How I work with trauma

Symptoms of trauma are not always easy to spot. A lot of what we ‘feel’ may be in dissociation, and we may not even be aware that we are ‘not feeling’. Dissociation can be a symptom of trauma – and can be described as when overwhelming feelings, normally associated with fight and flight, cause a ‘shut down’ in the body.

Trauma itself may also be described as the body’s processing of overwhelming experiences which hasn’t reached completion. The body struggles to return to homeostasis because at some level, the mind/body connectivity doesn’t recognise that the overwhelming or frightening experience is over. We can find ourselves easily triggered in to fight flight, or further along, into freeze or even collapse (shut down). This pattern can seem so familiar to many of us that we don’t realise this is a reenactment of past trauma.

What we remember and what we don’t

Sometimes we remember overwhelming experiences – a car crash, loss of a loved one, emotional or physical violence. These are experiences that involve strong feelings, most obviously of fear, but sometimes difficult feelings such as anger and shame. When we remember these occurrences, if we are able to process the associated feelings, we are able to ‘come down’ from the emotional memory and recognise we are back in in our bodies in the ‘here and now’, no longer stuck in that experience. If that process is not working as optimally as it can, this is when post-traumatic stress disorder can set in.

There is also the case of our bodies reacting to things we don’t remember. We don’t ‘remember’ what happened in our first months and years of life. If life was very overwhelming or frightening during that time, or family relationships were fraught or scary, an infant may have had to ‘shut down’ difficult feelings, as described above, as a way of coping.  Because this happens when the nervous system is still in development, in later life, shut down or collapse, or the activation of the fight flight responses becomes a reflexive way of responding to stress and relational difficulties. It is built into the body’s systems.

How working with the body can help

We can work with overwhelming feelings and states, both remembered and not remembered, by connecting through the body. If we are feeling ‘numb’ or ‘cut off’ this make indicate we are in a state that belongs to the past. Slowly and very gradually we might start to feel more. We can locate sensations and feelings from past trauma. We can also both soothe and regulate powerful emotion as it arises in the here and now. The feelings are in the body. We can learn to connect, often with the help of a therapist, to what is present, as well as to the body’s capacity to create new neural pathways and self-regulating patterns. We can do this together through compassionate awareness, breathing and muscular adjustments, reducing the tendency to panic, shut down or generally ignore our own suffering.