Earlier this month, I gave a talk at the first Human Factors in Diving Conference. It was a complex topic, and I attempted to weave a lot into the talk. I am picking up a few loose threads with blogs and a downloadable summary. This piece is a reflection on topics that were cut from the talk, yet somehow came through in the conversations during the conference.

There were two things I deliberately stopped short of discussing in the talk: acceptance and awe. Both are deeply relevant to how we metabolise experience. Yet it can be difficult to talk about trauma and growth in the same sentence without risking painful misunderstanding.

In the original talk, I drew from some fascinating research on the brain’s Default Mode Network. Over the last few years we have learned that, whenever a person is doing nothing, their brain is usually doing something. That something is done by the Default Mode Network (DMN). This is a network connecting different areas of the brain that activates during rest; when you stop doing a task.  (There are some links here). Over the years, we have learned that this probably holds the evolutionary function of checking whether we are safe.  A huge part of that safety is psychological and this network of the brain essentially runs regular status checks on whether or not we are useful to our people and whether those people know this! Do we matter? Are we offering enough? Have we accumulated enough status?

Sometimes we catch awareness of the DMN.  The part we can notice includes the inner, self-focused and often negative mind-chatter. It also loves to replay old memories, and find memories that support existing beliefs. Often very I/me focused, there will also be lots of thoughts about other people … but the purpose is still often egoistic.  For example, replaying of conversations to understand whether we said the right thing or analysing other people’s motivations to see if we are safe with them.

The DMN is useful. It’s the network we use when we reflect on experience, almost like a gateway between new information and the long-term storage of self. It’s a process of comparing, explaining, analysing and meaning-making.  But, it is not made for constant use. Arguably the home of the ego, it will tend to pull in everything around us to support our core beliefs, for most people, the negative core beliefs. It is highly active in depression and anxiety.

An excellent tip for getting yourself out of the DMN is to find a way to awe. Awe is that feeling of wonder and reverence in the face of something greater than us. One of the fascinating things about awe is that it appears to quieten that looping, chatting mind. The attention shifts away from ourselves and towards something larger. Divers are perhaps unusually fortunate in this respect. Awe is found floating in an expanse of blue water, looking up at the night sky or in sensing anything that seems impossible – but somehow exists.  When we engage with awe, we feel small in the presence of something much bigger than ourselves. As a result, the previously all-engaging self-talk becomes insignificant.  Suddenly we can accept whatever it was; and feel peace.

Awe can help us out of mundane ruminations, and there is even evidence of its role in reducing symptoms of post-traumatic stress. There is an interesting summary of awe in nature with military veterans here. For people with (non-diving/water) post-traumatic stress, the awe that is accessible in diving can be potentially healing.

In the talk, I touched a little on the DMN: when an experience is too much to process, the new information is held in sensory and motor networks, so the DMN does not necessarily have all the information it needs. The result can be looping. The mind keeps returning to the experience, trying to answer questions about safety, control, responsibility, and worthiness. It reaches for explanations, and in the absence of complete information it often falls back on old beliefs, old stories, and familiar ways of making sense of the world.

This is where acceptance is a tricky topic.

People are resilient and generally do heal naturally after events that would be considered psychologicially traumatic. There is also such a thing as post-traumatic growth, when people develop through strengths they build to deal with the challenge. This may be a change in attitude, a stronger connection to what matters in their life, reorganisation of relationships or finding work with purpose. Invariably, this involves acceptance in some shape or form.

We know that the way through difficult experience is often counterintuitively eased by dropping the resistance and moving towards acceptance. Yet telling somebody with PTSD to accept what happened is both insensitive and ineffective. It will likely cause them to feel unsafe, which in turn locks down the pause button, making it harder to process experience and forcing them deeper into the negative loops. And, when the trauma is diving related, one of their most accessible connections with awe may have been painfully curtailed.

So, I stopped short of prescribing acceptance and awe.

But, they came anyway! Interestingly, these were some of the ideas that emerged in the other talks and in deeper conversations after the talk. There were questions about stress inoculation, adversity in training, and links to personal experiences that opened space to sensitively explore the nuances of stress, trauma and it’s relationship to growth.