Samhain Meets the Rat Park Method

I attended the virtual Collective Trauma Summit a few weeks ago (partially…watched a few videos). Thomas Hübl, the founder, made the significant point that trauma teaches us to borrow from our future. When we experience trauma, we want to get out of the now…”not here, not now” is the human reaction. 

“The intelligence of trauma is that it knows we can take a loan from our future…but it comes with interest. It’s not free.”

In his discussion with embodiment coach Prentis Hemphill, they converge on how we use the idea that we have a “later” as a resource. She points to Christianity and the idea of heaven. 

Salvation is always in the future.

This is how some think of self-care, or what I prefer to call resourcing ourselves, since the phrase “self-care” has become so tainted and convoluted. We are too busy to care for ourselves, even though we are never too busy to take care of someone else or something else. So I ask: 

What is the quality of the care that you are giving? If love is attention, are you able to give your full attention if you are drained, empty, and resentful?

Together Hübl and Hemphill point out that the idea of “later” prevents us from making change now. We are intoxicated by the thought that change will come later. 

From my perspective, you don’t not have time now (sorry for the double negative). You don’t “have time” until you are sick, or in burnout, or constantly yelling at your kids, or not sleeping, or making frequent mistakes at work, or wondering how in the world you got here.

And that brings me back to Anya Kamenetz’s commentary on the rat park method. The idea that instead of trying to figure out how we can avoid information overload to stay centered—doom scrolling, most notably—we  ADD fulfilling activities and meaning to our lives. Making love, family dinners.

“Calling much of this stuff “information” is kind, of course. It’s porn, lies, rage bait, AI, PR, nonsense. Our names express our revulsion–“data smog,” “data trash,” spam, brainrot, slop,” she says.

Taking in too much information—or “information”—makes you tired. It makes you make worse decisions, or avoid making decisions. It makes you miss important messages in the noise.

“We are beings with agency. If we are seeking out all this information we must be trying to fulfill some need, right?”

I’ve unwittingly and without strategy been adding things into my life: signing on to free workshops, upleveling my morning routine, taking new classes, saying yes to connection with human beings at every opportunity, keeping my commitment to resourcing myself—and that’s in addition to my daily tasks and trying to magic up sustainable income. 

And guess what? My daughter isn’t suffering. My friends are not suffering. There’s a lot more dirty laundry, but the quality of my sleep is amazing, and I’ve spent an average of two hours less on my phone each week. I open a news app and if anxiety rears its ugly, primordial head, I recognize it immediately. So I shut it and don’t force myself to withstand the trauma. I listen to a max of one hour of news analysis a day, and I’m not missing out on anything. But also, I read the screenplay, so nothing about the performance shocks me sans the level of absurdity. And if I do find myself scrolling on Instagram, I recognize what a waste of time it is and that I’d rather be sleeping/doing my gratitude list/reading/writing the astrology/napping or whatever. 

The Nap Ministry boils it down even simpler: 

“Hey, here to say you don’t have to start a project, club or new invention or initiative as we focus on community, connection, and the analog world. You can just hang out with your friends, say hello to your neighbor and spend more time offline.” 

The caption goes even further: “And hear me out…you don’t have to make a reel to share it online either. You can just do it and vibe and live and be human in community. You can connect without technology.

I’ve noticed this obsession with launching something, crafting a project and doing these perfectly curated attempts that are full of unnecessary labor. You can just be. You can also rest.”

The rat park method is far more effective than creating rules around screentime, or “saying” I’ll be more present with my daughter, because the actual practice of presence is enough to recognize when I am not and refocus. 

“The “rat park” concept of addiction refers to some famous studies that suggested that given ample company, and toys and exercise gear like balls and wheels, rats are less likely to develop addictions to cocaine or morphine, even when the drugs are freely available.

So maybe instead of moralizing or beating ourselves up about chronic info-overload, or putting ourselves on an information diet, it’s more thinking about where we can intentionally enrich our environment, adding in more experiences that meet our needs for connection, inspiration, novelty, curiosity fulfillment, soothing, and fun.”

There is an urgency in the things that consume us that make us feel guilty or drain us or re-traumatize us. Sarah Tacy examined the words “urgency” and “emergency” and concluded that there is a sense of doom in the “-gency.” Our survival instinct keeps us tethered to that sense of doom in a society that fuels, demands, and idolizes the “-gency.” And that’s why she likes “agency.” 

The prefix “a” means without; when we operate from agency, we proceed without that feeling of doom. And the rat park method hands us back our agency. 

Slowing down from the momentum into the moment

Under the pressure of society and in the grips of social media, we are passive and reactive; but with our own agency, we lean into action and presence. While we think we might miss something or that we’re being irresponsible by neglecting the constant overflow of data smog, the misconception that being “connected” to that faucet will spur us to action is flawed. It keeps us in fight, flight, freeze, and fawn. It also contributes to the idea that there’s someone else who is doing something, and therefore, perhaps they are better equipped to do so. 

More importantly, it keeps us divided. A thread that keeps coming up consistently in my self-study is the Lie of Separation. Hübl points to the fact that trauma creates division. This division—the lie of separation we’ve been sold for thousands of year—is interwoven with our collective trauma.

And that’s where Samhain comes in. Humans in the west, particularly under the influence of Christianity, are obsessed with the afterlife or the second coming or the rapture. But paradoxically, they fear death and avoid even talking about it. 

I attended a hybrid Samhain ceremony Saturday night as part of Sarah Jenks’ Living Temple opening. Samhain is the Celtic new year, and signifies the end of summer and of the harvest—a death. But Samhain, like Dia de los Muertos, also honors the time when the veil is thin, and we are closer to our ancestors and those who came before us. 

I mentioned Jenks in one of my first newsletters. She had decided to get out of the personal development business because when she would connect our collective well-being with their personal well-being, many people would get angry.

At the end of the three-hour ceremony, during which we were guided through a meditative visualization revolving around confronting our own death, she asked us what our internal transformation was and how we would take that to the external.

Samhain ceremony asks us to confront the portal. To transform. It’s an opportunity for rebirth. 

Dancing around the ideas of our collective trauma, our intoxication with “later” and salvation (later), and the lie of separation; and the rat park method instead of “information” overload and our commitment to agency (as opposed to urgency); and our avoidance of death yet our capacity to confront the portal; and the idea of purposefully resourcing ourselves so that we may resource our communities, the Collective, and the world is the question: what are you doing now?

As Prentis Hill asks: “Am I living in the revelation or waiting for it?”