060 - A Conversation with Dr. Keith Witt, Part 1: Trauma to Transcendence

Portals of Perception

Is it a big stretch to think of struggling with trauma as part of a hero’s journey? Or is it integral for the hero’s transformation? How do we metabolize feeling weak or diminished by fear, anxiety and pain from traumatic events that at times can seem beyond our ability to cope?

What if we understood that even the willingness to face a trauma will stimulate the parts of the brain responsible for resilience and, over time, build strength and courage? Advances in neuroscience have shed light on some of the brain’s hidden functions in times of pain and trauma, and the resulting influences on our responses and behavior.

Moving through the phases of healing trauma is what builds the road to our eventual transformation. We apply emerging new wisdom and strength to reconcile and reshape our experiences with trauma, and perhaps inspire others on their own healing odyssey. A real hero’s journey.

Unraveling the nature of trauma and its healing is the focus of this conversation between Aviv Shahar and Dr. Keith Witt, an internationally known integral psychotherapist, teacher and author of 15 books. Keith has conducted over 70,000 therapy sessions, written hundreds of blog posts, and appeared on numerous podcasts, including his own, The Shrink and The Pundit, and Witt & Wisdom.

Among their insights:

• Conventional wisdom has been we’re all born equal and then the environment shapes us. Research has proved that to be entirely and dramatically wrong.
• Trauma is a natural part of the experience of life; it’s completely integral to the development journey. There are ways to work with trauma to facilitate our growth.
• A human being accessing their inherent “superpowers” to love and grow will get better, become more loving, and grow on whatever line they’re investing in. That’s the gift of consciousness.
• Once you lie to yourself, you do violence to yourself; you lie to somebody else, you do violence to another person. That’s not real compassion; it’s a defensive state masquerading as compassion.
• The essence of trauma learning has been being a victim and not having power. The essence of resilience is having agency, and living as if the rest of humanity are your companions, not your enemies.
• The culture is self-organizing away from comprehensive communication and towards confrontation. But conversation produces progress and solves problems.
• I am hopeful about humanity because all across the world people are dialed in, not just to spirituality, but also science, and to vast networks of incredible help and resources. It’s a great time to be alive.

This conversation is part of the continuing Portals discovery into what is emerging on the frontiers of human experience in this time of profound change. Information about upcoming special events can be found on the Events page. Also visit and subscribe to our YouTube channel.

TWEETABLE QUOTES

“Anybody who does psychotherapy works with trauma, and there's been wonderful systems generated in the last 30 years for treating trauma, normalizing it, studying it, and so on. There's been a lot of neurobiology research, and I study a lot. It's one of the pleasures of my life to study systems, and I practice a lot of therapy, and I realized that the field didn't realize that trauma work proceeds through four stages. People intuitively understood it. If you talk to anybody in the field, say, Bessel van der Kolk or Francine Shapiro, some of those people if you teased it out, they would basically end up talking about these four stages, and I felt like an integral understanding of those four stages was important for psychotherapists because the principles are different in different stages.” (Dr. Keith Witt)

“So, when you are practicing awareness with acceptance and caring intent for your interior experience, you're activating circuits in your frontal cortex, particularly your right frontal cortex, that are self-regulatory circuits. If you do that daily for a month, stem cells will divide into daughter cells and become integrative neurons that hardwire self-regulatory circuits from the front of the cerebral cortex back to the amygdala and hippocampus. So, all contemplative work creates the neural territory to be able to self-regulate. That's an important central feature of many systems.” (Dr. Keith Witt)

“Dialed in means I feel comfortable in my life; I feel in charge of doing what I need to do; I feel confident and competent; I feel like my life works for me and I work for my life. My relationships are working for me, and so on. It's just that I'm in harmony with my life dialed in, integral mindfulness.” (Dr. Keith Witt)

RESOURCES MENTIONED

Portals of Perception Website

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Aviv’s Website

Dr. Keith’s Website