The word trauma...it holds a lot of stigma. When you hear it you might think major injury, assault, catastrophic event, abuse, suffering but underlying all of these is a sense of victim-hood. I used to think (and maybe you did too)that only soldiers experienced trauma. It never occurred to me that as a human being I’m exposed to trauma all the time. Even the act of being born is physically traumatic,not just for the mother but the infant as well. For some of us we may have experienced trauma even before birth through the experiences of our mothers.
Just because your conscious mind doesn’t recognize an event as “traumatic” doesn’t mean that your body doesn’t register it as a trauma. I have had 2 children, but I never thought of childbirth as traumatic until, while studying the polyvagal theory, I recognized the connection between my experience, resulting symptoms of postpartum depression and the stress response in my body.
This begs the question: Is trauma really the story or is it a state of being?
The stress response resides in the unconscious mind. It reacts to messages of threat or safety that it “neurocepts” from the body. Neuroception is a fancy word for your body mind connection. Think of it like your “gut feeling” or intuition. It can detect threat or safety for you without your conscious decision.
We pick up subconscious cues of safety or threat from everything in our environment: smells, sounds,our internal physical perceptions, the people around us, facial expressions, tone of voice. Our subconscious uses all of that information, compares it with our past experiences and emotional memory and determines if we need to mobilize, shutdown or relax into safety.
The Story
Trauma as an event is simple enough to understand. Something happens. It might be dangerous or threatening. We react (flight, fight, shutdown) until the danger passes and then everything goes back to normal. We return to our calm safe state.
When you experience a traumatic event, it becomes a part of your history. It happened. Everyone has these events. They can be big, life changing events or they can be so insignificant that we may not even notice them when they happen let alone remember them. When we talk about trauma in the body, it doesn’t really matter if we rationally agree that an event was traumatic, it only matters how the body perceives that event.
The body’s perception overrides our cognitive understanding when it comes to our physical, mental and emotional response to trauma and stress. If it feels like a threat, it’s a threat. It doesn’t matter what we think, what we tell ourselves or what anyone else says about it.
Yes, war, assault, abuse, natural disasters, car accidents...all these are traumatic events but not all people who experience them go on to experience lasting symptoms of stress injuries. And for those that do, their perceptions of the events, their experiences and symptoms are completely unique to them. Individuals may have the same story, the same traumatic experience, but how their body perceives it and the resulting internal state can be completely different.
The State
When we experience a threat to our survival or the perception of a threat, it triggers a charged state of flight, fight or shutdown in the body. That experience is perceived first in the body, in the autonomic nervous system, not the conscious mind. When we’re allowed to react to that experience the way the body needs to, in other words we flee, fight or hide/shutdown, after the danger passes the nervous system can down regulate back to a calm, safe & social state. In the short term, this is how your survival response is designed to work.
If the conscious mind gets in the way, when we can’t, don’t or are prevented from completing those survival actions, we can get stuck in a charged state of flight, fight or shutdown. All that survival energy wants to go somewhere. If it can’t get out it goes in. It gets stuffed down in the body, locked into muscles, fascia, joints & tissues as physical, mental and emotional tension. Every blocked stress response piles tension on until you’re marinating in trauma that makes even small, seemingly insignificant events feel crushing.
Perception is Reality
Our unconscious mind, the primitive brain, isn’t capable of separating fact from fiction or past from the present. The brain stem only has one job and that’s to keep you alive. To help you survive and make sense of your experiences it tries to find patterns in everything that’s happened to you, matching up current events with past emotional connections. Those stories, their emotional coding and your neuroception (gut feelings) help it determine what’s safe and what's a threat. A trigger is anything that reminds you and your primitive brain of a past threat or creates the same physical, mental or emotional state. It instantly recreates that state in your body as if it’s happening right now.
Triggers act on the autonomic nervous system through the brain stem to cause a physiologic response in the body first. It’s impossible to think, talk or rationalize yourself out of the cascade of those reactions because they are all physiological. Retelling the story, with the intention of desensitizing yourself to a traumatic event can actually retraumatize or worse desensitize and disconnect you from all bodily sensations sending you into shutdown. Cutting you off from your healthy neuroception can confuse communication with the body, making you less able to determine threat or safety and breaking your internal trust.
In order to return to social engagement we need to convince the body that it’s safe. If these reactions originate in the body and are stored in the body, that means we can affect them through the body. By giving your body a safe way to discharge that stuck stress energy, complete it’s fight flight reaction and move out of shutdown you can return yourself to a calm state of social engagement. Trauma Release Exercise does this in a way that gives you complete control of the process. Using Dr. Berceli’s exercise sequence to access the tremor mechanism you can relearn safe self regulation and build resilience without having to retell or relive your trauma story.
Normal?
Without a release valve, normal everyday stress can become trauma. Most of us think this is normal. Stress is a much more acceptable state to live in. Stress we can handle, suffering from trauma makes us a victim. No matter what you call it, no matter what the story is, staying locked in a state of stress or trauma for too long can lead to physical, mental and emotional dysfunction.
It’s time to relearn what we’ve forgotten. It’s time to become a participant in our own healing rather than a patient and stop judging ourselves for being survivors. The body doesn’t know right or wrong,good or bad, it only knows life or death. And there’s more to life than just survival. Learning to regulate your own stress response safely and simply with the strength you already have is the first step on the journey back to resilience.
My name is Ericka Thomas.
I offer trauma release yoga memberships and private coaching for survivors of stress injury and overwhelmed people just like you.
If you want to learn more about the trauma release process or find a certified provider in your area go to traumaprevention.com
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