We often imagine trauma to be some kind of extreme event that leaves a person with strong emotional and mental difficulties afterwards, but in my experience, trauma is something very different.
For me, trauma is an energetic wound that arises as a result of an overwhelming event that couldn’t be fully discharged or processed.
When animals go through something like a fight, a chase or some kind of near death experience, after the initial fight or flight response, they’ll discharge the event by screaming or shaking or some other natural reflex that allows them to quickly come back to a state of calm and regulation.
The event has been discharged or processed, there is nothing residual that remains, and therefore there is no trauma.
When the event isn’t discharged or can’t be discharged, the energy of that event stays stuck in the body and becomes trauma.
I use the phrase trauma body to refer to the overall collection of our stored trauma. It is also referred to similarly if not entirely identically by the phrase pain body or the shadow.
Trauma is not so much about the overwhelming event itself, but in our ability to process and discharge it afterwards.
Trauma continues over time to wreak havoc in the mind and body and the nervous system.
Those people that accumulate a lot of trauma often have physical health issues as a result, as I did.
Why does one child who gets chased by a dog move on and go back to playing with dogs the next day, whereas another develops a long term fear of dogs and suffers with persistent thoughts and memories and flashbacks?
When parents bring up their children in ways that damage their ability to process overwhelming events, the child will develop more and more trauma over time.
By conditioning their daughter to be passive, polite and agreeable – no shouting, no fighting, no demanding. Or telling their son to man up and stop crying, no emotions, “be strong”, and so on, that child will not be able to discharge overwhelming events.
If you take a child who is told to stop crying, to behave themselves, to stop acting out, stop being angry, stop fidgeting, sit down, be quiet, listen to me, pull yourself together, and that child will be traumatised, regardless of their life experiences.
They’ve had every innate natural normal mechanism for discharging and processing overwhelming experiences, and it’s been taken from them, and replaced with shame and guilt and self hatred.
In fact, every time we are triggered by a child’s behaviour and we interrupt it or we clamp down on it, it will be replaced with something more unnatural and extreme later.
The more trauma that a person accumulates, the more their nervous system becomes dysregulated which you see through things like racing thoughts, an inability to relax, always being vigilant and on edge, constantly looking for ways to calm and numb themselves and so on.
The more trauma a person accumulates, the more easily triggered they are and the more extreme their responses can be. A trigger is what happens when something or someone outside of them presses on one of their energetic wounds – it could be through something they say, something they do, the way they look or dress, their gender, sexuality, race or religion – anything really.
Modern society also encourages us to hold tightly to our wounds, by placing an unhealthy importance on delicately treading around other people’s past trauma so as not to trigger or offend them, rather than encouraging and supporting that person to grow and to heal their trauma.
Trauma isn’t some sort of mental condition. It’s very much stored in the body and will continue to poison the body and mind and find ways to manifest and show up in our lives until it can be discharged.
It is incredibly hard to fully process trauma by simply talking it out, or thinking the right thoughts, in the same way that we can’t heal a broken leg that way.
A broken leg that doesn’t receive proper medical attention will solidify and heal badly leaving that person walking in an unnatural way and in pain, and that’s if they can even walk at all, and no amount of not moaning or being brave or come on it’s time to move on now will change that.
Trauma is processed most effectively through various types of body work that allow a person to come out of their thoughts, discharge the trauma, and find the safety to come back to living in their body again, living full present in the moment.
