For Trauma
Healing the unseen war within.
Do you often feel anxious or worried? Or maybe you’re extra grumpy, impatient, and frequently blame others a lot?
Perhaps you have explosive anger or difficulty tracking your thoughts because they race so fast? Maybe you are the captain of the overthinking club? Or maybe you are preoccupied with a fear of being abandoned or flooded with guilt over disappointing others. Perhaps you have the recurring belief that you are not good enough or you can’t understand why little things feel like such a big deal to you?
Maybe you just simply don’t feel like yourself—and you have no clue why?
Or maybe you tend to feel numb. Checked out. Perhaps you are the kind of person who feels disconnected or indifferent or invisible? You’re there but not really present. Empty. Hollow. Maybe expressing emotions or showing affection to others is hard for you, or you find it difficult to ask others for help and isolate when you’re hurting.
Or perhaps you have a compulsive habit. Even though you stand to lose so much, you can’t seem to stop.
Or maybe a particular sound or smell or sight or being in a particular location puts you on edge or turns you completely off. Perhaps you replay events in your head long after they are over? Maybe you experience nightmares or flashbacks of scary past experiences in your waking hours.
These (and many others like them) can all be symptoms of a person who still under the influence of trauma.
Some symptoms of trauma overshadow people throughout their entire lives. Others show up decades later. Some seem ever present. Others are situational. Either way, the symptoms don’t just magically go away. They generally worsen and interfere with your capacity to feel alive, to feel calm, and/or experience safety, support, and connection with others.
What is trauma?
Trauma is any experience that overwhelms and confuses us and continues to block our capacity to be in relationship with a sense of aliveness and safety in the here and now.
Trauma can happen in at least two ways.
First, is a particular event or experience that is “too much, too fast.” It often is a one time event that may have lasted only seconds or minutes. Sometimes it is played out over a long period of time. These include car crashes, falls, assaults, war zone experiences, poverty, medical procedures, shootings, and natural disasters. These are commonly referred to as “Capital-T” or “shock” traumas.
Second, is what Dr. Stephen Porges calls “a chronic disruption of connection.” These are pervasive childhood experiences where a hurting or scared child doesn’t have access to someone who is sensitive and safe, and who will respond in a timely manner to help the child regulate an overwhelming situation.
Experiences of “too little for too long” or “too scary/chaotic for too long.” are referred to as “lower-t” or “relational/developmental traumas.” These relational challenges often span over longer stretches of time and have a cumulative impact. Prolonged stress from living in these kinds of environments negatively impacts people’s capacity to feel alive and and relate in healthy ways.
“Our brains are wired for connection,
but trauma rewires them for protection.
That’s why healthy relationships are difficult for wounded people.”
—Ryan North
This second type of trauma (relational/lower-t trauma) happens to lesser or greater degrees, but it includes cases of abuse, neglect, and other family dysfunction.
Relational trauma could involve situations where there was an overall lack of unsafety or a lack of clarity and communication around important matters that set up a child to fail. It might include being raised in a home where a parent pressured a child to perform developmental skills like crawling or walking or potty training before the child was ready—creating crippling levels of performance anxiety that follow them into adulthood. A child can also experience relational trauma when a parent’s need is so big that they aren’t able to attend to their kiddos needs.
Relational/developmental trauma might involve an older sibling bully us or growing up overshadowed by a sibling who was more attractive and popular or who suffered a crippling illness/injury that drained the family’s time, energy, and resources. Others experienced trauma growing up in a home where a parent demonstrated sudden and intense mood swings or suffered from depression or an addiction or where a parent’s attention and affection was inconsistent or intrusive.
Some victims of trauma experienced sexual abuse inside the family or outside of the home by a neighbor or authority figure. It might also include growing up watching parents emotionally smother or tear each other apart or where there was a lot of yelling and criticism. It could also involve growing up in a home where emotions and desires were too much for a parent’s capacity and therefore unwelcomed, ignored, or outright criticized. In such cases, children survive by learning to dampen and suppress their most important thoughts, feelings and wants.
Trauma doesn’t invade some people’s lives until they experience a toxic relationship in adulthood. This might include being regularly manipulated, criticized, controlled, and/or exploited by a toxic friend, boss or romantic partner.
Some bury the effects of trauma for years or decades through management strategies (like staying super busy and detached)—until the strategies eventually stop working. Because the body still holds all the trauma survival energy, it can resurface in the form of nightmares, bouts of anxiety or anger, or unexplained health issues such as skin irritations, digestive issues, or chronic pain.
Trauma can’t tell time.
Unfortunately, the majority of adults experience significant trauma at some point in their lifetime and it is one of the most common reasons people seek therapy.
Even though the original trauma event or experiences are long over in terms of time passed, the accumulative toll it takes on us doesn’t know the passage of time. We may tell ourselves that it’s over. That the trauma is far behind us, and we can move on. But it’s not that simple—not when our nervous system still carries all the survival energy and has yet to fully absorb that it-is-over; that we survived and are going to be okay.
Trauma can leave us stuck in dysregulated threat response states.
Our nervous system unconsciously scans for and collects cues of safety and threat. When difficult life events leave a person’s nervous system drowning in cues of threat, it has a hard time detecting and interpreting cues of safety—leaving us STUCK under the influence of threat response states:
Fight/Flight/Fawn/Freeze/Fold
Our nervous system has soaked up the original sense of threat like a sponge and it has never had the chance to gently wring it out. Threat response energy remains and saturates our nervous system because we haven’t experienced the right amount and timely care, safety, and support to truly take in that the threat is passed and discharge it. This is the unseen war of trauma that wages within and we unknowingly live out of.
We may not be stuck in a threat response state every minute of every day, but it often doesn’t take much to get us there. It’s similar to living with a raw nerve that even when slightly brushed can involuntarily turn on a protective threat response—even when it doesn’t need to. One minute we can feel relatively stable and okay. Then suddenly get triggered and instantly feel unsafe and become reactive—often without knowing why.
Below our conscious awareness, events and experiences in the present start to remind us of a past threat. A certain color of carpet or bright florescent lights might catch our eye and trigger us. It might be a sound we hear such as a loud bang or the roar of an engine. A person’s facial expression or how they walk or the volume or tone in their voice could could send us reeling.
Driving through a particular section of town or a particular season of the year might touch off a threat response. Even someone acting kind or paying attention to us can push us over the edge. Just about anything that even slightly reminds us of a past trauma can sound the alarm of danger (even if real danger doesn’t exist). Implicitly it can “seem” to us like something threatening or devastating is happening or about to happen again.
When our nervous system remains stuck in threat states, old threat responses are highly prone to involuntarily turn on even when they don’t need to or turn on far more stronger than the situation calls for.
Sometimes we overreact in ways that are often way out of proportion to the present situation. Sometimes we underreact. We fear that something bad is about to happen or we’re about to lose something important and we don’t want to be present for it. So we check out. Shut down. Go quiet. Pull away and disappear. We might still be somewhat functional, but we don’t feel like ourselves. We are simply going through the motions, feeling indifferent or even depressed.
Sometimes we want to react and say or do something, but we freeze up like a deer caught in a car’s headlights. We may even feel the urge to act out and find relief from feeling so dysregulated by over indulging in food, alcohol, drugs or just staying busy.
However we react, it mostly doesn’t feel safe or good to us in the long run—or to those around us. It leaves us feeling disconnected from others as well as from our true selves. And every time it happens, it reinforces the trauma protective pattern.
We don’t merely remember trauma. We relive it.
It’s been said that that time heals all wounds. That’s not true when it comes to trauma. Trauma’s impact doesn’t wear a watch. Whether it happened just a few short months ago or many years have since past, unhealed trauma screams something bad has happened and it’s going to keep happening. So stay on guard!
The toll of trauma doesn’t automatically heal with the passage of time. When the survival energy of trauma hasn’t been gently released out of our nervous systems, there often isn’t enough room for life energy to come in and replace it. The survival energy continues to build, be held, and lived out in our bodies, emotions, thoughts, beliefs, and behaviors—as something that is happening NOW!
As we relive trauma’s impact, we are not available or free to experience joy, life, safety, comfort, connection, or even the possibility that something different and safe could happen in the here and now. When we get stuck in a dysregulated threat responses, the only kind of story we have access to experience is some version of the same overwhelming thing happening again, followed by either some form of escape and aggression, shut down or freeze.
Aren’t you tired of reliving it that way?
My desire to work with those who have a history of trauma was birthed out my own story. From before I could talk or consciously remember, I experienced a mix of shock and relational trauma. As I came to realize later in life how much my body was still holding it in negative ways, I began to notice the same was true for many of my clients.
Most people’s stories have been written in the language of trauma (to one degree or another). I also firmly believe our stories can be rewritten in the language of safety, support, joy, ease, and connection. We can’t undo the overwhelming things that happened to us or those we love. But whether it stems from being hit by a car, childhood sexual abuse, or growing up feeling pressured to perform, controlled, abandoned or emotionally neglected and unable to express ourselves, we can change our relationship to our trauma today.
We don’t have to continue reliving and relating out of trauma’s impact—unknowingly fearing in small and big ways that an original threat will keep happening again. We can still spot danger when it truly exists and take appropriate steps to protect when necessary. And we can also truly know threat is over. That we survived. That we are safe. That we can relax and love life again.
Under the right conditions, we can slowly discharge energy we no longer need to carry and retune our nervous systems to spot and take in cues of safety and life. In this present situation, with this person, we can experience something different. We can feel freer to trust and relax, and to begin to experience safer things available in the here now.
Watch this short clip from the movie Patch Adams as an example what can happen for a traumatized person when another person supports him through the channel of imagination to experience safety and protection in the here and now
Watch the Video Below to Learn More About Trauma & the Hope for Healing
Patch couldn’t simply talk his fear-filled roommate, Rudy, into feeling safe enough to go to the bathroom. But with a little bit of care, playfulness, and imagination he helped him embody that it could be safe enough.
Healing from trauma is possible?
Those who have been traumatized can get unstuck from reacting out of threat responses and experience more access to safety and calm in the here and now! Healing is possible, but there’s more to getting well than just talking about what happened and telling ourselves it’s over. Sometimes words are helpful. Sometimes they are not enough.
Somatic Experiencing sets the conditions to renegotiate your body’s story of trauma that word’s alone can’t do on their own.
Rather than talk you into feeling calm or thinking different thoughts, Somatic Experiencing therapy helps people in small, finessed ways identify and touch into the body’s memories of the trauma survival responses. There we can we support people until the survival energy eases up and clears out of their nervous system. With consistent and safe experiences, people’s nervous systems can start to settle, reset, and find safety again.
Trauma’s impact resides in the body as much as it was in the original experience, and it is there, in your body’s nervous system, where we will invite you to start your healing process. By paying attention to unpleasant physical sensations, bracing gestures, tensing patterns, intrusive images and behaviors that began to develop when original trauma happened, Somatic Experiencing therapy focuses on stabilizing and recalibrating a nervous system that has been conditioned to see only danger in the here and now. We will invite you to learn the “tells” to track what state your nervous system is in and how you can shift from state to state, to sit with your fears and pain related to your trauma without them hijacking you.
Slowly and intentionally, we will set the stage for your nervous system to organize and release protective energy that has overstayed it’s welcome, complete unfinished instincts to defend that were originally thwarted, reexperience protection and support that didn’t get to happen, and find its way back to an embodied state of safety, support, ease, and possibility. Through felt sense and reparative experiences, your brain can rewire new pathways of support and regulation that can replace old pathways of only seeing threat, and know the difference between what was then and what is now.
Examples of questions we might explore together are:
- As you let your eyes slowly scan and explore the room at colors, pictures, icons, etc., or look out the window, perhaps something in nature (blue skies, leaves on trees, sunshine, etc.,), what does that feels like in your body? Do you notice any pleasant sensations? Does your breathing become a little easier or fuller? Maybe your eyes soften or some other part of your body that often tenses up is starting to relax?
- As you experience stressful events today or recall scary things that happened to you what do you notice happening in your body right now? Where and how might it be tightening or bracing?
- What might happen next if we ever so slightly increased an unpleasant sensation or bracing pattern?
- What might happen if you slowed down a fast body movement?
- Is there anything you can turn your attention to that tells you are safe or supported in this moment, and how might that be registering in your body?
- When was the first moment you realized you were going to be okay or noticed that someone was coming to help? And what subtle, pleasant shifts might happen in your body as you reflect on that moment? What emotions or new thoughts might emerge?
Call or email me today if you want to chat more or make an appointment to find out how the impact of trauma doesn’t have to be a life sentence.
