Trauma Healing 101
FAQ’s ABOUT TRAUMA HEALING
“Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.”
-Carl Jung
What is Trauma?
Trauma is anything that is anything that is too much, too soon, or too fast for our nervous system to handle without becoming overwhelmed. This can take many forms that often go unnoticed in our fast paced world. Chronic stress such as a child feeling bullied at school, unsettled family life, or emotional neglect by their family at home adisregulates the nervous system, as does adult realities, such as severe work, death of a loved one, financial stress, or relationship disharmony. Anything that gives us a sense of feeling unsafe, or even threatened. Current research now realizes that trauma patterning one’s nervous system is very personalized and not only linked to acute events, like war, car accidents, or assault. Therefore, it helps to consider how our own nervous system and body deals with our own personal history of experience, instead of comparing ourselves to others.
What happens during trauma?
At the cellular level, the body experiences a surge of intense fight or flight energy and stress hormones. In this aroused state, our earliest survival strategies are to fight, flight, freeze or fawn. Although these neurological reflexes are used to keep us safe, when they are long lasting the body suffers. Our bodies need to feel safe and a sense that the threat is over in order for the nervous system to come back into a state of rest and balance. If a stressor is long lasting, chronic, or so severe or sudden, the body becomes dysregulated or in extreme conditions can go into a functional freeze response. On the outside, the freeze response appears calm, but internally there is still a huge amount of fight or flight energy. A freeze response can look like dissociation, numbness, or even fainting and can contribute to early onset diabetes, heart disease, digestive problems, and depression. Being stuck in the freeze response is why we can still suffer from something that happened to us months, years, or even decades ago.
How does trauma manifest in the body?
The body keeps the score! Trauma is stored in the nervous system and in the memory of the body. It commonly shows up as insomnia, hypervigilance, panic, anxiety, addictions of all kinds, chronic fatigue, migraine headaches, digestive problems, chronic pain (no matter how much bodywork we receive), a sense of feeling disconnected, numb, and depressed. Many people don’t realize that it may be unresolved emotional material at the root of it.
What is Trauma Healing?
Healing trauma is about going from ‘trying to survive’ to ‘thriving.’ It is about coming out of the freeze response in body and mind. It is about restoring the energy flow in the nervous system and rewiring the brain to be in the present moment.
It is about returning to a place we can we can connect with ourselves, feel relaxed, and feel safe in our own skin. Clearing old traumas often changes our core beliefs about who we are and brings us back into authentic connection with our own vital nature and unique genius.
How do I Heal Old Trauma Patterns?
Our body and minds are built to heal, and our nervous system patterns can change. We can come out of chronic freeze pattern no matter how deep or old our stored stress or trauma may be. It just takes courage, commitment, and a willingness to feel.
There are many different approaches to to trauma healing. Some are more psychological and focus on a psychotherapy as a top down approach. Some focus more bottom up and focus on releasing trauma from a more somatic approach. Some focus on brain chemistry though medication. We focus on an inside out approach, weaving somatic work together with cognitive coaching tools, and mindfulness practices.
What is the Fawn Response?
As much as it’s important to heal ‘the big stuff,’ I have found that it is often the ignored, invisible complex traumas from childhood that often cause the most dysregulation in adulthood. One very common theme I see regularly is the fawn response. A fawn response to trauma is often called “please and appease” response and refers to individuals who handle complex trauma in their environment by consistently abandoning their own needs to serve the needs of others. These individuals tend to be highly sensitive, emotional individuals who carry the burden of family dysfunction as their own as a means to ‘keep the peace.’ They often lessen their own emotional experiences to keep the home safe, avoid conflict, criticism, or disapproval. Shockingly, while fawning may seem to be a more elementary way of dealing with trauma, the implications on the nervous system of such individuals has the same weight as big T trauma! Children often adopt this method of survival due to disfunctional relationships with parental figures and unsteady home life. Common sympotoms include constant worry about a caregiver’s emotional state, flying under the radar, worrying how others will perceive you, problems maintaining boundaries and saying ‘NO,’ denying anger, and feeling insignificant, or chronically not good enough. Healing fawning is a rich experience and acts as an opening into true authentic expression.