David Treleaven

Trauma-Sensitive Mindfulness, a review

cklatzker

TRAUMA-SENSITIVE MINDFULNESS:

Practices for Safe and Transformative Healing                                               DAVID A. TRELEAVEN

Thank you for writing this, David.

So few people speak of this—almost no one—how mindfulness meditation can go awry for some of us and what to do when a previously stable, nourishing practice requires regulation.

PTSD with dissociative aspects plunged me into a ten week kundalini wormhole during mindfulness meditation in 2002, and I can attest to the thoroughness and care of David Treleaven’s new book, Trauma-Sensitive Mindfulness.

“Mindfulness is a process of enhanced self-regulation.” Brilliant.

What’s amazing about Trauma-Sensitive Mindfulness is how recognizable all its referenced books, studies, and citations are, (that I had to find for myself,) and how much comes up for me as I remember finding and reading them, and the conferences I attended to meet the authors and researchers—and where I was in my journey then. Having Pat Ogden explain the “window of tolerance” in person with all her remarks and the Q&A is ingrained.

It is gratifying as well to find the interventions that my therapist and I used laid out in this book, for others to use, organized.

I appreciate the design of Trauma-Sensitive Mindfulness. I especially like the configuration of the Modifications. Another of the book’s strengths is its emphasis on diverse cultures and backgrounds and larger systems of oppression. 

This is not a science book and I don’t object to David’s simplification of the neuroscience. I think the book’s References and Endnotes provide clarity. I would only add a few comments specific to the book:

  1. I found reference to Allan Schore’s work notably absent in David’s book, where Allan’s Affect Regulation books were essential for my understanding of implicit vs. explicit memory, and gave me hope that early impaired attachment could be repaired.
  2. I took exception to the flashback-halting protocol, although I may mean “flashback” in an exclusively experiential way, which would make a difference, i.e., my Parts never remembered, they only experienced. They invariably became annoyed when interrupted by the kind of questions in the protocol, and then everything would stop.
  3. It seems that R. C. Schwartz’s Parts in the IFS model are in fact identical to my Parts in the DID model, not that it matters. It seems to me in retrospect that my therapist was doing family systems therapy at the end when my Parts all talked to him, before integration.

Eighteen years on, my mindfulness practice continues strong.

(TRAUMA-SENSITIVE MINDFULNESS: Practices for Safe and Transformative Healing,                 DAVID A. TRELEAVEN. W.W. Norton & Company, 2018)