Understanding Trauma
You may have heard the word “trauma” and thought “That’s not me, I got over it” or it sounded like such a big thing but what I know for sure is that it shows up in one’s life in many ways.
Trauma is a very personal experience and people are affected by their trauma differently.
I learned of symptoms of my own trauma responses as I began the work of Gentle Trauma Release © during my studies. Through my own work on myself, I began to see that there was trauma living inside. It was there in my body, and it was holding on to my choices, decisions, and life overall. So, I had to understand.
In order to heal, I needed to understand Trauma.
If you are like me...
... you know there are things in your life that caused you pain and suffering. It could be big, something like a death of a loved one, being raped, seeing something that scared you and caused you to shut down. Smaller, in your adult mind, may be some childhood bullying, or someone saying you are fat, or not good enough at something that was important in your life.
Trauma is a bodily reaction to an event, or an emotionally disturbing situation and no matter the level of pain or fear, it has stayed with you. It’s a story that keeps showing up in your life, that causes you to react in ways that keep you from healing.
You can experience a profound release when it comes to the traumatic memories and emotions that have been haunting you. You can get your life back. It really is possible to let the painful past go of them for good. But it doesn’t just magically happen…A reliable, powerful tool is needed to help you with that. Gentle Trauma Release© is that tool.
Trauma Thoughts
It seems we often believe that trauma goes away when we forgive, or forget, or let go of the story. But that event, that story keeps showing in our day-to-day lives. It shows up because our body believes we are still back there amid that event, and we are still trying to move through it. Our bodies want to finish it, but we don’t really know the effect it is having.
Typically, we aren’t aware that we are carrying the trauma, we just know that our life choices, decisions, emotions, and patterns aren’t working for us. We feel stuck. We know there is something we need to do; we just don’t know how.
Imagine one of your stories, something in your past that brings you an emotional response that feels uncomfortable, sad, overly emotional. When it comes up or when you focus on it, it is like a witness. It takes witness to the story, and it remembers many different parts of what happened. And in a way, your body knows the threat, or the episode, or challenge is still there, and your body wants to finish it. But it can’t because most often that story was long ago. So, your body is in the belief that the threat is still here, and it’s going to do whatever it can to keep you safe.
We don’t survive trauma because of conscious decision-making or working to “understand” why or how it happened. Our body takes over, and sometimes we are left with an inadequate record of what happened, or we don’t think its over or can’t understand how we endured it. We can be left with all kinds of intense thoughts and symptoms that play out in many ways in everyday life. Our body wants to protect.
