What Is Trauma?
When I was thirteen, my brother died and my entire world went dark for days, which turned into months and extended into years of compounding despair, isolation, and unresolved pain held in my body.
My whole world had collapsed. I had lost my protector and playmate, and plunged into a visceral confusion about the purpose of existence, love, and a higher power.
I did what I was taught to do throughout my childhood: be strong, get busy, and move on. Instead of going inward, I got busier going outward.
However, my coping strategies eventually caught up with me in my early thirties. I had finally driven myself into adrenal fatigue, and was now managing the corollary health consequences of chronic fatigue, intense diagnosable physical pain, digestive issues, and depression.
This tsunami of unresolved trauma took me out for almost six years. I was forced to stop all my activities, including work, to look within.
I had been hiding inside of my social activities, my business achievements, my intellect, and even my athletic endeavors, because staying busy seemed to be the only option at the time. Feeling was not.
While clipping my need to express the layers of repressed emotions through busyness was a detour away from pain, it was also an obstacle to reclaiming my true power and vulnerability. Through excessive doing, I had cut off the subtle, primal impulses pleading for me to befriend my heartbreak and emotional confusion.
Busyness kept me distanced from my wisdom and healing mind-body intelligence.
I didn’t realize that if I could just stop, and tend to the impacts of unresolved shock and trauma in my mind and body, I would be able to re-establish a connection with my heart and soul.
I needed to interrupt the war against myself. To re-establish beliefs that were not based upon perceptions that love and life was untrustworthy and unsafe.
I didn’t know that if I had been able to connect with the wisdom within and lean into my experiences of grief, loss, exile, and abandonment, I would have found access to my power source of love and healing within.
But finally, day-by-day, I started making room for all the intense noise without filters. I committed to the path of welcoming everything, which is a lot easier said than done.
“Heartbreak and trauma would become an unexpected doorway to the divine within.”
What is trauma?
What exactly is trauma? How does it impact our sense of self, well-being, and relationship to life? How does trauma influence our levels of stress, hyper-vigilance, patterns of control, and fear-based behaviors on a daily basis? And how do we heal from it?
My intention in this article is to explore these questions and provide a conceptual framework of trauma.
Trauma is a complex and expansive topic. It’s a painful reality of human existence that influences and shapes each one of us, in varying degrees.
Emergency rooms treat acute physical traumas. Yet, the frame of trauma goes far beyond physical well-being to include psychological, emotional, and spiritual health.
Trauma is anything that disconnects or fragments us from our authentic selves and sense of wholeness. It’s typically the result of a shocking event (or a series of repeated disempowering events) that overwhelm the central nervous system, and change how we react to feelings of threat, anxiety, and overwhelm. It can fracture our sense of safety and well-being, and imprint us with vigilant states of tracking for danger, even when we’re not aware of doing so.
Trauma doesn’t need to be big and obvious like a car accident or the loss of a loved one to radically redefine our orientation towards ourselves, other people, and life.
For example, if a child is incessantly teased and criticized for expressing affection and love, the result of dismissal and humiliation of the innocent expression can be a traumatic imprint. Developmental missing experience are often silent and stealth-like leaving a wake of pain, loneliness, isolation, and suffering. Learn more about missing experiences in my article, Your Relationship Patterns Are a Pathway to Repeat and Repair.
The critical difference between a stressful event and a traumatic experience is a feeling of helplessness to change the outcome. Feeling helpless against a threat can cause numbness, anger, shame, anxiety patterns, withdrawal, confusion, shock, and dissociation. This type of powerlessness is exaggerated when we find ourselves unable to self-regulate and rebuild our resiliency in order to engage and diffuse the impacts of the real and perceived threats.
Trauma holds key pieces to why many of us feel we’ve lost contact with our power. Unprocessed pain interferes with our vitality, life force, mood stability, and physical health, which can cloud our decision-making. Trauma can make us feel entrapped in feelings of disempowerment, and cycles of victimization, reactivity, or paralysis.
“When unresolved, the impacts of trauma can turn into patterns of passivity towards life, or on the other end, self-aggression or external aggression.”
Three areas that further define trauma:
Trauma is subjective
Trauma causes a fragmented sense of self
Trauma is unresolved energy stored in the mind-body
TRAUMA IS SUBJECTIVE
It’s a trap to compare trauma by scale and size of experience. Why? Because trauma is subjective and defined by how we respond more than the trigger or event itself. The size of the incident is less relevant than the actual impact on each person and their unique nervous system wiring and belief systems.
The level of fragmentation caused by unresolved trauma in the body varies based on how significant the threat is to each individual person. Ten people can experience the same event and the impact will vary depending upon each person’s:
level of resilience at the time of the event or experience;
ability to bring high states of activation through a process of self-regulation, discharge or shake stress off physiologically and resolution;
sense of safety to ask for help;
access to quality support and care from others that extends the love needed to integrate, digest the shock, and support nervous system regulation
If a child (or adult) is shamed or ignored when their system is overwhelmed or traumatized, this further compounds the trauma. Why? Because now, not only are they activated and afraid, they also feel banished and unsafe to reveal how they really feel, which poses the risk of disassociating and losing contact with their senses, needs, and sense of hope.
2. Trauma causes a fragmented sense of self
A primary result of trauma is feeling disconnected from our core sense of self. It’s common to feel lost when we experience a chronic disturbance in our ability to regulate our nervous system exists, or when we feel cut off from our sense of well being and wholeness.
One of the painful outcomes from trauma is an internal split in our mind-body, causing us to mistrust ourselves and our internal experiences.
As a result, we may look for safety and answers outside of ourselves. Sometimes, this external seeking can be supportive in gathering resources to support our healing process, while at other times, seeking externally can contribute to a loss of power and safety based on the reflections and care we receive.
The body, in its balanced state, is our reservoir of primal wisdom and inner guidance. It’s more than a vehicle for our physical and intellectual explorations. It’s intended to be a refuge that allows us to feel connected, safe, and at home. Depending upon the type of trauma we experience, it’s quite common to feel disconnected from our body wisdom, therefore losing our ability to trust ourselves.
Unresolved trauma patterns in the mind-body increase states of vigilance, which often become our nervous system’s new baseline. This means that those of us managing unresolved trauma aren’t aware of how we’ve become acclimated to high states of arousal as our daily baseline state.
Some say that if you put a frog in a cold pot, it won’t jump out when the heat rises, because it’s lost the ability to sense the slow climate change. This is what happens with compounding unresolved states of shock, trauma, and vigilant tracking. These behaviors can often attract more complex and disempowering experiences because our perceptions of reality and our judgment of others can be skewed from lingering states of anxiety and panic.
We are painfully, and oftentimes shamefully, reacting through behaviors of hyper-control, isolation, defensiveness, hot-fused anger, self-doubt, or other self-preservation impulses. These patterns occur primarily at a subconscious level in which our brain interprets the world as dangerous.
When we feel unsafe or helpless, we subconsciously draw upon our chosen protective strategies to ward off the pain and overwhelm. Hyper-vigilant brain activity can make it difficult to feel fully alive in the present moment, because we’re always reviewing and critiquing the past or preparing for a future of potential fears and “what if’s.”
“Trauma can turn us away from feeling safe inside of ourselves, with others, and the world at large.”
3. Trauma is unresolved energy stored in the mind-body
Activating states of flight, fight, or freeze need to be discharged to convert high states of threat and activation through resolution. This is true for all mammals.
During my six-year health crisis, I trained in a therapeutic method called Somatic Experiencing, which is based upon Peter Levine’s book, Waking the Tiger.
The somatic experiencing method educates about trauma responses through the study of mammals in the natural world. When an animal is attacked by a predator, it will draw upon one of three threat responses: fight, flight, or freeze. Regardless of which threat response the mammal draws upon, the animal is also wired, once it has found safety, to discharge by shaking off the nervous system arousal. This is an intelligent attempt to return to a baseline state of rest and digest, which is essential for rebuilding reserves.
Have you ever wondered where the term, ‘shake it off’, comes from? The common reference for letting a stress response, or need to defend, go and moving on?
SHAKE IT OFF: MOVING FROM ACTIVATION INTO DISCHARGE & RESOLUTION
Wildlife filming has contributed great insights into this process through studying the mammalian trauma resolution process called shaking it off.
Films show that when a rabbit flees and escapes from a predator, it seeks shelter and literally shakes its entire body as a means to discharge the stress and activation from the event.
Another coping mechanism demonstrated by some animals is to freeze and feign death. The possum is infamous for its ability to expel the scent of death to trick the predator into releasing them. Freed from the jaws of death, the possum will find shelter and shake to finish discharging.
While wild creatures have an inherent practice to regulate and discharge threat responses, we humans have lost the art of shaking it off. In the frenzied pace of life, we’ve lost daily contact with the wisdom of this practice. Instead of shaking things off into resolution, we’re more likely to repress, ignore, bury, and distract from our threat responses in a myriad of socially normalized behaviors.
Most of us have been innocently taught, like I was, ‘be strong, get busy, and move on.’
Creating space to shake it off
Obviously, we’re not going to walk into the board room after a heated disagreement with a colleague and excuse ourselves while we “shake things off” by convulsing our bodies. But, we can take a few minutes to deepen our breath, close our eyes, and allow our system a chance to settle until we can tend to the causes of activation later.
After high states of shock and activation, we need healthy personal practices that will assist us in the process of discharging to bring resolution.
Many social and cultural norms frown upon emotional expression. Our emotional expressions are often judged as hysterical, or a weakness to be managed, quelled, dissolved, or masked as quickly as possible. The result? We override indicators of threat and keep going, as the tension and stress hormones accumulate in our bodies and impact our states of mind and sense of peace. And if consistent enough, eventually, the build-up of tensions will impact our physical health in a multitude of ways.
“When trauma isn’t discharged and shaken off, patterns in the mind-body field will form into beliefs and habitual defensive patterns.”
An example of ruptured sequencing finding resolution
Unresolved energy becomes stored in our mind-body. The suspension of discharging a threat by shaking it off creates a log jam in our system. Similar to a time capsule, it remains hidden, and frozen in time, until a similar trigger breaks the glass and ignites our defense mechanisms.
Here’s an example of how this happened for me during my somatic experiencing training. In 2007, during my third level training, little did I know that the theoretical framework of “discharge and shake it off” that I was learning in class would become an embodied and first-hand experience that weekend.
On the last morning of the training I was working in a dyad with another student. We were assigned a student assistant to observe and encourage our learning. As my partner and I practiced being in the therapist role, the assistant repeatedly jumped in with harsh critics of how we were doing it “wrong.” Instead of being inquisitive and supportive, our assistant became overly controlling, shaming, and critical.
I was in performance fear. Naturally, we both were feeling nervous being observed as we learned the new skills. The assistant was not helping to ease the tension with critical and shaming feedback.
It was as if the whole room became cloudy, and her voice a sharp blade. My practice partner and I could not find our groove. I couldn’t feel my body because I had dissociated to avoid the pain of being hyper-criticized. Time stood still. My body froze.
Had I been more resourced, I would have given her feedback, asked for a new assistant, or found a way to create more safety for my learning environment. But instead, I did what I had learned to do as a kid when feeling attacked by an “authority figure,” I hunkered down in a frozen state until it was over.
Finally, we broke for lunch and I took a brief walk in a local park. I was visibly shaking as memories of my childhood continued to flood my whole being. One by one, like a movie, I watched memories of being criticized for doing things “wrong” flood my awareness. I felt the heartbreaks of only being accepted when I did things the way others wanted me to, rather than feeling celebrated for expressing the truth of my heart.
Obviously the event with the assistant was a fairly insignificant trigger, and I was responding to a well of repressed trauma tied to consistently feeling shamed and cut off from unconditional love for being myself. I was ready to peel this layer of repressed pain, and my body was already in process.
I decided to leave the training, since it was the final day and there would only be a few hours left after lunch. I traveled the pristine drive on Highway 1, along the Pacific Ocean, from San Francisco back to my home in the mountains of Santa Cruz.
The intensity of the experience was tapping into a root of deep trauma. My body needed an outlet for the energy discharge. In addition to the shaking, I stopped twice along the side of the road to throw up. This is the power of how our body stores energy, and the intelligence in which it seeks to find homeostasis through various forms of discharge and resolution.
In summary, which I learned first hand that day, when energy is not resolved, it seeks release, even decades later in unexpected ways. This is why paying attention to our triggers and reactive tendencies can provide important clues about stuck energy and limiting beliefs. If we consistently defend ourselves when we feel triggered, we may miss the gem of what is seeking attention underneath. Maybe we feel vulnerable. Or we’re afraid of uncertainty and overwhelmed by double-bind decisions. Or maybe we’re angry and triggered because we failed to set a boundary to honor our needs, or we need to tell someone we love that they have overstepped our boundaries.
Developing our self-awareness and ability to take personal responsibility for our triggers is a significant step to healing trauma. In addition, bodywork, somatic therapy, plant medicine and anything that allows us to slow down, feel, and access the material stored in our body (not necessarily in our conceptual mind) can help us to reveal and heal these patterns of trauma.
Being conscious and aware of what we are releasing can assist with healing on a psychological level through self-compassion and greater understanding. Yet, on a physiological level, the discharge process can be void of story or meaning, and this too is just as powerful of simply shaking things out when the impulses arise as another way to heal and integrate shock and trauma.
“Many studies are now revealing that chronic pain, fatigue, autoimmune, digestive disorders and mental health challenges are spurred by the residue of trauma.”
Healing trauma: A continuous journey of integration
The impact of trauma alters how we manage the inevitable surges of threat, stress hormones, and helplessness. When we learn to shake it off and process somatically through the body, we can re-wild ourselves.
By discharging trauma and reclaiming our connection to the body, we re-ignite our inherent primal wisdom.
As I shared earlier, I didn’t know how to slow down after my brother died. I was taught that feelings are dangerous and when possible, it’s best not to dwell on feelings and just keep going. I did as I was told. And underneath my external success and accomplishments, I was lost and depressed. Truly, I felt broken to the core.
All of this led to a six-year healing crisis in which my body pain and fatigue forced me to turn inward and seek the truth. Without this painful ally, I may have never been tossed off the hamster wheel of busyness. And without that giant pause, I may have never awakened to discover the influence and wide scope of how trauma was impacting my well-being, and directly correlated to my physical symptoms.
Discharging trauma from my mind and body continues to allow me to reintegrate into a stronger sense of self, and trust in my resiliency and wisdom. As much as I wish I could check the box “completed my trauma integration,” for me, and many of us, the journey continues.
Breaking the spell together
We, individually and collectively, can break the spell of inherited beliefs each time we interrupt and prune the behaviors and thought patterns that reinforce them.
When our traumas remain blindspots, personally and collectively, the cultural crusade to reinforce disembodiment continues to reign.
The loudspeaker of striving to improve, or of checking out through other addictions, keeps the collective amnesia enforced. It keeps us turned away from our wholeness and basic goodness, while turning us towards busyness and the next conquest.
Having suffered without a map for so many years, I’m mindful not to diminish the experience of trauma. Or to minimize the impact of feeling fragmented and addicted to busyness or other cravings. It’s a natural response to numb or seek adrenaline rushes as an innocent attempt to place a translucent veil over our suffering.
I want to normalize trauma and make it part of our lexicon of human self-care, no different than eating balanced meals and caring for our physical health.
How do we heal trauma, individually and collectively?
How do we self-regulate? Or sit with one another when trauma arises and not try to fix them, but allow their emotions and body to shake off the fear and shock?
How do we help each other sequence our activations through into resolution?
How do we love ourselves through the shame and isolation that trauma brings?
I want to collectively investigate how to remember and amplify our ability to love, listen, take ownership of our wounds, and generate states of well-being from the inside out through our loving and spacious presence.
To heal trauma is to remember our wholeness — and, yes, this includes our messiness and imperfections.
We, individually and collectively, can break the spell of self-aggression — and blaming others — for our pain each time we embrace our vulnerability, and prune the beliefs and behaviors that reinforce trauma patterns and separation.
“It’s a heroic journey to empower ourselves with the intention and discipline to integrate the aspects of ourselves that have splintered off, and to lovingly tuck them safely back into our hearts.”
Where to go from here?
If you’d like to continue to explore the journey of addressing and healing trauma, I’ve written a series of articles on the topic:
Next:
Self-Acceptance Power
8 Common Impacts of Trauma
How Does a 'Dark Night Of The Soul' Catalyze Our Integration & Healing?