Trauma is a natural part of life. It is not a mental disease nor a pathology. Freud defined trauma as “a breach in the protective barrier against stimulation, leading to overwhelming feelings of helplessness.” The body/mind knows how to mend this break and heal the helplessness.
When your physical body is injured your innate healing forces immediately go to work. Bio-cellular communication acts to notify and heal, usually through pain. This healing communication is happening through an intricate series of involuntary commands executed by your nervous system and carried out together with the vascular system, the muscular system, the endocrine system, the respiratory system, and so on. The somatic (physical) aspect of healing trauma is key to overall health and wellbeing.
The body is as a bank of memories. It does not lie. It stores memory in the brain and in the connective tissues of the physical body. it is also the tool of integration for your mental and emotional life. See EMDR? for unlocking memory networks.
Traumatic Stress is Released Physiologically
Let us digest this concept: “The energy bound in trauma seeks release – physiologically.” A traumatized person is not “crazy”. The origin of their difficulty is not psychological it is physiological.
During threat, the body activates a massive amount of “survival-energy”. Traumatic stress occurs when the nervous system is interrupted or fails to complete its defensive responses to an overwhelming threat. The result is that the energy mustered up for survival (survival-energy) was neither fully consumed nor discharged. It remains locked and immobilized in the nervous system until triggered, or digested and discharged.
Dr. Peter Levine professes in his book, Waking The Tiger, that if humans would complete their response to threat, as animals in the wild do, this highly charged survival-energy would not remain locked in their bodies as traumatic stress where it continues to seek release causing physical, emotional, and mental symptoms like nervous tics, phobias, anxiety, etc. Unfortunately, these symptoms are most often restrictive, painful, and distressful. By instinctively releasing this constrained survival-energy the animals in the wild are not traumatized. Discharging this survival energy thoroughly increases resiliency. See Somatic Experiencing?
A person who has lost the instinctive capacity to discharge these highly activated pools of survival-energy is prone to wear down, not only due to the the threatening elements of the experience, but as well to the intense amount of survival energy it takes to suppress and compensate for denying the autonomic instinctual healing. These cycles of distress hamper one's resiliency, aliveness, and readiness for the next threat.
All too often most of us do not adequately discharge traumatic stress but rather deny the existence of it. After a minor car accident, we hurry off to keep an appointment. In a fall we rapidly get up, quickly looking about, in the hope that no one saw us fall. After invasive medical procedures we "act adult", telling ourselves it was not a bother, all the while our bodies sense a breach to its wellbeing.
Healing
trauma occurs through a sequence of reorganizing and metabolizing the experience to threat
without retraumatizing the person. This is accomplished by becoming aware of
and following body sensations, integrating personal resources, somatic
desensitization, titration of the traumatic substances, somatic deactivation, and completing the instinctive defenses
to the threat. When this happens within a context of supportive, incremental,
and sure change, the survival-energy is freed to flow and transcend the
experience.
In summary, when
the present is influenced by past unresolved energies, such as neglect and especially traumatic stress, you can feel disoriented,
confused, and disassociated. For a full healing to take place you need to understand and choose to heal the conflict between your body and
your mind.
In our collaboration we work to provide missing resources through a titrated process to discharge post-traumatic stress and toxic traumatic shock reactions, and thereby reinstate biological self-regulation, somatic resiliency, and vitality.
Contact me for assistance in establishing a portal of self healing.