The Wisdom of Trauma

Good morning! 

I hope you are enjoying this gorgeous warm weather now that we are deep into summer!

I have been spending a lot of time taking an online program about trauma. For those of you who have been following me and my journey into the Mind-Body world, you know this has become an integral part of how I now practice and work with people.  And trauma is, in my opinion, often an important piece of what is happening in their body for so many people.  

This particular program, Returning to Wholeness, piggy backs onto a wonderful documentary I was able to watch. It is called the Wisdom of Trauma.  Maybe you saw me post a link on our Facebook account last weekend when it was still available to watch. I do hope you took time to watch it. (If so, I would love to hear your thoughts about the documentary.) 

One of my biggest take-aways from Gabor Mate, MD, is that trauma is not the painful experience we may have lived through. Instead, he teaches that trauma is the wound we sustain when the difficult or painful experience occurs.  Trauma comes from the disconnection from ourselves. 

For example, if you think of an event in your life that you consider to be traumatic, ask yourself, “What is the impact that incident had on me?  What is the wound I sustained?”  He uses an analogy of scar tissue that grows as a wound heals.  Scar tissue is inflexible and rigid and typically is numb to the touch. Inside, we often experience a disconnection from the physical and emotional sensations of our body.  When this occurs we are often inflexible and rigid in how we react to similar situations in order to keep ourselves safe. 

What I hope you take away from this is that the wound is what happened inside of you, not the external event. 

This is HUGE! If trauma is truly from an incident that occurred in the past, then we are victims of that trauma.  

If, however, trauma is actually from how our body reacts from an experience, by disconnecting from knowing and feeling what is occurring in our bodies and from our inner wisdom, (i.e. our intuition or gut feelings) then we are no longer victims. 
 

We have the power to do what it takes to reconnect with our whole selves. 

And, by the way, a traumatic incident does not need to be huge for us to disconnect from ourselves.  Any experience can be considered traumatic when our autonomic nervous system interprets an experience as being unsafe in combination with an inability to do something about it.   

In my online program, Peace and Calm, I site an example of even a loud noise or yelling to a young child can feel scary and unsafe. 

But again, even if an experience feels unsafe and out of our control, if we have a support system around us that helps us feel through and release the energy of that experience, we can heal.  That energy is released instead of the body holding onto it and allowing it to color and change our perception of future similar experiences. 

If you have any thoughts or questions, I would love to hear them.  Please comment below and share this blog to anyone you feel would benefit from reading it.

In Kindness, 

Jen 

P.S. Keep your eyes peeled, I am considering putting together a 5-day challenge offering easy tools to decrease stress likely to launch at the end of summer!