I'm reading about stress and stress response and how stress is often subjectively triggered, meaning that what is stressing us is a perceived threat or an unidentified internal threat.
This reminds me of two ways that I experience or have experienced stress in my life. One is current - stage fright that happens when I am about to step up to a mic and perform a song on my guitar. That immediately triggers an instantaneous sympathetic replay of all the times that I wasnï ? ? €™t prepared to speak to an audience or, say, in a play, perform some lines. It's like what some people who have lived through near-death experiences report, namely their lives passing before their eyes but in my case it is all the times I lost my cool in front of an audience, sweeping through me like a wave. Once I was the lead in a Gilbert and Sullivan production and forgot my lines and was not able to recover my composure for the rest of the performance. I was humiliated. But it goes way back to when I was little, in 7th or 8th grade, and was called on to stand and deliver an oral report and was not ready. There was another time (in my early thirties) when I was backing up a guitarist at a coffee house and I couldn't find the right key harmonica. The guitarist was full of himself and continued the song without me and then performed the rest of the set in the same key, effectively excluding me from the act. Instead of standing up for myself and reminding him that I was still there, I stayed behind him, literally hiding from the audience, for the rest of the set! I was devastated. I felt like crawling into a crack in the floor.
So, whenever I perform on my guitar, which is my secondary instrument on which I am so-so or mediocre and vulnerable, I often freeze up. I begin to sweat, brain fog sets in and sometimes I can't even remember how the song starts. I fumble, I introduce the song in a self-effacing way. You get the picture. It's not pretty. But I'm working on it and making progress.
The second example of a stressful (traumatic) experience happened about 12 years ago. I was experiencing panic attacks, with hyperventilating and heart palpitations. Whenever these attacks arose, whether I was driving or socializing I would have to stop the car and walk, to catch my breath or excuse myself from my company. I didn't know what was causing these attacks until I had a dream that I was being attacked by a jackal that was lunging for my throat. Luckily I was working with a wise woman at the time who took the dream extremely seriously and recommended that I take radical steps to find out what was attacking me. I wound up heading for a remote retreat in the Peruvian rainforest where I worked with an Ayahuasquero, a shaman who works exclusively with Ayahuasca. He intuitively understood that I was in a life-threatening situation. He didn't ask me for a dream and he didn't analyze anything. But he put me on a special dieta, of fish and plantain, followed by a few days of purges, followed by intensive Ayahuasca ceremonies. Ayahuasca was the healer, not the shaman. What Ayahuasca did was, it went very deep, all the way into my nervous system which was infected by the Lyme virus. It flushed the virus out of hiding. When I returned to the States I exhibited classic symptoms of acute infection - chills, high fever, sweats etc. I was put on an IV, antibiotic drip, which wiped out the virus,
I have just described two kinds of trauma. The first is manageable. It isn't so bad that I avoid performing solos on my guitar. I am chipping away at it and predict that someday it won't be an issue. The second was much more serious and I couldn't heal from it alone. In fact I might not have even had that dream if I hadn't been working with a gifted Jungian analyst at the time. But, in retrospect, I now see that I needed the help of two gifted individuals who recognized my trauma and took me seriously.
I was lucky. The cause of the second example of trauma was chronic. It was chronic Lyme. The effect of the chronic trauma of the viral infection in / on my nervous system was acute. So that is an example of a trauma that is both chronic and acute.
When chronic trauma, trauma that we have lived with for a long time, begins to present as acute symptoms, often collectively described as an autoimmune illness or condition, we need to get help.
Stress is only a symptom telling us that something is wrong. If what is stressing us is in the environment, then we deal with it externally or we remove ourselves from the threatening environment. But if the threat is internal, in our interior environment, we need to look within. That can assume the form of an MRI or sonogram or a good dream interpretation.
I think it is helpful, when we are experiencing stress, to determine what is causing it. If it is stage fright, that doesn't mean to stop being an actor or a performer but it means to find out what our fear looks like, by working with someone who is trained to shine a light on the trauma-laced stories we are telling ourselves. If the cause is life-threatening, like my jackal, don't treat it with affirmations and camomile tea or meditation, although those are all effective. Be proactive! Life is short anyway, no need to allow trauma and the stress arising from trauma, to cut it even shorter.
(Article changed on Feb 24, 2025 at 10:19 AM EST)
(Article changed on Feb 24, 2025 at 10:21 AM EST)
(Article changed on Feb 25, 2025 at 8:14 AM EST)
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