Your Nervous System, Trauma & How to Heal it
Read time : 10-15 mins
Last week we touched upon how healing is about ‘making whole’ (that’s the origin of the word, from Proto-Germanic *hailjan - literally, to make whole. Today, let’s look at what healing the nervous system involves, and how this is a lot about learning to contact all of the sensations and experiences that we have, through our bodies and our senses. We make whole our experience of life, and the world.
This will involve a bit of theory, as its often helpful to really get the cognitive understanding of things on board, so that we can then embody it. So, buckle up, we’re going on a ride through the nervous system and stress response cycles.
Our central nervous systems has the job of reading the world around us, for cues of safety or threat. Depending on how we perceive what’s happening, our bodies respond by either heightening alertness or bringing relaxation online. Imagine oversleeping, waking up, suddenly realising you have to be at work, and then springing out of bed into action —all of this transition happens through our nervous system.
A certain amount of stress is good and healthy. We need it to flex and bend and spring and rest through the world (in order to be adaptable and resilient, and move through the different demands that are placed on us - we’re always moving through different cycles of stress and rest).
The word ‘trauma’ might sound harsh and cutting (the word itself comes from the Greek, ‘trauma’, meaning ‘to wound’), and yet, it’s a physiological response that happens within our nervous system that's actually a protective mechanism. Trauma is the response in our bodies when the stress becomes overwhelming or threatening (ie a huge amount of fear or stress), and can no longer be responded to or processed in the moment.
While we often associate trauma with major life-threatening events like war or accidents, it can stem from seemingly minor stressors that overload our nervous system on a daily basis.
How do we get traumatised & why does trauma exist?
- Here, it will be useful to understand what a stress cycle is, and the difference between a complete stress cycle and one that doesn’t complete
When we encounter stress, our bodies respond with a stress response : an automatic, body response, through our nervous systems (just like coughing, or sneezing), that serves the function of protecting us from harm.
We pick up the threat or danger through our nervous system. Adrenaline is created - and then a sequence of signals fire through the body, so we have the energy to fight or flee, to escape the danger. When we register that we’re safe again, this is the stress cycle completing. Sometimes, when we perceive the threat as overhwhelming or too big to manage in that moment, instead of fighting or fleeing, we become immobilised - here, the stress cycle doesn’t complete. Our body perceives the stress as life-threatening, so the best choice we have is to become still, and take ourselves out of the firing line. When the stress cycle completes, the fighting or fleeing helps to burn off the adrenaline and stress from our system. When the stress cyecle doesn’t complete, there’s no movement to burn off the stress, so instead, we’re left with an imprint of stress in the body, which we call trauma.
I’ll go into more detail about this, over the next little bit….
How Imminent Threat or Danger feels in the body
heightened energy : elevated heart rate, tension in the muscles, heat. We stop digesting our food, we breathe more shallowly.
There’s a reflex response through the body : one of bracing, like its preparing for impact. A slow, inward curl, like a wincing-away from the threat.
After this inward-drawing energy, we then get propelled outwards, an exploding outward energy that takes us into either a fight, or flight, response. This is called the sympathetic response of the nervous system.
Registering ‘I’m Safe Now’ After taking action to fight or flee and successfully bringing ourselves back to safety, we orient (look around at our surroundings, smell, hear, use our senses and scan for cues of safety or danger), and we realise : I ran / fought, I’m safe now! I survived. An update occurs, and our body responds with increasing ease and relaxation. Our bodies feel safe.
How Safety Feels in the Body
The felt-sense of Safety is one of expansion. Our tissues, joints, muscles all expand
We come out of the bracing
Our breathing becomes more deep and easy
We begin to digest food again
We can connect with others from a place of safety rather than threat
We return back to a baseline of ease, safe connection with others, rest and digesting food.. This is also the place that our bodies replenish, recover and heal. This is called the parasympathetic state of the nervous system.
A complete stress response cycle is where, the bracing and energy through the body is followed by movement - we fight or flee, so, we burn up the adrenaline, and use up all the energy created. The charge within the body has been used up to spring us to safety.
With Trauma, we get an incomplete stress response cycle
In brief, when someone with a traumatised nervous system (one that is overwhelmed with the energy of stress), the final stage of the stress cycle doesn’t arrive - the registering of ‘I’m safe now, in this moment, I survived’.
The traumatised nervous system usually has its roots in childhood, from a big event like assault, abuse, or a sudden death that rocks your world. Or series of small events, like having to take care of your parents emotions, or, it not being safe to express your emotions with your parents, or growing up queer or gender non-conforming, which are all daily threats to the nervous system.
What causes us to become traumatised, is that instead of fighting or fleeing, we freeze, or we fawn (please / appease) instead. Rather than the energy propelling us outwards, it draws us inward and makes us shrink. This is because the perceived threat is too big for us to handle.
Freeze and fawn are in some ways like the opposite of fight and flight, because we’re not moving, and so we’re not burning off the adrenaline, we’re stuck with the threat. These responses often have their roots in childhood trauma because it’s less likely that we have the opportunity to fight or flee in childhood, or we don’t believe we should, so we adapt to the stress in the best way we know how, through freezing or fawning (please / appease).
The ways that freeze can manifest are many different adaptations : through numbing out or zoning out, for example : binge eating food, watching TV, smoking pot, day-dreaming / zoning out,
And through fawning (please / appease) becoming agreeable, tiptoing and walking on eggshells, becoming the captor.
These life experiences become traumatic because we don’t have the movement that comes with the sympathetic response, which burns off the adrenaline and stress from the nervous system, and so a physiological imprint of stress is left within the nervous system.
In the animal kingdom, if an animal goes into freeze as a protective mechanism (for example, a gazelle being chased by a cheetah), they release the stored stress / survival energy by shaking it out afterwards. After the gazelle has finished shaking off the stored stress, it will leap into the air, and carry on moving, and then orienting and registering safety before returning to a safe and social / relaxed body.
As humans, we’re more repressed. We don’t tend to move as much, let alone shake out the energy of stress, or scream, or chant, or dance. It might feel silly to do this, because we’re reserved and have been taught to be good, still, polite and quiet.
We get traumatized by storing the charge, rather than burning it off. The stored charge becomes our physiology. An unsafe, anxious, unstable feeling with a lid on top, which makes us seem still, and contained. But on the inside, we feel far from calm - very anxious, or depressed, in despair. This becomes the way we carry ourselves in the world : our posture, belief system, personality. It can also be the root cause of illness (back problems, high cholesterol, TMJ dysfunction, muscle tension, IBS - all of which at the root are constriction / bracing through the body).
The stored charge gets carried into our adult lives. It becomes a body feeling of always being under threat, thinking the world is a dangerous place and that the world is out to get us. We might think, for example, if we go on the plane it will crash. The body believes it is threatened, and then the mind attaches to the sensations of threat and creates thoughts that reflect this. This is happening on a subconscious level.
When we’re in this place, we will try to make sense of it, by looking for threat everywhere. What we seek, we will normally find. The mind is trying to blame the sensation of threat that the body feels on someone or something at all times.
How to Heal Trauma
How do we stop doing this? By completing the stress cycle.
We can become trauma aware, through education on whats happening in the nervous system. This is a good starting point, so we can understand, recognise and start to work with our own body stress and trauma responses. Self awareness comes first, change / healing comes second.
My aim is for this blog to help with the education part, which is an essential first step to then help embody
Books like ‘Healing Trauma’ and ‘Waking the Tiger’ by Peter Levine are excellent resources.
Trauma however, is also not a concept, it's a physical reaction in the body. At some point, we must take this to practical exercises with our bodies.
If the formula for trauma is fear and immobility, what's the formula for healing it? As adults, we can learn to feel the charge of stress in our bodies, get better at recognising what it is and when it arises, engage in the charge, and release the charge
If you’re an intuitive person through movement : for example a skateboarder or dancer, it will be easier for you to connect with the feeling of this charge and help it to move through you.
If you’re someone who has dissociated from your body, it’s going to be harder for you, but its still very much possible, and a process over time. This was my personal experience : growing up very disconnected from my body, very dream-like and frozen in my experience through most of my childhood and I hated most kinds of movement, found it very shaming. Over time, yoga and somatic practice helped me to connect back in, and even find joy in moving.
We can learn to feel the sensations in the body, and when we learn to do this, they begin to release their grip on us.
What do sensations of trauma held in the body feel like?
A few common examples : tight chest, nausea in pit of gut, tight jaw, tight belly, eyes squinting, forehead furrowing, clenched fists, shoulders pulling up to your ears, shallow breathing, rapid pulse, waking up with insomnia and feeling anxious, having anxiety through the day.
Any part of the body that is clenching is experiencing a threat response
This is difficult to treat with talking, psychology and medicine, or it can be effective only up to a point, as the bracing doesn’t involve the mind, yet its a physical issue.
When we feel any kind of constriction, it tends to be uncomfortable. To avoid feeling the discomfort, we find ways to avoid it : we smoke, we drink, we watch TV, we eat junk food, we take medicine and try to find ways to numb out the pain and discomfort
Learning to connect with the threat response, so the stress cycle can be completed
You can first build a baseline of feeling sensations in your body, like learning a new language. Sensations like tension, heat, sharpness, dullness, tingling, vibration. Get better acquainted with these. This can be practiced through embodiment practices like yoga and qigong, or simple a daily somatic tracking practice for a few minutes at a time.
Then, you can start to notice the sensations which feel like tension or bracing. Perhaps, place a hand there, and ask ‘whats it like just to just feel this?’ for one minute only. What arises from this place?
Do images / memories occur, do sounds occur, do I crave a substance or behaviour, or person?
What happens if I sit with this for one minute?
What do I learn if I sit with this sensation?
When we sit with sensation, then the psyche comes online and we might connect with images, thoughts, memory, meaning around a situation, needs emerge
Our tight hips might say ‘I need to just stretch’ and we follow this response, and we find something moving and releasing.
In this moment, we’ve engaged a threat response in the body, and we’ve found a way to mobilise it and to complete it.
Sometimes it can be simple like this.
Other times it can be much more complex, and take months, or years. This is what we practice in Somatic Experiencing / somatic therapy sessions, and it’s often helpful when guided by an experienced practitioner. This can then be taken with you as a practice into your daily life.
Working with a threat response consciously will slowly dilute its strength over time. So if, for example, your shoulders go up to your ears, you will notice they go up to your ears a little less.
If your face was crumpled and heavy-looking with a serious expression, it may become a little less serious looking over time! This was a personal experience of mine.
When you begin to engage and work with your body in this way, you are on your way to healing your trauma, because your trauma is just stored survival energy in your body that didn’t get to move. Now, as an adult, you’re showing it that it can move, it gets to move and shift and complete.
And instead of projecting threat into the world, you will project safety into the world ….and thats when we become abundant and authentic and successful.
Perhaps this is the beginning of a new journey of self discovery. I wish you a lot of learning, inspiration and healing on this path.
More next week….
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Take care and thanks for reading,
Charlotte