Functioning trauma
Let's start with the basics. What is Trauma?
Trauma is anything that overwhelms our ability to cope with life.
As we move through life, we may encounter many stressful situations and challenges. Over time, we may find that this undischarged accumulation of energy creates a system of distorted response patterns based on the effect or impact these original traumatic occurrences had on our life.
It's not for us to decide how anybody else should respond to any given situation, we all have different coping mechanisms according to how resourced we were (and are) in our lives. For example, a child who has been taught healthy boundaries, raised in a supportive environment, listened to, and guided in a loving way may be described as somebody who is well resourced. This does not mean that traumatic experiences will never affect them, more that they will have enough coping mechanisms that they can process their experience. For others, that place of safety which is a pre-requisite for being able to discharge and heal trauma has never been available to them, therefore these continual triggers stack up until eventually we don't know what to do with them. At this point many people turn to drugs, alcohol, sex addictions, obsessive work patterns, self medicating behaviours or some other form of ‘escapism’. It doesn't feel safe or comfortable to be in this body and so we begin to do everything we can to stay out of it.
As we come to cover up these parts of ourselves that feel inwardly overwhelmed, out of balance, or distressing, on the surface we may be in what we call functional freeze (Peter Levine). An example of this might be an explosive situation coming to light where you hear people who know the person who has finally cracked say something like: "I didn't realise they were so lost/angry/isolated, I wish I'd been able to do more."
We adapt to survive but in doing so, we lose our full range of human experience and emotion, instead choosing to sacrifice parts of ourselves in order to feel safe, or perhaps to gain approval or love. At some point a wise choice, but is almost certainly no longer in service to our long-term wellbeing.
When we cannot properly discharge trauma we often get stuck in the sympathetic part of the nervous system, constantly in fight/flight, fuelled by adrenaline and cortisol, or we may go into dorsal vagal shutdown and dissociate. Either way, our coping mechanisms are not in balance and can over time, create chronic dis-ease patterns which will show up physically, mentally and/or emotionally; usually a combination of all three.
The good news is that there's a lot we can do about this. Learning about self-regulation allows us to slowly meet our past experiences and begin the conscious uncoupling process of our relationship to those experiences. We cannot change the past or what’s happened to us but we absolutely can change how we relate to those parts of our neural pathways and re-route them.
In my work, you will rarely hear me say "this is a safe space". What is safe for me may be far from safe for you, and what is safe in a group will differ for every single individual within that group. The first place we start is to identify what does feel safe for someone and not push them beyond their own inner authority and personal intuitive boundaries. A practitioner or healer is not here to tell you what you should or should not be feeling, but is there to open up deep inquiry that will support you in identifying what you need. For many of us who have had our boundaries crossed we may not know the answer to that simple question, and that's okay. We start where we are and make a decision to change to the best of our ability in any given moment.
The main point of the short blog post today is to highlight the fact that in order to end traumatic response patterns, we must first:
Bring them into awareness.
Find a consistent safe space in which to explore them.
Trust our own inner authority.
Become okay with vulnerability (when appropriate).
Learn to identify our bodily sensations when feeling ‘activated’, and find ways to slow those responses down.
Begin to learn how to move from ‘protection to connection’ (David Berceli)
Ultimately, it’s totally possible to re-wire these old patterns when we are patient, resourced, supported and loved through our process.
To discover more about my work, please feel free to book a free 15 minute call.
