Trauma impacts the body on a physiological level.
It can change the wiring of the nervous system.
Childhood abuse, neglect, and other traumatic stressors are significant risk factors for chronic health problems later in life.
After experiencing trauma the nervous system stays in fight, flight or freeze where the objective is to get away from the source of the threat.
If not released, it can eventually prevent the body from healing and making repairs.
The energy that the body produces to help us respond to a threat gets deeply locked in the muscles, nervous system, and body.
In this blog post, learn how to release your body’s power to respond and regulate that energy and how to renown your own vital energy.
Trauma impacts the nervous system
Trauma causes our nervous system to become dysregulated, making it difficult to regulate our experiences and emotions.
Stress caused by trauma can change brain development and affect how the body responds to stress.
Any event where you feel overwhelmed and unsafe can trigger a trauma response.
Our bodies begin to accumulate the energy needed to defend ourselves when we feel unsafe.
We unconsciously contract our muscles to protect our inner organs.
In other words, our bodies lock to protect us from threats.
This requires a lot of energy. And until we feel safe, letting down that barrier is not an option.
Trauma response becomes imprisoned in our nervous system.
Therefore, a traumatized person is constantly in a fight, flight, or freeze mode.
The nervous system gets overstimulated and is unable to go back to balance.
So the nervous system should be moved from chaos toward equilibrium. The more options you give your nervous system, the easier it will be for you to escape any kind of rut.
People who experience trauma are more likely to have autoimmune disorders, heart disease, chronic pain, and other chronic conditions.
A traumatized person functions primarily in the brainstem, and the language of the brainstem is sensational language.
Therefore, to work through the core of the trauma response you should address that level of the nervous system.
The first step
We’re all embodying our lived experience in our muscles, bones, posture and expression. This is how I can see what’s going on inside my clients.
By working with your nervous system and body you can rewire your responses and embody conscious life experience and way of being in your body.
The endless stream of sensory information is continually encoded into the nervous system’s hardware.
The first step is to track how trauma is impacting your nervous system and showing in the present moment.
- Ground your emotions
- Understand how we respond to triggers and overwhelm
- Discover the root of these responses
- Learn to pay detailed attention to your sensations
Somatic practice
The key is to assist people in having bodily experiences that contradict feelings of overwhelming helplessness.
The feeling of empowerment is what we’re going for.
In other words, traumatized people should gain mastery over their sensations and power in their bodies which will help develop genuine autonomy.
A direct and effective way of doing this is through the body.
We should find ways for our bodies to experience power and mastery.
Movement is the best approach.
Each person’s movement habits naturally improve due to increased movement awareness, better self-regulation, and more balanced psychological and emotional states.
When our body faces a certain movement or a situation that isn’t comfortable for us we usually push through and don’t search for an alternative option.
However, just as babies learn to walk, we should inquire, and test out various possibilities.
Sometimes we’re so used to pain that we cannot determine if we’re comfortable or not.
That’s why I insist on gently learning to explore new options.
The important thing is to feel safe testing different movements.
So for example if you had an injury you wouldn’t want to start working on the injured part of the body. Instead, you want to focus on where you can find the feeling of safety, which will lead you to tune into the whole system again, without unbalancing the nervous system.
Conclusion
When we go through trauma our bodies respond by feeling unsafe.
The feeling of safety is required for healing to take place.
Through subtle movement, you can increase awareness which will lead your nervous system to naturally change causing unnecessary tension to be released, breathing to become easier and your overall state to become more balanced.
Referencing the body is a way to go when it comes to lasting healing from trauma and sustainable transformation.