What Do I Mean When I Say Trauma?
Trauma is not the distressing or disturbing event that occurs, but rather the emotional and bodily response that overwhelms someone’s ability to cope and restricts their ability to safely feel a full range of emotions.
Basically, it’s the response, not the trigger.
That means that the event doesn’t have to be as intense as war or an assault of some kind. It could be any experience that entails an abuse of power, oppression, lack of control, significant loss of something or someone important to you, feelings of helplessness, fear for emotional or physical well-being, or intense pain. What causes a traumatic response in one person may not be in another. It is more about the resulting symptoms and challenges in functioning and coping as a result.
This happens when the body goes into a state of fight, flight or freeze during an event and then has difficulty returning to a sense of balance and safety. When this happens, the body may continuously sense danger when real danger is not present or totally shut down and numb out, becoming disconnected from the body.
How Do You Know if Trauma is Impacting You?
After a frightening traumatic experience, many people have strong emotional reactions such as sadness, anger, fear, hopelessness, and shame, as well as physical reactions like shaking, nausea, body pain, difficulty breathing, etc. For most, these intense feelings and sensations dissolve over days or weeks. For others, the symptoms persist over time, whether or not there is enough to qualify for PTSD or other diagnoses. Common symptoms of trauma that show up in the heart, mind, body, and behavior include the following:
Heart: Overwhelming fear, shock, anxiety or panic attacks, detachment from feelings and relationships, numbness, depression, guilt, shame, disbelief or denial, helplessness, hopelessness, emptiness, anger/rage, irritability, or mood swings.
Mind: Sudden intrusive thoughts or images of the event, nightmares, difficulty concentrating, memory loss, hypervigilance, negative thoughts about self or the world, dissociation, and disorientation.
Body: Feeling jumpy, extreme fatigue, fast heart rate, difficulty sleeping, pain or muscle aches, sexual dysfunction, lack of appetite or overeating, difficulty relaxing, or edginess.
Behavior: Avoidance of memories, places, situations, or other triggers, social withdrawal, lack of interest in things you used to enjoy, hypervigilance, changes in sleeping or eating patterns, or obsessive/compulsive behaviors.
How Is Trauma Stored in the Body?
Trauma is stored in our bodies through implicit (or somatic) memory. Unlike explicit memory, which helps us remember factual information, implicit memories are emotional responses and body sensations. These memories are stored in different parts of the brain and need to be integrated later to become unified.
With trauma, as stated earlier, the fight, flight or freeze response is activated. The goal in these situations is not to encode explicit memories but to return to a safe place. As a result, many survivors have difficulty remembering all of the details (explicit memory) but still have access to fear, helplessness, jumpiness, etc (implicit memory).
Further, when the person is put outside of their window of tolerance and gets stuck in a sort of chronic trauma response, the part of the brain that triggers the fight, flight or freeze (the amygdala) gets over-sensitive. This means false alarms that scream “danger!” go off even when there is no real threat. This is why smells, certain types of touch, visual stimuli, sounds, or tones can trigger implicit memories and trauma responses in the body.
The brain needs to integrate. And it can’t do that until we teach the body to activate calm and safety.
How Can Somatic Practices Help?
Survivors “cannot recover until they become familiar with and befriend the sensations in their bodies…Physical self-awareness is the first step in releasing the tyranny of the past” (van der Kolk). The first step is to learn to notice and describe the physical sensations underneath emotions. This can be things like pain, tension, pleasure, temperature, pressure. The way breath feels coming in and out, and even gestures and movements.
Once we are aware of our bodies and the abundance of sensations present. We can learn to regulate our own nervous system responses through breath and movement- releasing tension, reintegrating traumatic energy, restoring a sense of safety, and healing body and mind.
Why Work With a Somatic-Based Therapist?
Sometimes talking about a traumatic experience can help. Other times, such as if you don’t have the regulation tools to modulate your body’s response to the re-telling. Talking can actually do more harm than good.
A somatic therapist will first help you become aware of your body’s sensations. Once you are aware and in tune with your body. The therapist will give you powerful tools to regulate your nervous system through breathwork and movement. When regulation is mastered, sharing your story in a relaxed muscle body can desensitize. The unwanted or intrusive body responses and return your brain’s ability to discern when there is a real danger and when it’s a false alarm.
You can own your story, feel safe in your skin, and heal from what has happened to you.
Please call us today to set up an appointment with one of our trauma therapists in Dallas, TX.
Resources
https://psychcentral.com/lib/how-why-somatic-experiencing-works#7
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/workings-well-being/201708/heal-trauma-work-the-body
Body Keeps the Score by Bessel van der Kolk
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