Propiedades electromagnéticas del neutrino

Can you tell what is going on in the painting on the previous page? At first you may not notice anything unusual as it may just look like a regular landscape painting. But it isn’t. If you pay close attention, you will see that there are two distinct elements in this picture: a canvas being painted on an easel and, to the right of the canvas and above it, the actual scene being painted. If you haven’t yet noticed that, go back now and see if you can see the easel and notice that there is a painting on it; the white border of the canvas with regularly spaced

the white border of the canvas with regularly spaced staples marks the distinction between the painting and the scene being painted. To the unsuspecting eye, however, they look like the same thing, don’t they? Yet, they may be drastically different. For example, it’s possible that there is a barn with a cow in the actual landscape, but the artist, for whatever reason, is only painting the trees, grass, and mountains. Were we to assume that the painting is an accurate representation, we’d be very mistaken. The most telling aspect of this painting by Magritte, in our opinion, is its title, which translates to: “The Human Condition.” The painting and its title capture the fact that it is human nature to “fuse” our perceptions, thoughts, worries, predictions, feelings, bodily sensations, and memories about events (the painting) with the actual events (the actual scene), to the point that we cannot distinguish which is which. Yet, we know from research that this inability can result in significant suffering (Hayes, Strosahl, and Wilson 1999).

Mindfulness, the main topic of this chapter, is about focusing our attention in order to distinguish the painting from the scene, and vice versa. The aim of this chapter is to give you some skills to help you cope while you are doing the work of dealing with your trauma. We believe that mindfulness is the first crucial step in being able to step back from your reactions and do something healthy when trauma issues get stirred up. Mindfulness will also set the foundation for the rest of the book.

Exercise 2.1. Strategies You Are Using Right Now

Before we start looking at new skills, let’s look at what you have been doing to cope with life since your trauma. In the first column, list some of your strategies for coping. In the second, indicate how long you have been using each strategy. In the third column, rate how useful each has been using

third column, rate how useful each has been using a scale of 0 to 10, where 0 is not at all useful and 10 is entirely effective.

Take a moment and review your list above and notice any similarities among the strategies that are not as helpful. What most people notice is that a lot of the strategies that are not working as well in the long term revolve around avoiding experiencing or coming into contact with painful emotions in their lives. These emotions might be related to old traumas or current life experiences. You are taking the first steps here by just noticing what you do and being willing to become aware of how these things work in your life. In fact, you might even be engaging in some avoidance behaviors that do work for you at some level, such as studying to get away from sadness about a relationship breakup and getting good grades as a result. We know people who are straight-A students or who have accomplished a great deal in their work life with this style of coping. We are not saying that you should be judging these strategies as bad things to do, but rather taking a look at how they function in your life. So, if instead of being about a true joy in your work, your work behavior is driven by the need to avoid feeling bad about yourself, to avoid thinking about painful experiences, or to always try to

thinking about painful experiences, or to always try to please other people, we invite you to check and see if this is what you really want your life to be about.

Other ineffective coping strategies that people commonly use include drinking, using drugs, or finding other ways to avoid difficult emotions. Some people do things to hurt themselves like cutting, burning, or hurting their body in other ways. No matter what you are doing, you can be pretty sure that a lot of other people are doing something similar in their attempts to cope. There isn’t much new under the sun, but most of these coping behaviors are done with a lot of secrecy, and people feel a lot of shame about them. This book is not about judging yourself but about trying new things.

Avoid Avoidance

We have talked about the issue of avoidance as a response to traumatic experiences. Our point of view is that the way to deal with the pain and suffering is to work through these experiences, as opposed to pushing them away, just as we know that the way to get over a spider phobia is to undergo some form of exposure to or contact with spiders. However, exposure to spiders doesn’t mean walking into a room and, without any warning, throwing a spider on top of the person who fears spiders. That approach, in fact, is bound to reinforce the fear of spiders instead of reducing it. Similarly here, as we will discuss in the next chapter, we know that the way to reduce suffering associated with one’s trauma is to be able to work through the original pain of the trauma in a careful, gradual way, where you maintain control over the what, how, and, importantly, when (Riggs, Cahill, and Foa 2006). This book is not about throwing a spider on your lap!

Part of the process here is, therefore, to build a safe foundation, through increased awareness of what is going on inside and outside you, so that you can do this very difficult work. This increased awareness, or mindfulness,

difficult work. This increased awareness, or mindfulness, is the opposite of avoidance and can be the foundation for effectively living a life you truly value. In our work, we have found that some people with trauma histories either never learned some of these skills in their early years or got so involved in using other methods of coping, sometimes not very healthy ones, that they have forgotten the utility of other methods of coping. We want you to develop some more effective ways of caring for yourself as you do this work. So, as you read this chapter, we urge you to consider these ideas as tools that are part of reaching toward your valued life goals. Maybe you feel like these sorts of things won’t work for you, or they may seem silly. As discussed in the introduction, we are just asking you to stay open and try some things out. In some sense, we all do the work of psychologists in our private lives. We try to understand our behavior and find better ways to deal with problems and life issues. Part of being a psychologist is experimenting with new ideas and finding out what works for you.

One of the first steps in building a safe foundation, learning any new skills, or making any changes at all in your life is being more aware of what you are experiencing right now. As we mentioned in the

experiencing right now. As we mentioned in the introduction, suffering is a secondary problem that comes from trying to push away or avoid pain. Most suffering comes from projecting into the future or thinking (sometimes rethinking) about the past. It is rare that there is incredible pain in this very moment. Most of the time, it’s about the past or the future. Think about it right this second: how much of the pain you’re experiencing right now is about the future (Will I be able to get to work on time tomorrow?) or the past (I can’t believe how stupid I looked at that presentation last week!)?

Because part of the goal of this work is to wake up and be present for what is going on in your life at this very moment, the first thing we are going to talk about is something we call being mindful. As we explained above, this is key to building a safe foundation and for being able to successfully apply other concepts in this book.

Think about this past week. Have you done any of the following?

Talking on your cell phone while driving Listening to music while reading or talking Planning ahead or making lists while “listening” to your spouse or friend

Doing the dishes or being in front of the computer while on the phone

Watching TV while eating

Watching TV while eating and talking on the phone

Watching TV while eating, talking on the phone, and reading a magazine or paper!

If you said yes to one or more of the above, you can relate to how hard it is to bring our awareness to one thing at a time. So, in this era of multitasking, what will it take for us to become more mindful? Practice, practice, practice.

practice.

The idea of being mindful has been talked about in both psychology and spiritual traditions (for example, Brach 2003; Chodron 2001; Hayes and Smith 2005; Linehan 1993a; Linehan 1993b; Kabat-Zinn 2005; Nhat Hanh 1987; Zindel, Williams, and Teasdale 2002). There are many ways to talk about this idea, but the basic concept of mindfulness involves being aware of your body, your life, and your mind. The goals of mindfulness are:

Being present in your life for the variety of internal and external experiences that you are having Controlling your attention but not what you see Staying in the present moment

Noticing and being aware of your experience without judgment and avoidance

Becoming mindful is one step in moving away from trauma and back into your life, but it is relevant to everyone, whether or not they are survivors of some particular trauma. Modern life has pulled us into a state of not being present in our own lives! If you picked up this book, you have enough motivation and self- awareness to look at your role in making your life vital. To increase awareness, we have to slow down enough to notice all the different components that go into our behavior in life.

For example, imagine that you have always driven an automatic transmission car and then, all of a sudden, you need to learn to drive a stick shift. That beginning process requires all your attention to be focused on a few steps: pressing your left foot on the clutch and releasing it as you step with your right foot on the accelerator. Over time, this process may become automatic, but for a while, you have to bring all your attention to this task to be able to learn it. A similar process happens when

be able to learn it. A similar process happens when you’re learning any new skill or when you are trying to correct the way you do something, such as trying to improve your backhand in tennis, start using your pinkie finger when you type, or improve your performance of a particular musical passage on your musical instrument.

This learning process is no different when it comes to things that happen inside us. We still need to bring awareness to these experiences in order to do something different. If you find yourself snapping at a coworker, friend, or partner and want to stop doing that, first you have to notice what is going on inside and outside of you. You must be able to notice that you are feeling anger to be able to stop yourself from acting in anger. This is particularly the case with issues related to your own safety, because safety can be compromised by impulsivity and thoughtlessness, which are the ultimate enemies of awareness.

This chapter will guide you through exercises asking you to notice what is going on with you in various areas as a way of helping you practice self-awareness, so that in times of crisis you can engage in actions that are based on your values rather than fleeting emotions or thoughts.

Mindfulness and Trauma Survivors As mentioned in chapter 1, survivors of trauma tend to cope with the experience in different ways. Different people have a variety of ways of coping with stressful experiences and even the same person might deal with traumas differently across his or her lifetime. Often, these coping styles may go from one extreme to another, both of which tend to block the trauma from being assimilated. This has been called the “dialectic of trauma” (Herman 1992). This may show up as numbness for some people or hypervigilance in others. Being mindful is about being fully present in this moment as described in the quote by Cezanne at the beginning of this chapter. [Where are your thoughts right now?]

your thoughts right now?]

Part of being mindful is about being aware of your environment in a new way. At times trauma survivors report being either unaware or extremely sensitive to their surroundings. Interestingly, this is another one of those seemingly opposite patterns that we can see in people who have experienced traumatic events: Some people may report that they feel really shut down and don’t notice much at all anymore. It’s as if life is no longer real, or they feel like they aren’t in touch with their body anymore. Life feels at a distance, as if the person is traveling in a thick fog with no real connections. On the other hand, other people report being intensely aware of either internal or external experiences. This phenomenon can be called hypervigilance.

People who have survived dangerous environments have sometimes reported that they are hyperaware of everything around them. This acute sensitivity to the environment may have served a useful function at some time. For example, combat veterans may have been very sensitive to small sounds in order to stay alert for danger. But now they might use this sort of vigilance in everyday, noncombat situations. If you have experienced significant family violence, you may have become extremely aware of small changes in people, constantly watching for signals that a violent episode may be imminent. Sometimes this hyperawareness may have even been useful in helping you to stay alive, such as hearing the enemy before others noticed anything at all. Even if this sensitivity did not function in that way, it may have given you a sense of control, a sense of being able to predict when bad things were going to happen. This can be an interesting sort of paradox in that many combat veterans we have talked with report that they never felt more alive than they did while in country. We want you to look at how that hyperawareness functions now in your life.

This acute awareness of everything is not what we mean by being mindful. In fact this is a kind of hyperarousal that happens in extreme stress and can be very hard on you, both psychologically and physically. Psychologically, it means that you are so aware of small details that you can miss the big picture. It functions not unlike the image we included at the beginning of the chapter. And this hypersensitivity can lead to a lot of misinterpretation. For instance, if you interpret every small creak your house makes at night as a sign of danger, you’re not likely to get much sleep. Or if you find yourself extremely sensitive to every small change in the behavior of people around you, you might end up misinterpreting small events as meaning that people are upset or angry with you, when in fact they are just dealing with their own issues. Physically, we know that staying in a state of extreme stress and arousal can cause all types of health problems over time, including heart disease, high blood pressure, and other stress-related illness (Kabat-Zinn 2005). [Notice any thoughts, judgments, or feelings coming up for you.]

In our experience, people who are struggling with traumatic experiences often become especially good at finding ways to be out of contact with their thoughts and feelings. Even when you don’t do this all the time, small triggers can send you off, pulling you away from contact with your present life. This is part of the trick of doing work around your trauma experiences. The act of doing the work is very likely to trigger old thoughts and feelings that you will want to avoid. One of the basic aspects of working through trauma is sticking with treatment (reading, in this case) even when your thoughts and feelings tell you to run away. So we are going to have you practice coming back to the present moment in lots of different ways, including inviting you to check in with your experience every time you encounter one of the bell signs scattered throughout the book.

signs scattered throughout the book.

Exercise 2.2: Rating Your Awareness This Week On a scale of 0 to 10, with 0 being not at all numb and 10 being completely numb—unable to notice or care about anything—how numb would you rate yourself this last week? ___________ On a scale of 0 to 10, with 0 being not at all hypervigilant and 10 being completely hypervigilant—noticing everything you feel or others do—how hypervigilant have you been this week? ___________

One of the first steps in changing your behavior is to become more observant of where you are in awareness at the present moment. Throughout the next week we want you to stop and take your “awareness temperature,” on a scale of 0 to 10, noticing situations when you are more likely to go numb or to be hypervigilant. When you give yourself a low rating on the awareness scale, see if you can bring your attention back to the present moment, gently and without judgment.

We are going to give you a variety of different exercises to try, because in our experience people respond differently to different ways of doing this work. To help each exercise best serve you, start by reading through it once or twice first, and then complete it. After