TCM Psychiatry and Spiritual Recapitulation (Qíng Zhì Bìng) – Module Five

Module Five

The Four Wounds of Trauma and the Three Whys of Addiction

Every living being is limited by its ability to adapt to its environment.

All animals, humans included, are born with a nervous system full of physical and social instincts. All animals are meant to grow up with parents to show them the finer details of behavior. Specifically, physical behaviors like fight, flight, and freeze, as well as social instinctual behaviors like tend, befriend, and cower.

If you have ever been through a physically overwhelming experience like a rock-climbing accident or survived a war zone, or if you have lived through ritualized physical and/or sexual violence, then that part of your nervous system is in Trauma.

That does not mean you are broken; it means it is now time to find opportunities to connect with the right people and relearn how to release the embodied memories and recapitulate the ways those days and people are still inhabiting your nervous system. Recapitulation is a way of consciously reliving a memory as a part of a practice to move through and beyond the pain and behaviours coming from that wound.

If you grew up in an environment that was physically or emotionally dangerous, unavailable, or manipulative, then it is likely your instinctual Polyvagal, or ‘Social nervous system’ is on a Trauma avoidant setting. Sometimes this defines your life through avoiding any and all risk, or for some, the need to take risks.

That does not mean you are broken; it means it is time to create opportunities to connect with the right people and relearn how to read body language and open to how it feels to belong.

Addiction is the opposite of Belonging. First, addiction separates you from your anxiety, then your pain, then your family, and then the few remaining friends that have held on as long as they could, and finally, addiction can separate you from yourself.

 Module Five Contents:

• Introduction – Redefining Trauma
• Trauma and Chronic Illness
• Trauma and Addiction
• The Four Wounds of Trauma
• The First Wound is Hypervigilance
• The Second Wound is Comfort Seeking
• The Third Wound of Trauma is Social Disorientation and Loss of Trust
• The Fourth Wound is Loss of Self Trust and Existential Pain
• How Trauma and Distress are Addictive
• The Three Whys of Addiction
• The process of Radical Self Acceptance.
• A Closing Circle – Five – Walking in a Good Way