Survival Habits: habit patterns of tension
From the Work IN Podcast
First , do you understand what trauma is? I ask because for many years I didn’t know the answer to that. I thought trauma was something that only happened to soldiers in combat or victims of assault. I thought if it didn’t leave any physical scars then how traumatic could it really be?
Same thing with my definition of stress...but I think that’s a different episode.
It wasn’t until I was participating in one of my first trauma informed yoga training that I started to recognize symptoms of post traumatic stress in myself. I had turned my phone off for the day but I could still hear a buzz when a text would come in. At the end of a 2 hour yoga practice where I was feeling more relaxed than I had in months the buzz of a text from my bag. And I caught myself holding my breath. Not only that but my whole body froze in that instant.
Before I get ahead of myself here, I want to give you a clear picture of where I was coming from.
You could say I was raised with a decent amount of privilege. I’m the oldest of 4, my parents are still married, there wasn’t any divorce, drug abuse or mental illness in my immediate family. I was able to escape my childhood without any catastrophic illness or injury. I married young and have 2 healthy children, I’m still married, employed and for the most part healthy. There has never been anything on the surface of my life that would indicate suffering in any way shape or form.
But there I was, in a room full of enlightened yoga instructors, holding my breath in a classic freeze response. My muscles froze and I could feel my heart beating in my throat. And I realized then and there that I had a real problem because that sensation wasn’t new. I heard that buzz of a text often. Maybe 20 times a day. But in the midst of the chaos of my normal rushed and crushed life I rarely noticed it.
How often can you stop breathing through your day before it starts to take its toll? Think about it, that’s why we use CPAP machines overnight. I have a friend who’s sleep study found that she stopped breathing something like 60 times an hour. But wearing an O2 mask during the day isn’t really a viable option. Not when I knew the solution lay somewhere in my nervous system.
Now you might be wondering what was going on in my picture perfect life at that time that could cause someone to brace for an attack at the sound of a text. And I am going to tell you that while there is a story there, it’s not THE story. In fact THE story isn’t important at all.
Whaaat? What do you mean you're not gonna tell the story, what kind of podcast is this?
Let me explain. I could tell you what was going on in my life at that time. It might even be something that would justify that kind of physical reaction. But I can’t guarantee that that story is the one that was the source of the stress.
The story that we tell ourselves about why we feel the way we feel doesn’t always match. Our rational mind is constantly trying to find meaning by telling a story that makes sense. but the primitive brain is just looking for context. It searches back through our entire lives to find a pattern that it can apply to determine how best to help us survive.
The patterns it finds then determines the physiologic response in the body. So maybe that response is related to something current, but not necessarily. Keep in mind we’re talking about a perceived threat. Not clear and present danger. There is nothing rationally dangerous about receiving a text notification in a room full of yogini’s.
In other words, in other words the story doesn’t matter, to the primitive brain only perception matters. The accuracy of the facts of the matter, the event or the situation are secondary to whatever emotional coding was connected to the memory.
In a perfect world we would have been taught to fully and completely express fear, pain, anger, disappointment, resentment, worry, rage, then let it go without consequences or shame. As children We’d be encouraged to deal with uncomfortable sensations or emotions in healthy ways and taught to self regulate our own nervous system.
But we don’t live in a perfect world. We live in a world that values/celebrates a culture of stress. A society where reacting with too much emotion, where standing up and defending yourself, voicing a different opinion or rocking the boat in anyway is risky behavior. A society that insists we shrink ourselves to fit in it’s boxes instead of finding bigger boxes.
This has led to a systemic detraining of our natural responses to both real and perceived threat. That detraining becomes the foundation of dysfunctional patterned responses to all forms of stress.
Understand that it is critical to our survival for the brain to find the most efficient ways to navigate the world. In looking for and establishing patterned responses to all of your experiences the brain is making it easier for you to survive your life. It really has no interest in anything else. It doesn’t really care anything about what you think of a situation. It’s only interested in the best, fastest way to keep you alive. Patterns of emotion, physiologic reaction, movement & thought are the way it does this.
It’s these repetitive patterns of reaction that over time and chronic exposure to stress in all its many forms without any way to discharge that elevated stress energy that lead to deeply held physical tension throughout the body. That tension could be obvious to you, in the form of tension headaches or tight, painful muscles. But it might be far more subtle. Like TMJ from grinding your teeth, changes in your voice or restricted breath capacity.
You can spend years in talk therapy combing through the story of your life, doing the “work” to let go of whatever those stories are that may be holding you back, but the body Nervous system may never understand you. It can't understand because the rational thinking brain and the primitive brain autonomic nervous system don’t speak the same language. The translator lives in the correct interpretation of sensory messages from the body. But chronic stress exposure, from past events, present situations or perceived danger over time can shut down the delivery of those messages. Causing a breakdown or misinterpretation of what is going on in the body.
The brain depends on an accurate and dependable flow of information from the body in order to maintain homeostasis (health) and determine safety or threat. That communication is done in the form of physical sensations. If the brain can’t trust those sensations, or becomes overwhelmed with too much, too fast it can shut down. When this happens the body will default to high alert or freeze because remember it’s only job is to keep you alive at any cost.
The patterns of survival are deeply ingrained through the autonomic nervous system and the primitive brain. So deep that sometimes they can look like our personality. Confrontational aggressive mood swings, laziness, people pleasing or workaholic behaviors are all examples of personality traits that double as stress induced survival patterns. I’m not saying they actually are, only that they can be.
When we develop a pattern that keeps us stuck in a survival stress response one of the first places we can feel that is physical tension in the muscles, tendons and joints. The nervous system is trying to keep you in a state of physical readiness for either fight or flight. That means your muscles had better be ready to go. Over time, that tension can become locked in place by the fascia and begins to look like a road map to the trauma story as told by the body.
The story that my body tells is very different from the story that I would tell you. My body holds tension in my face, neck, jaw, shoulders traps, my right hip and for some weird reason my left calf. I have spent countless hours at the chiropractor, in physical therapy, scraping & dry needling and in all kinds of massage trying to get my body to let go of its tension patterns. All of these provided only temporary relief. Temporary because none of them actually retrain the nervous system enough to release my body’s survival tension pattern.
It wasn’t until I started to incorporate trauma release exercise as a way to let that stuck survival energy out that I was able to connect the dots and find some last relief, first from the physical symptoms of stress and trauma and then the physiologic resilience that my nervous system was craving.
As the tremor mechanism makes its way into different areas of the body, sometimes it can unlock some of the forgotten story through physical sensations, emotions or memories. For me that happened incrementally. It took years for my tremor to move out of my lower body and up past my hips. When it did it moved straight into my face muscles.
I know, so weird. It felt like I was snarling like an animal. Like all the muscles in my face wanted to scream. Then an image popped into my head of a moment when I was in kindergarten. Standing in line at a park, when the little boy in front of me picked up a stick and stabbed me in the face. I still have a scar that’s almost invisible now. I hadn’t thought of that incident in 30 years. I had effectively erased it from my personal history as unimportant and irrelevant.
But my body remembered like it was in that moment. First the muscles of my face reenacted that moment, allowing me a front row seat to that memory and then it felt like my hair actually caught fire as rage flooded my mind. Rage mixed with the fear of a 5 year old.
That was when I truly started to understand that just because I didn’t think I’d experienced trauma didn’t mean my body and nervous system agreed. And the constant tension that I feel as an annoying and normal part of my everyday life is the way my body echoes the secrets of my past experiences.
Practicing trauma release isn’t always like that. Sometimes emotion comes out with no memory or story at all. Sometimes you remember a story and there’s no emotion attached at all. And sometimes the tremor just shakes you along and stays purely physical, moving through muscles and fascia you never knew existed.
All animals shake after they’ve escaped a threat. Trembling is how the nervous system resets itself back into a rest and repair. We can activate the same pathways. Movement, the tremor in trauma release, and breath work are ways to coax the nervous system back into safety.
Changing a habit is never easy and changing a lifetime pattern of tension may seem like an insurmountable task. It will take time and patience but I’m telling you it’s possible.
We don’t do ourselves any favors by muscling through every day. Patterns of tension, while based in survival, are nevertheless a constant reminder that the body wants a way out. It is craving a path way back to a calm safe state. Ignoring that for too long can create a self-destructive feedback loop between the body, the mind and the nervous system that locks us into the tension patterns of fight, flight and eventually freeze. The longer we stay there, the more likely the body learns to live there. Eventually shutting down non essential body systems until the dysfunction can no longer be ignored.
Thanks for joining me inside the Work In and if you’re looking for a way to shake off your tension patterns and find freedom from stress tension and anxiety head over to elemental kinetics.com and check out Kinetic Grace - Kinetic Grace is a membership that integrates yoga + TRE and functional fitness to guide outstanding individuals off the battlefield of trauma and back into grace.
I’m Ericka
I Coach warriors.
Hey there…
I guide outstanding individuals off the battlefield of trauma to retrain the nervous system, safely reconnect through the body and recover resilience in their personal & professional relationships.
If you’re looking for a way to shake off your tension patterns and find freedom from stress tension and anxiety, I’d love to work with you.
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