How Did Our Ancient Ancestors Heal From Trauma?

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Trauma is nothing new to the human race. Sociologists may argue about whether early human societies were comfortable and egalitarian, like many of the modern-day hunter-gatherer peoples living in the world’s remaining rainforests, or whether our forebears instead lived in violent dominator cultures in which the members who were physically strongest ruled (the primary fantasy of nineteenth-century writers). However, sociologists and anthropologists and other social thinkers do not disagree that trauma and death have always been part of human life.

So, how has humankind historically dealt with trauma for the past two hundred thousand years, before the advent of psychotherapy? Humans experienced mental and emotional wounds in ancient times just as we do today. Family members became sick and died; friends and family were lost to battles with other tribes and with wild animals; after the advent of agriculture, famine and plagues were periodically visited upon us.

In times past, if four of us set out as a hunting party every few days, odds are that over time at least one person in our party would get eaten by a predator or die in an accident. When that happened right in front of the other three of us, how would we deal with the psychological trauma that resulted from witnessing such an event? We would be in a state of trauma-induced shock. How would we cope with that? How would we deal with the trauma from a near-escape from death?

The answer that occurs to most people is we’d engage in some sort of ritual when we returned to the village, rituals that usually involved drumming and dancing, two forms of bilateral activity known to induce trance. But this ceremony may be more to help the people back in the village, such as the family of our lost companion, to work through their grief.

The Human Body Is A Self-Healing Organism

The human body is a self-healing organism. When you cut your finger, it heals. If you break your leg, it heals. Even if part of you is cut out in surgery, the surgeon’s wound heals. We heal from bacterial and viral invasions, from injuries, and from all variety of traumas. The mechanisms for healing are built into us. Five million years of evolution, or the grace of God, or both, have made our bodies automatic healing machines. So why wouldn’t the same be true of our minds and emotions?

All of the traumas we experience in life leave their wounds. If humankind hadn’t had ways of healing from those emotional and psychological blows, over time society would have become progressively less functional. Instead, history shows us that people usually recover even from the most severe psychological wounds, often learning great lessons or gaining important insights in the recovery process.

The famous Kauai longitudinal study of children raised in stressful, disadvantaged conditions found that a higher percentage of the children grew up “highly resilient” than did a middle-class comparison group. The generation that survived the Great Depression and the Nazi Holocaust in Europe went on to create important social institutions, build nations, and offer comfort and hope to humankind. Elie Wiesel’s experience specifically comes to mind; although he would never wish on another the horrific experience of being in one of Hitler’s death camps, through his writing of that experience he has given a particularly inspiring model of resilience and healing to the world.

Natural Interventions For Emotional Healing

The reality is that, while adversity breaks some people, it strengthens others. And when people heal from adversity, the old cliché of “what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger” usually rings true.

But, just as with the production of scar tissue in the healing of a wound to the skin — a process involving millions of cells producing very specific compounds in response to the trauma in the tissue — there must be an inborn mechanism for healing the mind and the emotions. And just as healing from a cut can be speeded up by keeping the wound clean and dry or can be slowed down by letting the wound get wet or dirty or irritated, this emotional healing is also a process that can be either stimulated or thwarted by our interventions.

A specific healing mechanism that nature has built into the human mind and body enables us to process trauma in a way that is quick, functional, and permanent. Just like the skin’s mechanism for forming scabs and scars and eventually even making the scars vanish, this mechanism is simple, fundamental, and elegant.

In its simplest form, this mechanism involves rhythmic side-to-side stimulation of the body. This side-to-side motion, or bilateral movement, causes nerve impulses to cross the brain from the left hemisphere to the right hemisphere and back at a specific rate or frequency. This cross-patterning produces an autonomic integration of left-hemisphere thinking functions with right hemisphere and brain stem feeling functions. This integration is a necessary precursor to emotional and intellectual healing from trauma.

This steady movement of nerve impulses across the hemispheres of the brain is stimulated in the bilateral-movement processes of a variety of modern forms of psychotherapy, including Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing, Emotional Freedom Technique, and Thought Field Therapy. In its most pure form, however, I’ve discovered that the natural and rhythmic left-right-left-right process of walking, while performing a simple mental exercise, can also stimulate this same internal integration process.

Simple, Bilateral Movement Discharges Emotional Stress

This, I posit, is the way humans have healed themselves from trauma for the hundreds of thousands of years of human history, and it’s only because so few of us walk anymore that we have to resort to office-based psychotherapeutic processes to produce the same result.

And that result is impressive. When we stimulate the nervous system in this bilateral manner while calling to mind a persistent emotional distress, the emotional charge associated with that memory quickly and permanently dissipates. This isn’t a process of producing amnesia or forgetting; instead, it’s a way of reframing the past, a way of re-understanding, of putting into context that which has been so “unnerving” for us.

When we perform this bilateral process correctly, the pictures of painful past events in our memory transform from stark, scary, sound-filled color movies into black-and-white still pictures that are flattened out and lose their sound. The internal dialogue we have about the events — the tag line that we tell ourselves, and actually hear in our own heads in our own voices — changes, usually from something like, “That was a painful experience that still scares me,” or, “I was victimized in that relationship,” to a more productive synopsis, such as, “Yes, that happened to me, but it’s well in the past now and I’ve learned some good lessons from the experience. I can let go of it.”

Inciting the movement of nerve impulses across the brain hemispheres helps people to come to terms with their past. They stop being frightened by their imagined futures and feel comfortable and empowered in the present. Walking while holding a traumatic memory in mind in a particular way can produce this result in a very short time.

Excerpted with permission of the author from Walking Your Blues Away — How To Heal The Mind and Create Emotional Well-Being (by Thom Hartmann, Park Street Press, 2006). Available on the substack The Wisdom School: What It Means To Be Human.

Thom Hartmann is a NY Times bestselling author 34 books in 17 languages and the nation’s #1 progressive radio host, as well as a psychotherapist and international relief worker. Sign up to receive The Hartmann Report, a daily newsletter of Renaissance thinking about progressive politics, economics, science, and the issues of our day. 

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