Trauma can happen from almost anything.
But it starts when the body experiences a sense of hopelessness. Something as little as missing your connecting flight can cause enough stress to create trauma. It can happen in only 15 seconds. That moment where you go, “Oh, my God, I’m going to be trapped in this airport in Nebraska for the rest of my life!”
For that 15 seconds, hopelessness is present. That is a traumatic event.
What happens with a traumatic event is it throws your system into a fight, flight, or freeze state. Think of trauma as energy encapsulated in the body that it doesn’t know exactly what to do with.
The reason the body either encapsulates the energy or suppresses it is because it doesn’t know exactly what to do with it. The body thinks the energy in the system dangerous for the survival of the whole.
This is why there are many cases of people actually forgetting the traumatic events that happen to them. For example, people who have been in war zones and other extreme situations, the system shuts down because it deems the person will not survive with this knowledge.
How to Heal Trauma
When most people start therapy, they don’t usually know they have trauma (unless it’s something very obvious). There’s often denial around the events. Most people try not to see it because if they do, they have to recognize whatever happened wasn’t good. That they went through something that causes them difficulty.
The first thing that we have to do is identify what happened and acknowledge that it was traumatic. It’s important that this happens very, very slowly, particularly in the beginning.
If I were to push into somebody’s traumatic event, and they’re not ready to identify and work with the energy that is released, something happens that is called RE-wounding. Re-wounding is when you actually drive the person further into the trauma.
This often happens to new therapists because the tools you are trained in are very effective, but you don’t have the finesse or understand the nuances. I made a couple of mistakes like this when I started. I have also had many new clients come to me and explain the last person they went to pushed them too hard too fast.
When you establish a good rapport with the client, and you start to identify what happened, you can actually start helping the person release the energy.
How to Establish Balance After Healing Trauma
This is why somatic therapy is the number one tool for working with traumatic events. Somatic therapy works with the energy in the system. If you’ve experienced trauma, you can use somatic therapy to slowly release it in such a way that homeostasis is reestablished.
In some cases it can take quite a bit of time to work this energy out, but the next phase that you move into is reestablishing balance. Balance is part of the homeostasis that happens.
The experience loses its energetic charge and, because you worked out the charge, it moves from a trauma to part of your history.
You can’t change what happened, but you can change your relationship to it.
People who have had traumatic events and healed say they decided the event is not going to define how they live their life. It is something that happened and they choose to live a life based on their own terms.
They take their power back. They take back their desire to live on their terms and reestablish balance. They continue living successfully regardless of these events.
Get Help in Your Healing Process
It’s my mission to support you as a client.
If you’d like help on your process healing from trauma, schedule a complimentary 30-minute consultation call. This is not a sales call. It’s a simple check-in to make sure we resonate with each other.
I’ll ask you some questions about what’s happening in your life and answer any questions you have about my work.
If it doesn’t feel like a good fit, I’ll let you know or you can let me know. There’s no pressure to work together.
Click the link below and we can find a time that works for you and schedule your complimentary 30-minute session: