We cannot talk about trauma without talking about stress, which is a body’s natural response to uncomfortable emotional experiences accompanied by changes in your body, mind, and biochemistry. Some stress can do things like enhance performance while other stress, such as chronic or distressing, can overwhelm your complex and autonomous nervous system, leading to an inability to recover to normal or baseline functioning. When we experience stress, our bodies simultaneously activate the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems, which prompts threat responses.

We are not alone in this!

In response to threat and injury, all animals (including humans) execute biologically based, non-conscious action patterns that prepare them to meet the threat and defend themselves. We subconsciously draw from a “library” of possible responses, such as dodging, ducking, stiffening, bracing, fleeing, collapsing, freezing, retracting, etc. All of these are completely normal, somatic based responses enacted by the body in order to protect and defend itself. It is when these defending responses are overwhelmed that we see trauma.

Animals (unlike humans) are able to naturally recover from these states of dysregulation by engaging in counter responses which look like body movements that release or discharge that rush of survival energy that was generated by that threatening experience. In animals, this often looks like yawning, licking, shaking, running, etc.) Humans, however, have been socialized to hinder counter responses. When there is no counter response, there is no way for that energy to disperse outward, leading to prolonged nervous stem dysregulation and the entrapment of energy that then lives on in our bodies.

For example, when we prepare to fight or to flee, muscles throughout our entire body are tensed in specific patterns of high energy readiness. When we are unable to complete the appropriate actions, we fail to discharge the tremendous energy generated by our survival preparations. This energy becomes fixed in specific patterns of neuromuscular readiness. The person then stays in a state of acute and then chronic arousal and dysfunction in the central nervous system.

Now trauma, is the accumulation of that trapped survival energy, which results in constant dysregulation of the nervous system while overwhelming one’s ability to cope. It is an injury, that is so profound or prolonged, that it overwhelms your ability to understand and make sense of an event. It alters the way we process and recall memories, which, consequently, instills beliefs about ourselves and what our mind will perceive as safe vs. threat.

In essence, trauma is an interrupted natural and non pathological response that needs to be brought to closure

Many people have been taught that trauma resides in the nature of the event when in actuality, it is a response that can become trapped within our bodies. And as trauma builds and continues to remain unprocessed, it ingrains painful memories so deeply that they distort the way we think, act, and feel. Trauma constricts how we live our lives and makes their painful experiences a permanent fixture in the mind, a recurring telling of events that repeatedly brings the sensations, sounds, and imagery back into the present.

Over time, these patterns become ingrained, causing a disconnection from the body as a means of survival. These survival adaptations, while impressive, wreck havoc on our body, mind and spirit.