Lara Land | Lara Land

Sick: Medical Trauma and Gasslighting

by Lara Land | Aug 8, 2022 | LAND BLOG, LARA LAND

One of the greatest and often unspoken about causes of trauma is medical trauma.

Medical trauma can occur when a child is subjected to a procedure that they don’t understand or to folks of any age when tests are being done which aren’t explained. Medical trauma can also become present when a patient isn’t listened to or doesn’t have their wishes respected. Sometimes something as “small” as lack of eye contact, touch and affirming words can cause trauma in a medical atmosphere.

I recently had the experience of having to go to a hospital in Spain. My doctor who spoke English rushed me through my assessment missing the vital information I was giving her about the over two weeks of symptoms I had just experienced. Many of the clues to my diagnosis were there inside my story, but Instead of listening, and even after showing no pain during her brief exam of stretches, she decided that I had sciatica. When I insisted I didn’t, she sent me through the machine of hospital operations from pain medication injection (which didn’t work to X-ray which I didn’t need or want and eventually refused.

In between, a variety of folks who I assume were nurses and who didn’t speak English took blood and urine. I tried to ask questions but there was a lot of running around and it was impossible to find someone to speak with me. All I could see was that everyone from the nauseous guy next to me to the guy with gout on the other side was getting the same treatment. It was finally when they were wheeling me to X-ray and I saw my husband who hadn’t been allowed in with me that I had the supportive energy that allowed me the confidence to say no to the X-ray and ask for an English speaking representative. I was made to sign documents that I was refusing treatment and was sent away with a prescription for pain meds. It was not until I was about to leave the hospital that the doctor came and found me having realized my true diagnosis which required antibiotics and could have soon become dangerously serious.

I’m still waking up thinking about it all.

This is not the first time I’ve experienced medical trauma. Birth trauma is another experience that sticks with me. Birth trauma had such an impact, that I’m feeling activated / triggered now as I begin to write this. After months of preparing with a doula and birth classes for a “natural“ birth, I was rushed to be induced when it was determined the baby inside me had no fluid around her. This came after some other stressful and frankly traumatic encounters in pregnancy including having the only hospital adjacent both center in my area shut down,I was actually excited to be induced and start moving forward finally as a mom.

Induction however in a hospital setting starts a whole chain of practices and procedures that severely limit birth choice. I had to be constantly hooked up to machines with chords so short that whenever I changed position even in the slightest it set off alarms to the nurses who dutifully entered and reset the attachments. This was brutal medical trauma as I was really committed to laboring in squatting and other non reclining positions. My only choice was to lay or stand. I stood a lot next to the machine. It wasn’t fun or productive for labor and towards the end when no doctors or nurses were there and it was just myself, my husband, and my dula I ended up in squat and cat/cow positions on my bed moving my way until the final birthing team arrived. Things got even more dramatic then but I’ll spare you the details.

I do still wake up some days and I’m brought to tears wondering how birthing my daughter could have been different.

Those days I work with trauma sensitive embodiment tools to process the birth trauma I still feel in my body.

If you’ve experienced medical trauma or birthing trauma it may take some time to trust folks in the medical field. Having an advocate with you, can help a lot. In both cases it was my husband who was able to give me the loving care and the permission to use my voice in the way I needed to feel safer.

Have you dealt with medical or birthing trauma? Let me know in the comments below.

We are all addicted

by Lara Land | Aug 1, 2022 | LAND BLOG, LARA LAND

I’ve probably mentioned this already, but my husband always says that a person’s opinion is the least interesting thing about them. I think that’s about the greatest thing I’ve ever heard.

In a social media driven world overrun with opinions, I’m left constantly wondering if any of the folks I encounter spouting their strong AF views ever give any consideration to the positionality and life-experience they are coming to those from. Or do some actually believe they are neutral, blank canvases? I know the Supreme Court would have us think they are though it is so obviously not true.

In fact, the United States great lie is that there is this fair neutral view which is why so many of us are going great lengths to call it out as biased and blind and supportive of white, male, able-bodied needs and desires.

It’s not only our views, but our way of thinking which we are addicted to.

By the time we are adults, the way we process information, weigh priorities and outcomes and come to conclusions is all habitual, feels good and right and we are addicted to it.

We are affirmed in our addiction by our peers and circles and followers who tend to think as we do, creating what is commonly called the echo chamber.

New ways of thinking are harder to come by in later years when we are less exposed to the new frameworks and paradigms we get at school. We have to seek out more fringe ideas, philosophies and teachers and listen to folks who think differently, trying on their thinking and working through thought exercises and giving our brains a good stretch.

This is something I have enjoyed doing via podcasts I listen to which in the past years have led me down many different styles of thinking but most notably, metamodernist thought projects and system change queries. I am so grateful.

Nikki Myers, the latest speaker on the Beyond Trauma podcast, is known for her work combining the twelve step program with yoga to help folks with addiction. However, her knowledge and practices are actually so much more than that. The way she explains and curtails addiction goes all the way to the way we think.

Take a listen on iTunes or Spotify and leave me a review to let me know what you think!

Afraid to be too big?

by Lara Land | Jul 25, 2022 | LAND BLOG, LARA LAND

Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us.
– Marianne Williamson

As many of you who have followed my life-coaching writing and posting up through now undoubtedly know, one of the teachings I repeat again and again in my life-coaching work is that there is always a pay off one is receives from any habitual feeling or action that continues to cling long after it has surpassed its helpfulness.

It is an illusion that one goes from growth to growth.

Understanding the reward we are addicted to and accepting its loss, is necessary to gain the next level of personal growth.

This is true of all long term emotional states including insecurity.

Insecurity may come from a variety of roots including parental figures whose psychologies craved the neediness and dependance of a child even as the child matured. Or it could stem from teachers and other influential adults who also gained in power through nurturing doubt in their subordinates. In more recent years insecurity has been produced and nurtured through social media where the illusion of others’ success creates impossible goals and expectations.

Regardless of the root cause, insecurity continues through adulthood, like all other undesirable habits, by choice, when we are unable to face the fear of how others may react to us if we hold our power…

…or because of false notions that if we stand in our self security we can’t also make and own mistakes.
…or because there is a reward we receive for playing small and insecure that we are afraid to give up.

That reward is the reassurance of others that we are good, smart, strong, pretty, etc etc.

If you are someone who deals with regular, long-term insecurity, ask yourself what reward you would have to let go of to let the insecurity go. Is it the ability to escape scrutiny? The avoidance of risk? Reassurance? Excused immobility?

Once you understand the pay off for any hard to break habit, you can decide consciously if you are ready to go there and let both the habit and the reward go.

Let me know how this worked for you!

Helping my life-coaching clients to understand and break patterns for the long-term is one of my greatest joys. If you think you can benefit from life-coaching, consider joining me for my Women’s Realignment Retreat this October 7th-9th where you will receive both group and individual coaching or message me to discuss ongoing private coaching openings for fall.

I can’t wait to help you grow!

little t trauma

by Lara Land | Jul 18, 2022 | LAND BLOG, LARA LAND

When we think of trauma our minds usually go to a single traumatic event like a crash or natural disaster, but traumatic stress actually goes way beyond this limited definition. There are medical traumas, trauma produced when we witness a violence and can’t act, and there is the trauma of lack when needs are not met, especially in childhood.

In some ways, we are more likely to get the care we require after a single traumatic event than when an ongoing disempowerment is taking place. Ongoing traumas are often hidden or when they are exposed, minimalized in deeply unhelpful ways.

A traumatic response in our systems may occur anytime we are unable to act, get away, or metabolize the traumatic event and instead must hold in the tension of the flight or fight we desire to enact so deeply as our evolutionary response. This happens regularly to folks who experience racial trauma and it stresses the body to levels which often produce negative health outcomes.

Many of us will have experienced traumatic stress from covid and our inability to flee or be together in ways that we are so drawn to when fighting a common enemy. Even if we weren’t in the worst of situations when covid hit, it’s important not to minimize the impact that delayed response has had on our bodies.

Making sure to check in with yourself and if possible with your patterns to get to know what might be lurking below the surface “I’m fine” is essential for making sure your trauma isn’t passed on to others. In some ways our self work is our basic responsibility and it’s the work my next Beyond Trauma podcast guest, Dr. Liz Cohen is so familiar with and good at.

She explains so clearly why what we may be calling little t trauma is actually where some of our biggest challenges lurk and why we shouldn’t shrug off what we’ve all just been through with covid even if we feel as if it is over.

Take a listen on itunes or spotify and as always, please subscribe, rate, and review and comment here with your thoughts!

You’re stressing me out! The underrated importance of VIBE!

by Lara Land | Jul 10, 2022 | LAND BLOG, LARA LAND

In long term relationships there is a way we balance each other out. If my partner worries a lot I may become the more free-spirited one. If they are always carefree, I take on the concerned role. Those role types tend to adjust to balance things, but they are not vibe. That’s different.

Vibe energy is the nervous system energy you bring into the room.

Most folks are generally unaware of this energetic presence unless they’ve been made conscious of it. After that, it’s something they can’t stop noticing!

Lara Land blog - The underrated importance of VIBE! - girl blowing bubble

The way our nervous system impacts others unless they are ultra conscious of it and can control it, is that we match energy. If your stress response is even low grade activated, I can feel that. If you are super and genuinely calm no matter what I throw at you, I will eventually chill out too.

Being in the presence of someone who has their nervous system down regulated is something you may not until now have been able to note consciously, but if you’ve had the experience, you will never forget.

It is why folks wait in line to see Amma. It’s why I’m obsessed with Lama Rod. And it’s why I take my best photographs with Simon Keough. (Have you seen the new ones on my site?!)

It’s also the most important element to get right as a trauma informed yoga teacher.

It doesn’t matter what poses you instruct or breathing techniques you teach if there’s something in you that’s rushed or unsettled, it will be felt in the trauma informed yoga room and your students will not be able to truly calm down.

This is why I stress the importance to my trauma informed yoga teacher trainees of keeping up a regular yoga and/or meditation practice which sets our average nervous system at a more regulated place AND to do whatever practice works for them to regulate themselves in the moments before they walk in the yoga room.

Regulating practices include Nadi Shodhana (alternate nostril breathing), self-touch like a hand on the heart and/or belly, shaking out, sun bathing and many more. Trauma sensitive yoga teachers should practice working with different techniques and testing what works for them before teaching others. Understanding our nervous systems is critical to becoming skilled teachers.

Free nervous system regulating meditations are available on my YouTube page. I also do this work one-on-one with my coaching clients and teach it as part of the Three and a Half Acres Yoga Trauma Sensitive Teacher Training.

« Older Entries

Next Entries »