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Trauma: The Hidden Pathogenic Factor

By Felice Dumas, Ph.D.e

It has been an important year for studying trauma; one of OM's under-taught and undervalued concepts. Practitioners have had the unique opportunity to watch patients react over time to its personal and national effects. We have witnessed the differing methods by which people have resolved or suppressed their feelings and have had to research what it takes to effectively treat this insipid pathological factor as it has affected all of our patients to differing degrees.

The divorce rate has increased; the number of military enlistments is up, as are anti-depressant medication prescriptions, and cigarette and ice cream sales. Other industries such as the travel, conventions and weight loss struggled through the first six months following 9-11-01. Crime rates fluctuated wildly, businesses have been born, careers redirected and habits broken. Prejudice eased between some peoples and increased between others.

What have you been in your patients or felt inside of yourself? Here are a few examples that I have seen this year.

Jackson, an athletic young man, rode his bike on a downtown sidewalk. As he passed the exit opening of a parking structure, a large, rust-colored van tore out of the driveway, hitting him hard. His bike twisted and flew through the air. His body followed and fell to the ground as the wind of impact blew through him. Unconscious on the sidewalk, Jackson's head pounded repeatedly as trauma and spasms dictated. I quickly ran to hi, knelt down and put my hand under his head to stop the seizures from jamming his skull into the pavement. Then I dug my fingernail into Heart 9 on his pinky finger. The seizures stopped instantly. He opened his eyes and, looking dazed, asked, "What happened?" "You were hit by a van and I stopped the trauma from blowing into your heart," I whispered.

Alexis was nervous as she told me why she had sought my services. She had been raped four years earlier and could not "come out of it." Since the event, her interest in and ability to enjoy sex had eroded. Because of it, she was letting people take advantage of her in many areas of her life and was angry with herself for not "letting go" of this painful incident. Increased muscle tension caused repeated strains and injuries and as a professional tennis teacher, this made it physically painful to make a living. What was the primary etiology of this growing quagmire of misery and stagnation? Trauma seeping into the organs, disturbing the liver and shen.

I left Washington D.C. on September 10th of last year. It was the flight taking me home to L.A. after having dropped my daughter off at college for the first time. She called me the next morning, the first of my life as a single mom with an "empty nest," and spoke of plan hijackings from multiple cities, including the one I had left the day before. One of the flights that went down had been my original return flight.

Within a few days I learned that I had lost both personal friends and patients in D.C. and N.Y. buildings. I sat quietly for a month. When I was not sitting, I was organizing my linen closet, eating chocolate, the ultimate heart yang tonic, or cleaning out my garage. My brain had no organizational ability and my thoughts could not follow one another in sequence. I treated very few patients because I had nothing to give them. Whatever I had, I needed to redirect into myself to find my way back, out of "shock" and into my sense of personal identity. I had lost motherhood, or so it felt at the time, patients, friends, and everything else that we all lost as citizens of the U.S. I had also, almost, lost my life.

Energetic imbalances began expressing symptoms through my heart and spleen, shaking my sense of self and ability to metabolize information. It went on to affect my kidneys and liver, filling me with an underlying sense of dread and the inability to either express my emotions or resolve them. Breathing was difficult and I did as little as possible. My lungs responded to my contracted breath and sadness with an upper respiratory infection. Today, the lung crack on my tongue is wider than it was a year ago. Healing took many months.

Trauma is one of the oldest pathological entities to be battled by our professional ancestors. Evolving out of the martial arts and war related injuries, "hit medicine", the treatment of orthopedic injuries accompanied by trauma, has attained a high level of sophistication. Psychological trauma has also warranted rigorous study. Living in small, tightly knit communities, the peoples of ancient China lost much of what they knew during infectious disease epidemics, war and natural disasters. Individuals experiencing loss provided valuable information for physicians and the religious authorities who helped implement and codify Confucian doctrine. OM's understanding of individual and group psychology and sociology is profound and born on the pain suffered by real people, just like you and I, coping with life's traumas over hundreds of years.

The Nature of Trauma

Have you ever experienced a burn that instantly felt better once you put ice on it? After a few minutes of relief, it is natural to assume that removing the ice would not cause an increase of pain, so you remove the ice. Surprise! If you take the ice off you notice that the burn becomes more intense and the pain sinks deeper into your body. You reapply the ice. This goes on for a while, ice goes on, ice comes off to surprise you with burning pain. On again, off gain, and finally you can remove the ice and the pain will have sufficiently subsided. Trauma works the same way in that it continues to seep into your body unless you stop it. If left unchecked, this silent, toxic force seeps into the body over a course of years. We all know of a college football or tennis player who felt great until they hit 50 or so. Then the trauma that resulted from acute injuries during their teenage years has had enough time to warp the joints creating arthritis, twist the bones causing spurs, or dry the tendons resulting in chronic tendonitis.

All the organs and many forms of qi play a role in the body's ability to create, be effected by and minimize trauma. The energetic dynamics of this force have unique qualities that affect every person differently, depending upon their individual strengths and weaknesses. While the multiplicity of faces worn by this hidden pathogenic factor may confuse the practitioner initially, there are simple methods by which this force can be discerned and overpowered through appropriate treatment.