With Robert Scaer, MD,
Saturday, June 15, 9 am – 1:00.
Life trauma is based on exposure to a life threat in a state of helplessness. This leads to the freeze, or immobility response, a basic instinct in mammals. Many diseases have their basis in the physiology of an aborted, truncated or incomplete discharge of the freeze response in the face of a life threat. Dissociation represents the somatic and perceptual state that we experience when we’re in the freeze response. It is a body/mind state that is quite dysfunctional, and is composed of the procedural, or somatic memories of related past traumatic events in our lives, and is a state of autonomic dysregulation.
The resulting disorder of regulatory functions in the brain and body results in a spectrum of symptoms that include emotional, cognitive and somatic dysfunction. Emotional dysregulation leads to many of the syndromes of mental illness outlined in the DSM-IV. Application of documented alteration of autonomic, endocrine and immune function in victims of life trauma also lends itself to explaining the cause of a host of chronic disease processes.
$40; Members $30
To Register, call 303-449-3066, or click Register for an Event (upper right).
Robert Scaer, M.D. is Board Certified in Neurology, and has been in practice for 36 years, twenty of those as Medical Director of Rehabilitation Services at the Mapleton Center in Boulder, CO. His primary areas of interest and expertise have been in the fields of traumatic brain injury and chronic pain, and more recently in the study of traumatic stress and its role in physical and emotional symptoms and in diseases. He has lectured extensively and has published three books on these topics: The Body Bears the Burden: Trauma, Dissociation and Disease, The Trauma Spectrum: Hidden Wounds and Human Resiliency, and Eight Keys to Brain/Body Balance, released in October 2012.