Trauma
The signs of trauma are there.
Trauma can involve an intense incident.
The impact is easy to see.
Hard not to know when the memories and sensations invade your space all the time. Abuse. Accidents. Violence. Recent or long past.
Disconnecting is possible as long as you're ok disconnecting from yourself, others, and life.
Positive intention can mask trauma.
The birth experience can leave a trauma imprint within mom or baby, despite starting a family's exciting life transition.
Medical procedures of all kinds can solve a physical ailment and leave trauma in the nervous system.
Checkups, immunizations, even therapies can unknowingly have a traumatic effect on the autonomic nervous system – the common roots of your physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual well-being.
Trauma can be stealth.
You think, "I had a good childhood." Yet outside of your awareness, interactions, and expectations with others overwhelm you.
Something disrupted your sense of feeling safe and secure in who you are. Slowly and unknowingly, your capacity to regulate on the inside gets flooded, activating your survival system.
Trauma happens in good families – possibly caused by a yelling mom, dismissive dad, or being raised to buck it up or have an explanation for everything.
It's not necessarily an evaluation of parents; it's an artifact of experiencing situations that demanded more of your nervous system than it had yet developed the capacity to handle.
Unfortunately, those experiences pass on from generation to generation, waiting for someone to break the cycle.
By any name, the trauma feels like yuck or absolutely nothing.
Trauma information and misinformation are more available than ever.
Many terms describe the effects of trauma, including PTSD, complex-PTSD, developmental trauma, attachment trauma, panic, hypervigilance, or shutdown.
On the surface, the impact of trauma can appear differently. It is a personal and unique developmental experience – not to be compared or qualified.
The simplicity comes when we get to the root cause – the nervous system's dysregulation, particularly in the emotional interconnections between the body and brain.
Your emotional system learns to survive on hacks.
Out of its natural functioning, your inner system adapts. Instead of displaying emotion and face dad's criticism, you hold it back. To avoid the sinking feeling in your gut, you say what the person wants to hear. To get attention (needed for survival as a child), you do something perfectly.
That always works. Til it doesn't and you have to try even harder, be even better. To avoid that inner constriction, keep them happy. To get love, give up yourself. They happen out of awareness.
To avoid the sinking feeling that comes with eye contact from an adult, turn away. You respond out of your awareness. Your autonomic system, that part that is responsible for your survival, is putting these micromovement or behaviors into autopilot so you can survive without having to think about it.
During sexual trauma, the nervous system can call on the fawn/feign response as the best chance of getting through it. Unfortunately, it's a response that can get stuck as the autopilot – deepening the habits of hopelessness, self-criticism, and disconnection.
Hacks cause unintended and real consequences.
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Even with something as protective as avoidance, vibes spread – resulting in broken relationships, never-ending conflict, and tension filling the air, suffocating everyone in it. Cut-off feels good at the moment only to amplify the hollowness of disconnection.
Sleepless nights, inability to relax, chronic pain, and fatigue without medical explanation (or with it but without effective solution) point to emotional (trauma) wounds that you fail to recognize or resolve.
The hacks get in the way of what you care about most. As life context changes, the protective hacks that worked as a child with your parent don't work with your child as a parent.
The hacks that kept you from feeling bullied now make you distant from your partner. Life is not what it was when your built-in responses 'worked.' What once was protective and helpful now is limiting and painful.
Hope is there, even before you can feel it.
It's a continually changing system, and with intention, it can heal and reset – eliminating the need for the hacks. That system allows you to put the past in the past, awakening you to live in the present fully.
Embracing a path of restoration and growth is scary. Indeed! This feeling is an artifact of trauma and why it's impossible to do it alone. It requires the opportunity to be fully seen and heard as you are. That is scary! Naturally, your inner surveillance will first detect a threat to anything, anyone new. That's the first step in our work.
When it feels safe, you can naturally come out from behind the denial, blaming, hypervigilance that protects. Through the process, I'll hold the hope when it's hard for you.
Together we'll loosen the grip of your hacks.
Restoration and post-trauma growth are life changing.
Learn to grow beyond the hacks and move on with your life. Don't let those past events keep you in an emotional upheaval.
Once you restore regulation, you will become primed to develop a healthy emotional system.
Then, you will ride the waves, address the energy, so a new perspective emerges, and navigate the ups and downs of living with ease.
I'm ready to be your non-judgmental, compassionate guide.