Trauma Recovery
“TRAUMA IS A NORMAL REACTION TO AN ABNORMAL EXPERIENCE”
Our bodies are designed for survival. When faced with threat, or perceived threat, the organization of our primal survival response is immediate and outside of our consciousness. Our minds begin to fragment and organize around the threat and the experience. This fragmentation is protective in intent. It allows us to not be in touch with the raw pain of the traumatic event and helps us to move forward with our lives. However, this fragmentation, despite it’s wisdom, can leave us feeling disconnected from ourselves, our bodies, others and the world around us. For this reason, we say that trauma is not in the event itself, but rather in how it is stored in the body and held in the mind.
Trauma gets locked in the body. Responding to trauma is a full mind/body experience. Our brains are designed to respond through quick impulses that lead to action. They respond with fight, flight or freeze. It is not a conscious process. This is why it is essential to engage the nervous system in the healing work. We want to bring back those natural responses that were thwarted or stifled, leaving the energy locked in the system and causing the symptoms that cause our suffering. But we don’t stop there. The mind’s fragmentation and protective adaptations can also serve to keep the trauma stuck within us, despite the best intentions. In working with trauma I help identify the natural survival impulses inherent to each individual and work with my clients to bring those impulses through to resolution. We also determine which of their adaptations no longer serve them or have become destructive. As the body releases its stuck response, we can unburden ourselves from the detrimental thoughts and beliefs about ourselves, others and the world.
Insight-oriented counseling alone is not enough to restore our health. To feel like we’ve resolved our trauma, we cannot simply talk about it. We must experience this resolution as though it were happening in real time. We must experience the sensations of restored health, confidence, relative safety and mastery. We must experience the unburdening of thoughts, fears, and beliefs that have kept us afraid.
Complex Trauma
Complex Trauma is defined as severe, pervasive, and prolonged exposure to traumatic events and the subsequent range of response to that. The combination of working with the emotional, relational, psychological and physiological systems helps clients with complex trauma gain healing momentum and begin to unlock the effects that trauma has had on them. I find it to be highly effective for clients to be able to work in this holistic approach.
Traumatic grief
Traumatic Grief can be seen as the loss of someone through traumatic means or means outside of what is considered to be natural. In traumatic grief, the difficult process of grieving a loss becomes complicated by the terrifying effects of trauma. Survivors of traumatic grief often become locked in the horrific story of their loss, which keeps them from engaging in the natural movement towards positive narratives about the person or being they lost.
The grief process may become further complicated by engagement in the legal system, a system that is concerned with legal concerns, not healing.
It is important to work with someone who can help you decrease the symptoms of the trauma so that you can move through your grief process.
Post Traumatic Growth
The idea that we can be altered positively by overcoming traumatic events is not new or radical, but often not discussed in communities. We can heal from trauma. And we can become strengthened and enlivened by that healing.