A 'Mindfulness' Conversation

The following is something that was written to me by another blogger:

"We might be differing on our definitions of “cling to.” It sounds a bit like “not clinging” is tantamount to “pushing away” in your experience. To me, “clinging” would be trying to make a feeling last longer, or feel more intense, than it really is — if it truly is a long feeling and an intense one, than mindfulness would let it be long and intense as it needs to be."



My Response:

I think you are right on target with the general principles of mindfulness when you say that ‘clinging’ is defined as trying to make a feeling last longer or feel more intense than it really is. And therein lies the problem. I’ve never known any trauma survivor who was trying to do such a thing. They basically want out of the torment and just want to feel better. Enter mindfulness, which implies that the intrusive aspects of the trauma response and the corresponding high levels of distress are likely to be due to the survivor possibly ‘clinging to the trauma’ by making too much of things – that it is possible to make too big a deal out of a toddler being repeatedly raped and sodomized by her father for instance, and that if the distress is great enough in the present, then the person is attaching too much importance to this event and the havoc it elicits. The same problems arise for those who are in a ruminative phase.

This is extremely invalidating for any therapy to even imply because there are certain things that are so awful, it would be pretty hard to ‘make too much’ of them. This is a double-bind because mindfulness says to accept your feelings because it is understood that really being able to do so is the key to relief and yet it implies that doing so might be making too much of things. And the worse your trauma was, the more intense or long-reaching the emotional devastation, the more likely that you are ‘making too much of things’. If such a message came from a family, a therapist would call it crazy-making. But it’s okay if it comes from a therapy. This distinction is also crazy-making. Dare to call the therapist out on it when you finally figure out why you are losing your mind under the manipulative influence of such a therapy and no matter how many contradictory quotes, how much independent study and how many notes you have made, they will look right at it and deny the reality and common sense of what they are looking at. This is called gaslighting. It is dishonesty, denial and minimization masquerading as enlightenment and anyone who recognizes the truth about this is said to be incorrect and suffering ‘distortions in perception’.

This is all very crazy and toxic, but that is how mindfulness works. It effectively silences the client and blunts and shames their naturally strong emotional expressions (which are treated as ‘behaviors’) and it accomplishes all of this with a double-bind. This is emotional and psychological abuse and it is re-traumatizing. And for the dissociative client, it causes even more insidious damage and they often end up having to heal the damage caused by the abuse perpetrated against them from the invalidating and crazy-making therapy before they can have productive access to the material that originally drove them to seek help in the first place. This can add years to the healing process and I wouldn’t be surprised if it makes integration impossible for some. This is a perfect example of the toxic and damaging effects of spiritual dogma.