More than fifty years ago, the spiritual teacher Ram Dass popularized the phrase “Be Here Now”. Distilling the essence of Eastern philosophies and spirituality for the benefit of people raised in the West, the Harvard psychologist-turned-yogi encapsulated an important truth in his 1971 book of the same title: life happens in the present moment.

Although many of us direct our attention regularly to memories of the past, and towards what we imagine will take place in the future, the past and the future are mental constructs. The past and the future are images, stories, and mental representations of life, but not life itself.

Another popular figure of the New Age movement, Eckhart Tolle, is likewise known for his influential book emphasizing “The Power of Now”, published in the late 1990s. Tolle writes “Life is now. There was never a time when your life was not now, nor will there ever be”. Tolle describes in detail how, before awakening, most of us stay caught up with what he calls “psychological time”: memories of the past and predictions of the future.

In 2014, yet another bestselling author espoused the benefits of living in the now, but for clinical rather than spiritual purposes. In his seminal book The Body Keeps the Score, trauma researcher Bessel van der Kolk describes the role of trauma treatment as helping clients to be here now – instead, specifically, of staying there and then. The “there and then” to which Van der Kolk refers is the traumatic past. Van der Kolk emphasizes that for trauma survivors, the here and now holds the promise of healing.

Why Being Here Now is Hard for Trauma Survivors

If staying present in the here and now is hard for you, you’re far from alone in that. At a glance, our addicted, distracted, overmedicated society reflects the widespread trouble most Westerners continue to have, to live life as it unfolds in the present rather than primarily through thoughts of past and future.

It may be validating to hear that for people with a trauma background, being present in the here and now is even more challenging than usual. Even people who do not have disruptive trauma symptoms need practice directing their attention to the present moment. But for people with nervous systems that carry what Dr. Janina Fisher calls the “living legacy of trauma”, the present moment can be exceptionally difficult to access.

Difficulty being in the now is due to the ways that trauma symptoms and memories are designed on purpose to keep the past alive. Our symptoms hijack our attention because we continue to perceive, on deep levels of the nervous system, that we are not safe. It is very hard to take our attention away from reliving the past and pre-living the future, because the strategies we developed to deal with real dangers from our past are still with us now. Living in “trauma time”, we are stuck in events that may have happened decades ago, still feeling the same feelings and sensations wherever we go.

The fact is, traumatized people have an even stronger reason than the mythical “normal” people, to learn to live in the present moment. As van der Kolk insists, only in the present moment will people recovering from danger find the experience of safety, that needed element which makes healing possible.

Making Friends with What Keeps Us in the There and Then

There is a way for people with trauma to learn to be more present in the now, the only place where safety and healing are actually available. The way begins, paradoxically, with befriending the parts that keep attention “there and then”, re-experiencing sensations that belong together with the traumatic past.

How do you relate to your mental health, trauma and addiction symptoms? If you’re like most of us, you probably have a range of responses. Sometimes you’re frustrated with yourself for “still” having certain symptoms, like depression or anxiety. Maybe at other times you feel despair and a sense of hopelessness that you’ll ever get better. Quite likely, you take it as a personal flaw – in which case you beat yourself up about having symptoms. If you have a substance addiction, eating disorder, self-harm, or a suicidal side, you almost certainly feel ashamed that you do, more than compassionate towards yourself about it.

What if there were a different way to relate to our mental health, trauma, and addiction symptoms? What if by befriending those symptoms as the survival resources that they actually are (or once were), we could shift our inner landscape, gently and without violence? What if by making friends with our own extreme survival solutions, those extreme parts could soften, allowing us to be in the now, more of the time, where we can at last receive the healing kindness we have always needed?

Just such an approach comes recommended by Frank G. Anderson, MD. Dr. Anderson is a psychiatrist, trauma expert, and Internal Family Systems Institute Lead Trainer who integrates several trauma-informed therapies, including EMDR, Sensorimotor Psychotherapy, and IFS, into his work with trauma clients. In his groundbreaking book Transcending Trauma: Healing Complex PTSD with Internal Family Systems Therapy, Anderson explains how radically accepting, understanding, and validating our symptoms as protector parts using survival strategies left over from our traumatic past is the beginning of finding a natural capacity for now-moment presence.

How to Be Present After Trauma

In order to get better, we have to call things by their right names. This is especially true in the field of recovery. We get much better, much faster, when we recognize the signature presence of trauma, underlying our symptoms and our behaviors.

In particular, we need to understand how a symptom is serving in a protective function. According to luminaries in the field of trauma treatment like the above-cited Janina Fisher of Trauma-Informed Stabilization Treatment and Pat Ogden of Sensorimotor Psychotherapy, we don’t get far treating surface symptoms like anxiety, depression, or substance abuse, if we can’t see that those symptoms are procedurally learned.

Procedural memory is a type of long-term implicit memory involving recollections which can only be demonstrated through motor action, or performance of physical or cognitive tasks rather than conscious recollection of events. Procedural memory is the memory of skilled actions, such as how to ride a bike, swim, or drive a car. The body remembers how to do something, even if we can’t recall the details of learning to master the sensorimotor activity.

Ogden’s somatic therapy work with trauma survivors helped uncover that what we commonly think of as symptoms of a mental health disorder, may actually be the evidence of our survival adaptations to extreme circumstances, encoded as procedural memory. Habits of posture, movement, eye contact, and nervous system states reflect what we learned in the past to be most adaptive. What this means is that if we are anxious now, we can assume that orienting to the world as full of danger, thinking rapid, fearful thoughts, and maintaining a hyperaroused nervous system helped us survive before.

According to Internal Family Systems Therapy (IFS), the radically non-pathologizing model developed by Richard Schwartz, which the above-mentioned Frank Anderson practices as well, we should relate to our symptoms as heroes to be thanked for their service, rather than enemies to be vanquished. Not only should we make friends, we should be grateful for our symptoms!

Honor the Symptoms as Evidence of How We Made It This Far

For women with trauma, it is very likely that they do not have a fully coherent narrative to explain all of their intense emotions, negative thoughts, and extreme behaviors. In the absence of a good explanation, many women fall into the trap of self-blame, which amplifies shame. When well-meaning friends, loved ones, and even therapists try to make extreme symptoms like addiction or self-harm go away without first fully understanding the positive intentions of those symptoms, women can feel even more ashamed and confused, unable to explain why a part of them wants to hang on to destructive behaviors.

When we understand the ways that trauma memories are stored in the brain, as implicit memories – nonverbal sensations, nervous system states, posture, and habits of movement – we may discover that our symptoms are actually procedural memories. The symptoms we experience now shift from being evidence of a mental disorder, to being evidence of how we survived our traumatic past.

Anxiety reveals itself as a survival strategy of maintaining a hyperaroused nervous system, ready to flee at any moment. Chronic anger reveals itself to be a legacy of a frequently-needed fight response. Depression, shame, and self-loathing, on the other end of the vagal spectrum, reflect a learned strategy of collapse-and-submit, indicating that we may have had many experiences in our past wherein dorsal vagal shut down worked best to secure our survival.

Because our symptoms represent parts of us that figured out ingenious ways to survive, these symptoms aren’t going to change easily. What we can do is ask our symptoms to tell us when, where, and why we learned to do that. How did depression help us survive? How did shame, anxiety, or cutting help us in the past? What is the really good reason that we began to use substances to cope? What would have happened to us, if we had not had those strategies available to us?

Distinguishing There and Then from Here and Now

Slowly, through honoring our symptoms as carrying our survival strategies, we may learn to distinguish between then and there, and here and now.

If it feels like we are in danger, but there is no danger present now, then the sensation of danger is an implicit memory rather than a truth about now.

For instance, if we tend to avoid eye contact with people, that may be because we learned procedurally that it wasn’t safe to make full eye contact. Perhaps the eyes of our primary caregivers were frightening. Perhaps making eye contact made us a target for our abuser, or attracted mean-girl bullying at school.

Recognizing how our behaviors helped us, we can start to wonder whether the strategy is always necessary now that we’re grown up, away from many of the dangers that once threatened our chances of survival. We may discover that in this moment, with this person, it is ok to meet eyes. Once we learn that any number of behavioral habits we thought were part of who we are, including symptoms like a tendency to stay depressed, to fear social interactions, or to overeat, are records of solutions we found long ago, we can begin to ask ourselves questions which will help us adjust to a now moment that is almost certainly safer than our past (if only because we are bigger and more developed now).

In the words of Deb Dana of the Polyvagal Institute, we can learn to ask ourselves the discernment question:

In this moment, in this place, with this person or people, is this level of nervous system response necessary?

In the instant of recognition that it would, in fact, be safe to relax some of our protective stance, whether that protection is coming in the form of anxiety, anger, or despair, we touch into that hallowed, storied, and most sacred dimension, the only place where healing can happen: the here and now.

Thanks for reading!

If you’re curious to see how trauma-informed care could make a difference in your story, consider one of Villa Kali Ma’s many holistic programs for women recovering from trauma, mental illness, and addiction.