Dr. Buczynski: Now that’s a critical point Dr. Peter Levine just made, about the importance of helping patients connect to their vitality and bodily awareness.

Now I want to introduce you to another important facet of helping patients access feelings of aliveness . . .

Dr. Bader: It’s about being able to pursue pleasure and being able to pursue what lights you up. And being able to risk pursuing that when everything inside a person might be screaming, “I can’t trust anybody, I can’t trust the world,” and they’re terrified.

As a therapist, I’m often doing what I call making developmental assists like support. Support is so important in terms of a person trying something out that’s very frightening to them, and knowing they can come back to the therapist, or knowing they can come back to the spouse, or knowing how they’re going to support themselves for trying that thing that is in the direction of pleasure.

Dr. Buczynski: Dr. Ellyn Bader just raised the idea of how important it is to help patients begin to pursue feelings of pleasure.

And one of the ways you can do this is by linking them up with support, whether that comes from you, as the therapist, or from someone else in their life.

Now, I want to stay with this idea of helping patients pursue pleasure. Because there is another way you might start to think about this.

Dr. Herman: And so, sort of reclaiming the ability to feel pleasure goes along with the easing of pain. I think sometimes we kind of skimp on the pleasure side. We’re about relieving pain, which is a good thing. But I think oftentimes we don’t do enough exploring of what does give people some sense of at least comfort if not pleasure. And usually, there’s got to be something, a lot of people who are too traumatized to tolerate human touch, for example, can snuggle with an animal.

And as people’s emotional tolerance and affect tolerance expands, their ability to find pleasure somewhere will expand also. I’ve just read a couple of books, memoirs by survivors, who basically said rock and roll saved their lives, or rock music saved their lives, or punk rock, or some version gave them a teenage identity and the songs spoke to their condition and made them feel they weren’t alone, even though they didn’t know anybody who was like them. Where they ended up finding their group of punk rockers who were runaways or throwaway kids like themselves and that kind of thing. So, there are multiple sources of hope and inspiration out there in the world, and I think it’s incumbent on us to help people explore what gives them pleasure.

Dr. Buczynski: So, I just want to emphasize the point that Dr. Judith Herman just made. And
that is the importance of helping patients expand their ability to tolerate pleasure.
And in a moment, we’ll share 2 steps you can take to help patients start to move toward
pleasure.

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