Dissociation, Mindfulness, and Creative Meditations

Show Guest: Christine Forner

Dissociation, Mindfulness, and Creative Meditations explores the potential of mindfulness and explains why this level of developmental human achievement is so precarious within traumatic stress, especially traumatic dissociation. When children are harmed, we are all harmed. For many years the general understanding was that children are resilient. They seem to heal from physical injury much quicker than adults, so the assumption that their emotional and developmental systems were the same. It is also a general belief that the kids are too young to remember things, so what happens to them is not that harmful, but this is a myth. In the last 20 years we have learned a great deal about how stress and adversities affect children and its way more serious than what was believed to be true.

Children are extremely sensitive to stress. Babies and small children will seek out caregivers when they feel threat or danger, when their own caregiver is not there and they are scared the instinctual body of the child will move into a state of panic and terror. They don’t really move into rage or running away as a defense, they do move into dissociation. Dissociation, if needed a lot, can lead to a dissociative disorder and a whole host of other issues. These children become at risk for mental illness, learned helplessness, anti-social behavior, and illness such as autoimmune, heart disease, cancers.Christine Forner joins us to discuss the connection between mindfulness and dissociative disorders .She will explain how her book teaches readers how to exercise the part of the brain that is responsible for mindfulness and how to regulate the part that is responsible for dissociation, and so they come away with tips that will help even the most dissociative individual to reap the benefits of mindfulness practices.