Medical Stress and Trauma: A Mindfulness-Based Approach To Reclaiming Safety And Empowerment
Christen Mullane has just release her new book, Medical Stress and Trauma: A Mindfulness-Based Approach To Reclaiming Safety And Empowerment. I was lucky enough to be a first reader and as I was reading it and working through it, I felt like I was literally working with Christen alongside me. There's a lot of important content that she shares, but at the same time there was such a gentle connected way that it was written that I felt like I was being supported by her.
I invited Christen back to join us again on the Medical Trauma Support podcast and when I asked her to sum up what her book is about, she said, “what the book attempts to do is to help people find a pathway to be with what's hard after adverse medical experiences have happened. Whether we're patients or caregivers or providers.”
As I was reading the book, I was thinking that this book is for anybody who's a human, because we will all engage with the medical system at some point. And many of us engage with the medical system the moment that we come onto the earth, because the majority of people are born at the hospital. So whether you have personally experienced medical trauma or not this book is so helpful for understanding what medical stress and trauma mean and how they can impact us and the people we love and care for. If somebody you love is struggling with medical trauma, this book can be a guide to you for a better understanding of what they're experiencing.
Christen shared that her dream for healthcare is that patients, providers, and caregivers can all experience a little bit of healing from this workbook. She shared that part of that is perspective taking and being able to understand what the experience of working with the body when the body is challenged is like from all these different facets. We all have a body and the likelihood that that body is going to interact with the medical system over the course of its life is high. And when that happens, we carry our whole history with our bodies with us into that exam room, whether we're the provider in that room, the caregiver or the patient. And so her hope in writing this book was to make tools that feel both specific and general enough to capture a lot of the human experience and offer skills that are needed to navigate healthcare as it is right now.
Christen and I also talked about how this book can be used in so many different unique ways that fit what the person reading it needs at that time. Each person should read it at their own time, on their own timeline. You may want to sit down and read it over a weekend or you may want to take the year to read it and work through it. You may want to do it on your own, or you could bring it to your therapy sessions to discuss or create your own book club to have peer support as you work through it.
Christen’s hope is that providers can use this themselves as well, maybe even using reproducible handouts that they can share with their clients. She was remembering her experiences of working in different healthcare systems and how fast paced the work really was. Some of her background was in integrated care teams in primary care clinics where she might've had 20 to 30 minutes to meet with a patient. And that was in the context of them having a real long day, meeting with other providers a lot of the time. And so depending on your role, she feels there are ways to flexibly approach this book. She said she could totally see where just being able to copy out a safety plan for use in medical systems and give that to somebody for “homework” that's a little bit more intervention than we have right now in most healthcare interactions. It also validates the experience of the patient needing to create a sense of safety in the system.
We discussed that some of the areas that can take damage when we’ve experienced medical trauma are our beliefs around safety and empowerment. And one of her goals with her book was to address those things. She said that whether you're a provider dealing with burnout, a caregiver who's dealing with vicarious traumatization, or a patient who's working with medical stress and trauma in some way, those themes come up. They come up in treatment.
As we talked about safety and empowerment and the safety plan it reminded me that I wanted to dive into that a little bit because one of the sections of the workbook is all about safety. And that is very meaningful for me because I think a lot about how can we as individuals feel a little bit safer each day in our own bodies. We know that medical stress and trauma can really impact a sense of safety that we had before the event, or some people maybe have never been able to really feel a sense of safety because of early experiences. We need to feel safety inside ourselves so we can know that we're safe, whatever kind of thoughts or emotions come up. And we need it externally in our relationships, in our communities, in the world. Christen also shared that often after trauma, people will come away with a sense that safety has been completely shattered. And she offers another way of thinking about it in this moment where we think about safety more on a continuum and as something that we can gradually cultivate for ourselves. It's not something that other people always are able to give us, we can be supported and guided as we develop a sense of safety but it is ultimately up to our systems to develop.
Christen and I decided to do an experiential exercise knowing that most healing starts with a bit of safety. She offered listeners a chance to begin to identify what safety means to them. She led us through an exercise from the book. If you would like to do it as well, just grab a pen and paper. Instructions from Christen: “The idea is to do some journaling and take some breaths if the breath feels safe as we're opening this exercise. If the breath isn't quite safe in the body that's okay too. See if you can find just one way to ground one sense that feels approachable to you. It might be something you can see or the feeling of your pen in your hand. And we're going to take about two minutes. Does that feel good to just journal a little bit, just to start to open this door? Feel free to set a two minute timer or give yourself even more time if that works for you. The idea is to take a moment to journal or draw or make a list about what safety means to you. And so as you complete this exercise, you might think about times and places when you have felt safe. You might think about different domains like physical, emotional, relational, financial, or spiritual safety. There might be sensory experiences or items that you have that evoke a sense of safety. So that could mean your collection of action figures from childhood or the smell of your grandmother's cooking, right? So just kind of starting gradually to evoke those things and maybe think about even how you felt in your body when you feel safe or movement practices that you associate with safety. When you’re ready you can stop journaling. If it feels good, you can revisit what you wrote and see if you can tap back into that feeling of safety.
The journaling about safety exercise is an example of one of the things that's in the book and there are other exercises like getting into the nitty-gritty of safety planning for a medical visit for example.
There was a lot more we covered during the podcast, but I’ll save that for you to listen to. I hope you’ll listen and let me know what you think!