandmother was never able to fully process and put words to her mother’s death. Instead, my grandmother would seem preoccupied all the time. She would act out her preoccupation with her mother’s death through her facial expressions, a distant look in her eyes, weepiness during times when nothing sad was happening, and an inability to organize her house and her life. My mother, in turn, was outwardly angry and frustrated with my grandmother, but inwardly very sad about my grandmother’s inability to be present with my mother when my mother was a child.
I grew up with my mother’s anger and frustration (derived from my grandma’s loss of her mother at age 18), I internalized my mother’s anger as something that was my fault because I was a child and because I didn’t understand that these feelings that mother had were connected to this event that happened two generations in the past. I internalized my mother’s angry tone of voice and her impatience with me (after she’d get off the phone with my grandmother every day) as mood states that I had provoked. In this way, I internalized this story from the past, namely my great-grandmother’s death, as a “dance” rather than as a full-bodied story of my ancestry that I could tell using words. If my grandmother had processed the death of her own mother, she would’ve been able to tell the story of what happened to her, including the way she felt about it and how she overcame those horrible, painful feelings of grief. As it was though, my grandmother was never given the opportunity to express her feelings in words and tell her story.
I believe that there was a part of my grandmother that stayed behind when my grandmother’s body died. Some might say that she haunted us or that she was a ghost, but our family didn’t experience things in this way. Rather, I believe that this part of my grandmother was tasked to tell the story of her own mother’s death through future generations in order to release the “loop” and the pain that she was never able to fully express during her lifetime. In order to tell the story, she had to sometimes embody a living family member’s body if that living family member has some similarity in their lives that would make her story relatable to them. If that family member had reached a point in their life when they had a “container” for the pain, perhaps that part of my grandmother’s soul could be released through the telling of her story to go and be with her Core Self in the afterlife.
Indeed, if as a child, you are neglected or abused in some way and as a result, you dissociate into different soul parts or sub-personalities that are perpetually re-experiencing that abuse or neglect, your Core Self continues to mature and change and develop new emotional resources over the course of time. The looping, traumatized part might be caught in a vortex of a past-tense experience, but if at some point, you develop a repertoire of emotional resources that make it possible for you to integrate the dissociated soul parts, you then have the ability to talk your Self through what happened to you as a child. For example, in hypnotherapy, we might suggest that the patient tell their inner sub-personality their body’s actual age. Then, we might tell the patient to reassure the inner, dissociated child part that the Core Self can take care of him or her now. As a child, you maybe didn’t have the emotional resources to help yourself through certain traumatic experiences, but as an adult, you have a much broader set of emotional resources to process and overcome trauma.
Ancestors who died suddenly may have a part of themselves that has gotten stuck in a vortex. And you may, at times, get swept up into this energetic vortex and embody the story through some aspect of your own life. Often, embodiment of ancestral trauma happens through metaphor.
Bearing witness to a trauma and putting words to that trauma releases it. It doesn’t matter whether you put words to your own trauma or to an ancestor’s trauma, in either case, acknowledging, feeling, and then describing a challenging experience is powerful in terms of healing. The ancestral trauma is our trauma. We live and act out ancestral traumas as though they were our own traumas until they can be released.
How ancestors tell us their stories is beyond the scope of this current discussion. Ancestral storytelling can take many forms. If you don’t believe in ghosts or hauntings, that’s okay. A lot of people prefer the metaphor of DNA-resonance which is also relevant here.
Sub-Personalities, Emotions, and Decision-Making
Sub-personalities are made up of emotional information that we use to navigate different social situations that demand specific perspectives and decisions from us. Every decision that we make in our lives is made by referencing emotional content. Though most of us in the modern world want to believe that we’re making logical decisions, in fact, none of us ever make a single logical decision in our entire lives. All decisions are based on emotions. A person who has brain damage that destroys the emotion-producing centres of the brain will never make another decision again, not even to sit up in bed or go brush their teeth. To make a decision is a complex task and the most difficult decisions are the ones that we make without the ability to justify them using logic. Typically, after all, we make our decisions using emotional content, but then later, we justify the decision that we made by using some form of logic to buttress it. Society really emphasizes the value of logic in the world today while denigrating the value of emotion so we tend to emphasize our logical justifications that we set forth for the decisions that we make creating the illusion that our decisions are “logical”.
One of the major reasons why people benefit from working to integrate sub-personalities that have developed as a result of trauma is because a sub-personality that was born as a result of trauma can make a decision on behalf of the entire internal system of sub-personalities and on behalf of the Core Self. In other words, one sub-personality that’s stuck in a trauma-loop of neglect or abuse at age 5, can make a decision on behalf of your entire family of inner sub-personalities about whether or not to quit your job. Anyone who has ever asked themselves, “Why did I DO that?” knows what it’s like to have a young, traumatized sub-personality take over to make decisions on behalf of your entire emotional-psychological system.
Because decisions are based on emotional content and not on logic, we would tend to make decisions that correspond to the sub-personality that’s being embodied at the moment when the decision must officially be made. For example, you might talk to yourself everyday on your way home from work about how much you hate your job. You might, over the course of time, decide to quit your job, but also fear that you won’t have the courage to quit once you arrive at your work setting. Though most members of your system of sub-personalities might agree that your job is bad for you, if a sub-personality that wants the job or that really likes to follow the rules tends to step forward during work, you might feel like you can’t trust yourself to follow through on the plan to quit your job.
Addiction-based behaviors involve an inability to trust yourself to follow through on plans that you make for yourself in advance. Though addiction is an obvious situation that involves an inability to recruit your entire system of sub-personalities to collaborate toward the same goal, there are, in fact, many situations involving conflict among the different sub-personalities within the system. Some people experience this kind of inner conflict as a sort of emotional paralysis. Other people experience sub-personality conflict as an inability to control behavior to prevent destructive behaviors.
Most people already use the language of dissociation when they describe internal experiences. As humans, we often say, for example, “A part of me wanted this…but another part of me wanted that.” Inner conflicts like this are normal and our ability to converse with ourselves internally is part of what makes us unique as humans. But if you have a hard time resolving the conflicts peaceably and within a reasonable period of time, trauma is often a core issue. Releasing trauma can help your various sub-personalities be less polarized on issues that you confront in your daily life.
Triggers
When a person moves to a new country with a new language and new customs, they have to develop a new sub-personality (at least one sub-personality, but maybe more) that slowly absorbs the culture and the language in order to survive. Though that person retains the sub-personalities from their culture-of-origin, they also develop another set of sub-personalities that learn to behave and speak in a manner that’s pleasing to people in the new culture. This is an amazing ability that humans have, but when we aren’t conscious of this human tendency to dissociate into different sub-personalities, we can suffer as a result and find ourselves in a position where we can’t solve some of our most pressing problems.
We create new sub-personalities at times in order to learn new skills. Not all sub-personalities need to be re-integrated and in fact, many of the sub-personalities that we develop as a result of trauma do not reliably show up for embodiment when we wish for them to step forward. Though I might learn Spanish because I’ve lived in Mexico for 10 years, and the parts of me that speak Spanish may step forward when I wish for them to do so, the part of me that was abused when I was a 3rd grader may only step forward when I’m triggered. The trigger that cues my Inner 3rd Grader to step forward isn’t conscious. I don’t know what triggers this part of me. But when something specific happens in the environment around me, I might suddenly become petulant, rude, and irritable. I might start making decisions in my relationships that are unhealthy as that sub-personality tries to take control and create boundaries that aren’t particularly healthy for my internal system of sub-personalities as a whole.
Almost anything can act as a trigger that causes a person to embody a sub-personality / part that has been traumatized. Before I did a lot of work with the sacred medicines, when I would get triggered in the past, I would often have a hard time “cooling down”. Most often, being triggered for me meant feeling angry and being unable to stop feeling angry. This makes sense because most of us, when triggered, embody Protector parts / sub-personalities more often than other sub-personalities inside of us that are more vulnerable. The Protector parts of us stand guard to protect the weaker, child parts of us that feel powerful emotions like sadness, fear, and vulnerability.
Men often worry that if they work to release their trauma that they’ll be like the Incredible Hulk when they start to peel away at their Inner Layers. They worry that what’s underneath the anger is even more powerful experiences of anger. Rather, underneath the anger is sadness, fear, and other emotions that are much more complex than anger. Once the complex emotions of sadness or fear are released, anger is no longer needed as a source of protection.
I was very lucky to have had the opportunity to learn about triggers over the course of about a decade so as to understand the strange nature of triggers. In this article, I talk about a traumatic dentist experience and the nature of the trigger that developed as a result. The trigger was unconscious as all triggers are, but I was able to figure out what the trigger was years later based on dreams that I’d had when symptoms of mental illness developed.
How to Release Trauma
Trauma release can happen in a number of ways, but in order for trauma to be released, we have to know what we’re doing and be conscious of the process. In other words, we have to observe one part of ourselves with another part of ourselves and we have to do this act of observing with Intention. So it’s important to have a basic understanding of what trauma is if you wish to release trauma.
Trauma lives in the body until the left hemisphere of the brain evolves to a point where it can comprehend the trauma that the body experienced and accept the emotional content and the facts of what happened. Once the left-brain is mature enough to accept a traumatic experience and find words of acceptance to describe the experience, trauma can be released. But if some of the traumatized sub-personalities are hidden or dissociated to such an extent that they are exiles, you have to find ways to bring those exiles back to the body for embodiment. In other words, unconscious trauma has to become conscious. The more open-minded you become toward your Selves, the easier it is for your exiled, dissociated parts to step forward for embodiment and eventual release.
On the other hand, if you’re judgmental toward yourself or toward other people or if you’re surrounded by judgmental people who have actual control over your life, then you might have difficulty embodying some of the more challenging material from your past to release it. This is where the sacred indigenous medicines like psilocybin or Ayahuasca become essential. Both of these sacred medicines can help you gain access to unconscious traumatic material and these medicines can also help you create new neural connections so that you can be more open-minded toward your Self and your own traumatic material. Regardless of whether you’re surrounded by judgmental people, psilocybin and Ayahuasca can help you find ways to overcome these limitations.
Most people have trauma that is very close to the surface and this type of trauma, which is almost conscious, can often be released using one of the following therapies:
- Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing / EMDR
- Alpha-Theta Therapy
- Brain Entrainment
- Hypnosis and Guided Meditation
- Craniosacral Therapy
- Emotional Freedom Technique
- Trauma Release Exercises
- Breathwork
Trauma-release involves the body and does not just involve “talk”. Though integration therapy is all about talk, regular talk therapy outside of the use of the sacred medicines can, at times, be more damaging than helpful for trauma-release.
Additionally, Lydi and I work with the following sacred indigenous medicines for trauma release:
- Sapito
- Psilocybin
- Ayahuasca
- Amanita muscaria
- Ambil / Rápe / Tobacco
- San Pedro
- Silene capensis / African dream root
- Salvia divinorum (when available)
- Iboga / Ibogaine (when available)
- Xananga
- Kambo
Summary
Trauma overload can lead to emotional as well as physical illness. And releasing trauma can therefore heal not just emotional health issues, but also physical health problems like diabetes and cancer to name just two diseases that respond to trauma-informed therapies. When a person experiences a trauma, the body tries to shake it off, but the human mind often prevents this from happening. As a result, trauma gets trapped in the autonomic nervous system, dissociated from the inner narrative of the person’s life, until an opportunity happens to release the trauma.
Various trauma-informed therapies exist to help people release trauma. All of these therapies involve some kind of physical or somatic experience to connect the autonomic nervous system trauma to the inner narrative and logical thought of the left hemisphere of the brain. Of all of the trauma-informed therapies, the sacred indigenous medicines are the most powerful and the most important in terms of releasing trauma and rewiring and improving brain function, mental health, and physical health.