Healing Trauma Through the Body
I am a trauma survivor and for most of my life I have been working against my body. Almost all of my teen years and a lot of my 20’s involved moments that I still am healing from. Back then, I was not in a position to mentally or physically understand what was going on and how to help myself. So instead, I found other reasons to explain body aches, headaches, (social) anxiety, and other physiological responses. I tried to tell myself I was over-reacting, to calm down and to find other ways to distract myself. I kept encountering challenges within my relationships, I felt explosive a lot of times, I had lots of mood swings, and I didn’t fuel my body well (lots of cravings).
It wasn’t until I started to shift my focus to my body, and how I listen and communicate with it, that I began to get some relief, not much- but some! Over time, I began to gain more understanding, compassion and love for my body and what exactly it had been doing all of these years. I started to learn how to release and move my body so that tension and pain (even from events that occurred years ago) could begin to be moved and released. Everyday I continue my journey, but I can say that now I have more agency, relief and awareness.
Why do I work with the body? Because for so long, I worked against my body and it made daily living and relationships challenging and painful. Because it was the only thing that started to create change from within. Because I began to feel that I could heal from my painful past experiences. Because it works, and in fact, it was the only thing that worked for me.
I think it is important to first define trauma; trauma is not a particular event or situation, it is the way your body encodes and remembers that event or situation. Two people can go through the same event and both have a different outcome in terms of how the trauma is stored in the body. Trauma can be big events (such as a pandemic, sexual abuse, natural disasters, etc.) but it can also be small events/situations (such as verbal abuse, emotional abuse, losing a job, a break up, harassment/bullying, rejecting, etc.). The first we call “Big T” and the latter we call “Little T”.
Both leave an impression on our nervous system and can influence how we move through this world. One of the first things I do with my clients is a deep dive into how our nervous system works. I believe that understanding how our systems are wired helps to develop understanding and compassion. We can begin to understand that when our body has reactions (i.e., anxiety, racing heart, sweating, shut down, etc) that it is our nervous system trying to keep us alive.
Think about a tortoise: when a tortoise becomes scared, it goes in its shell to protect itself. When we are in a situation and our body freezes up, our nervous system is saying “if we are still, we will survive”. On the other hand, if we are in a high stressed situation and we begin to breath heavily, our body is getting more oxygen to our muscles so we can run (flight) or attack (fight) in order to survive. These responses happen as a result of our body remembering events from the past as they are triggered by something going on in the present (this can be a scent, a location, a tone, a person, etc.).
You can begin to develop a song and dance with your nervous system so that you are able to support yourself when triggers occur. I think it is important to say, the goal is not to learn to avoid your nervous system’s survival states. That is not realistic. We cannot remove all stress and stressors from our life or erase past experiences. The goal, instead, is to create some fluidity in how we are able to move through our survival states and not get stuck in them.
To heal from painful past experiences, we have to do so in a regulated body. In ordered to be in a regulated body involves knowing when you are not and how to guide your system back to a sense of connection and safety.
If you would like to learn more about this process and ways to support yourself on your healing journey, please reach out. Knowing that I no longer have to be a victim to my past experiences has given me the ability to be stronger within myself. Trusting that I can support myself in future situations gives me agency and ownership. Healing is not a linear journey; we have set backs and ups and downs. It is also not something that happens very quickly- but it is worth it and you deserve it!