Trauma and the Body

Until very recently, we saw trauma as something that happened in the mind. We considered it a mental illness, a "disorder." (And you know I hate that word.)

Most people don’t realize that trauma, as a diagnosis, has only been around since 1980, when Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) was pathologized by U.S. psychiatry in their handbook for insurance companies, the DSM-III.

Yet now we know that taking a purely mental approach to trauma healing only gets you halfway. After decades of research by clinicians like Peter Levine (Waking the Tiger) and Dr. Bessel van der Kolk (The Body Keeps the Score), we now have evidence that trauma lives not just in the mind, but also in the body.

This is why somatic approaches that are body-based are becoming the go-to approaches for trauma healing ("soma" means "body" in Ancient Greek). Many psychologists have become somatic trauma therapists, because resolving trauma through the body is a highly effective modality.

It makes sense that trauma lives in the body.

Trauma is what happens when a perceived life-threatening event or situation gets encoded in the nervous system. The memory or imprint of what happened is held not just in the brain, but in the body.

Trauma shows up in our physiology — in our blood, our bones, our tissues.

It's important to notice what Levine observed in his work with children and veterans, which is that trauma is about an event or situation being perceived as life-threatening. Whether it actually is or isn't doesn’t make a difference.

If a person perceives an event or situation to be life-threatening, that’s enough for trauma to take root.

That means that quite reliably, what is traumatizing for one person might not be traumatizing for someone else. One person’s traumatic event might not even be remembered by another person who was there.

Human beings have a massive range of experiences and our bodies respond to threats very differently.

Trauma happens when a person is overwhelmed and responds with intense fear, even terror, and feels helpless. Trauma is an intense experience for the body, especially the nervous system.

The state of being overwhelmed is highly uncomfortable and takes a lot of energy to process.

There are two ways that unresolved trauma can show up in the nervous system: over-activation or under-activation.

An over-activated nervous system is running at increased speed.

When this happens, we can feel extremely anxious and our mind often starts racing. We might start sweating or even shaking, because we’re having an intense stress response in the body.

Conversely, an under-activated nervous system moves at a slower pace.

We can feel heavy and immobilized, like action is difficult if not impossible.  We might experience states of helplessness, where we feel collapsed and lifeless. Numbness and shut-down are signs of an under-activated nervous system.

Both over-activation and under-activation are signs that there is unresolved trauma in the body. But most of us don't recognize numbness and shut-down as signs that something within us needs healing.

Most of us still think about trauma in an outdated way, like it’s about the mind. But if we haven't updated our understanding, we're going to miss out on knowing about the massive advancements happening in trauma healing.

We can’t change what we don’t see. Every changemaker needs to know how to recognize unresolved trauma in the nervous system.

Most of us carry some degree of trauma that need resolution. Some of us carry more than others.

It’s helpful to know how to navigate when trauma shows up in the nervous system in yourself or others. We often judge people for avoidant or high-conflict behavior when actually they might be experiencing nervous system dysregulation from a trauma response.

Most often, unresolved trauma shows up in our intimate relationships. Maybe we have a hard time with emotional closeness and intimacy, especially sexual intimacy. We may feel unlovable or unloving, and think there is something wrong with us or that we should just try harder.

If we don't recognize that what we're experiencing is unresolved trauma, we risk blaming and feeling ashamed of ourselves. But it's not our fault.

It’s easy to be hard on ourselves for our bodies’ natural reactions to stressful situations.

Instead, I invite us to bring self-love and self-compassion to those places within us that are not yet healed.

It helps to recognize that nervous system over-activation and under-activation are both attempts for the body to regulate itself. There might be back and forth between over- and under-activation, as the body holding trauma tries to regain its balance.

If we don't recognize unresolved trauma for what it is, it can deeply impact our experience and potential in life.

Whether it's the extreme anxiety of over-activation or the numbness and shutdown of under-activation, until we resolve it, it stays with us.

This can feel extremely self-defeating. But when we learn more about trauma, we can meet ourselves with self-love and self-compassion.

When we know what we're dealing with, we can support ourselves to heal.

With body-based trauma resolution, it doesn't even have to be hard. Somatic trauma healing does not focus on the story of what happened, but instead brings us back to our bodies.

What the new research says about trauma and the body is that the body knows how to heal. We can trust our bodies. We can learn to come home to our bodies.

And for people with trauma, that is a very welcome message indeed.

As we support ourselves to heal and resolve the past trauma, we free up more energy in our bodies. We often feel lighter and more alive, which translates into every area of life, especially our relationships.

This greater aliveness is an amazing feeling, speaking from personal experience. After doing somatic trauma resolution work, I have more energy to use for my thriving.

This is the "post-traumatic growth" that the research says is available to each one of us, no matter what happened in the past, no matter how long the trauma has been there.

In case you’re wondering, it’s available to you too.

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