Being “in the now”, otherwise known as present moment awareness, is one of the most central spiritual practices there is. You are probably familiar with ‘The Power of Now’ by Eckhart Tolle. Maybe ‘Be Here Now’ by Ram Das. Maybe the Buddhist practices of mindfulness and vipassana. The deep emphasis on the present moment in Zen Buddhism. Maybe somatic embodiment practices. Maybe I am presence in Hindu philosophy. Being “in the now” can pull a person out of trauma because it can pull a person out of painful past scenarios as well as fearful future scenarios, anchoring them into the reality that nothing bad is happening right now; which pulls the nervous system out of what people are calling fight or flight mode. But a little-known reality is that some people will struggle with being in the now because being in the now in and of itself triggers a trauma response.
Let’s look at the reasons why present moment awareness can trigger a trauma response in some people.
- People who have experienced certain kinds of trauma do not have good associations with the calm, peacefulness of the present moment. In fact, when things are going ok, it causes them to panic. Stillness feels like a threat. Peace feels like the calm before the storm. For them, everything “being ok” equals dropping their guard and thus feels like an invitation for something horrible to happen. Moments of safety where nothing much is happening feels unnatural to them and unpredictable, far more unpredictable and unnatural than chaos. In fact, it is common that being in the peace of the present moment will feel like being in a super eerie ghost town to them. A traumatized nervous system interprets absolute quiet and peace not as calm, but as the terrifying isolation of being abandoned, being surrounded by unseen danger or even, being hunted.
- If a person was harmed in ways that involved being blindsided, the behavioral adaptation to that trauma that they usually make is to franticly mine the past for information (such as mistakes). Because this can help them to avoid the same thing happening again. As well as to frantically try to predict every future thing, so as to try to be able to avoid bad things from happening. This is the safety strategy they have. But this makes it so that the minute they focus into the present moment, they are going against their own safety strategy. So, rather than them realizing “wait, everything is ok, so I am ok”, their brain will react with “oh no… this is a disaster. I’m going to be blindsided.” They feel far safer in threat scanning than they do in being in the present moment, simply noticing what is.
- To borrow a metaphor from car engines, when the body has adapted to operating at a high RPM. Stress chemicals within the brain and body are chronically high. The body treats these survival chemicals like fuel and over time, your system accepts this high-stress state as your normal baseline. Your system then relies on your own stress hormones just to function normally. When you enter the present moment and register safety, it is like slamming on the brakes while the engine is still revving at 7,000 RPM. The gears grind, the car jerks, and the system panics because it does not know how to shift down to a peaceful, low RPM. You experience a stress chemical crash. Unlike other people whose systems experience this drop as relaxation, your system experiences it as a crash or like a system failure in which the system is suddenly deprived of fuel. This also tends to cause sudden overwhelming lethargy and exhaustion, a sudden drop into the emotional states that are being masked by always being stuck in fear mode, such as sadness, helplessness, numbness or grief. And it may also cause a person to experience brain fog. So, what does the system immediately do? Try to get back to that normal state of high RPM functioning. You go back to worrying, back to thinking about stressful things from the past. You pick a fight with someone. You fixate on thinking something that is upsetting. You go do something intense or risky. Present moment practices can in and of themselves trigger you to need to stress out. This is a highly physiological thing.
- For people who experienced trauma that involved things like chronic childhood neglect, physical abuse, sexual assault or medical trauma, the physical body itself becomes the “incident location” where bad things happen. Much like a crime scene. You know the intensity with which a person gets away from a house where something horrible happened or the intensity with which a person never wants to go to places that remind them of a place something bad happened. When being in the body was that place, the body is the danger zone. But because they cannot physically run away from their own body, the brain does the next best thing. It detaches the mind from the flesh. People dissociate from their body. They can live like this. In a state of depersonalization and derealization. It allows the person to go to work, pay bills, and interact with other people while completely disconnected from their internal agony. It acts as an emotional buffer. It literally numbs physical pain and dulls sensory input. And it enables them to remain acclimatized to a world where bad things happen to their body without that impacting them as much. Part of coming into the present moment is embodiment. You inhabit your body in the here and now, rather than being gone with your thoughts. True presence does not escape the material world (including the body) it dives completely into it. And for someone who is deeply traumatized in this way, that is a terrorizing experience. It is like being told “hey… you know that cabin where your whole family was murdered? Let’s go back there and live there!” Embodiment causes a trauma reaction in people who have specific trauma.
- Stored trauma and suppressed pain (that which is unprocessed) often floods forward in response to present moment practices. Your system is a highly efficient triage system. During a traumatic event, your brain does not have the luxury to process what is happening. It is focused entirely on keeping you alive. And you can stay stuck in this mode for years. This creates a kind of backlog. The brain wants to heal. It does not want to carry this heavy backlog forever. It is constantly waiting for a window of safety to unpack it, process it, and file it away permanently. When you enter the present moment and quiet your mind, your brain may interpret this as: Ah, the immediate crisis is over. This is our chance to unpack the backlog!” Needless to say, this can make being present feel like an internal flood or assault of painful things. Things like somatic flashbacks, really intense emotions, intrusive thought and images.
There is a seldom recognized and cruel paradox for traumatized people. One of the most important places to be for deep healing (the present moment) feels like the most dangerous place on earth. The very tools that enable healing, such as mindfulness, trigger them and hurt. So, what should we do about this?
The first thing we should do about this, is to become more collectively aware of this dynamic. In my experience, not even some of the best teachers of present moment awareness actually understand this dynamic. Nor do people who are traumatized and who (unlike everyone else) experience the opposite of relief when they enter the present moment. The result is people feeling like things that involve being in the present moment (like meditation or somatic embodiment) don’t work for them. The result is people feeling like something is inherently wrong with them. The result is teachers insisting that their students will feel a certain way if they do it right, which isn’t the case. The result is people being judged as spiritually unevolved and attached to their ego. It breeds a toxic and disconnected spiritual culture which does not actually understand or help people who are traumatized.
The next thing we should do about this, is to stop expecting present moment practices to feel good. This expectation starts you off on the wrong foot and sets you up for a detrimental cascade to occur. Know that it is probably not going to feel good. It may trigger you. It may feel terrifying. You may experience a flood of emotion or physical sensations. It may feel eerie and creepy. The minute you drop into the present moment, your psyche may become like a flailing fish on dry land. You may suddenly feel all over the place, like you can’t even track the frantic movements of your own mind and what it is focused on. You may feel like you can’t control your own mind to do what you want it to do. You may also just suddenly become aware that you are totally not present again, having gotten subconsciously sucked into thinking about something else. But this is to be expected. Knowing this and expecting this will make it so you stop telling yourself the story that something is horribly wrong, that you are doing something wrong or that something is wrong with you. If and when this happens, radically validate what is happening. Remind yourself of what is happening. Explain to yourself that you are having a trauma response and go into detail about specifically what is happening. It can be especially beneficial to remind yourself of the current date and your age and where you are and what is happening. For example: It is 2026, I am 42 years old. I am in Seattle Washington. I am doing a spiritual exercise to be in the now and because of growing up in an unsafe home, I am feeling like when I do this, because I’m not paying attention to bad thing that could happen, the other shoe is going to drop. But I can’t know that this will for sure happen because I am triggered. This is a trigger. In reality, everything might actually just be ok, I just am not resourcing it yet.
The next thing to do is to explore your personal resistance to the present moment. What threat does it represent in your case specifically? And with this personalized information, you can then make a conscious decision about how to challenge the associations you have with the present moment, how to change your relationship to the present moment. You decide upon how to engage in the present moment in a way that caretakes, rather than bulldozes your trauma. It is a good idea, now that you know the present moment can be a trigger in and of itself, to use that trigger to integrate your trauma. You can do this with The Completion Process. You can technically use any trauma healing process on this specific challenge.
Rather than expecting yourself to be fully in the present moment and stay there for a long time, practice doing it for only a couple of minutes. You can set a timer. The mind tends to feel more comfortable taking a break from hypervigilance if it knows it is only for a short and defined amount of time. You can extend this time period if and when you feel ready to do so. This will improve your relationship with the present moment as well as your window of tolerance for the present moment. Doing this gently acclimatized you back to the present moment without shocking your system.
Practice the art of the intentional pendulum swing. Into the present moment, out of the present moment. Into the present moment, out of the present moment. To do this, bring your focus entirely to something in the present. For example, touch your skin and really feel that touch. Pick something up and really smell it. Deeply look at something in your environment. Focus all of your attention on a sound. Then let yourself think about something else past or future or some imagined scenario. Then come back to the present moment again. Keep doing this, back and forth. If you want to, you can set a timer for a specific set time that dictates when to go back and forth. This will also improve your window of tolerance for the present moment.
For some people, first allowing themselves (in a very conscious and dedicated way) to write down worries as well as what they are going to proactively do about those worries; and/or allowing themselves to really deeply analyze the bad thing from the past that is on their mind, makes their system more willing to then do a present moment exercise without it being as much of a massive threat to your system.
If you are sitting still and you start to slip into a trauma response, try staying in the present but change your physical state immediately. Stand up and shake your hands or bounce up and down. Splash cold water on your face or immerse your face in cold water. Start humming a low tone, bite into a lemon, hold an ice cube, open the lid of a spice jar in the cabinet and take a deep sniff. This stimulation can snap the system out of the loop of the trigger.
If you are triggered by the present moment, that isn’t a message that present moment work does not work for you. It doesn’t mean that you should stop intentionally doing things that bring you into the now. It doesn’t mean that anything is wrong with you. In fact, your system is doing exactly what it is designed to do. Avoid the threat. But this process of engaging with the now, is going to look different for you than it does for other people. To begin with and maybe for a long while, it isn’t going to feel amazing. Being in the now, is not something you have to do perfectly. It makes perfect sense what your system is doing. You are completely in charge of whether to engage with it or not. But it is my promise that there are really great things waiting for you in the present moment. Things that will absolutely help you to unwind the very trauma that is currently making being in the now, such a struggle.
