What is Trauma?
What is trauma, anyway?
Trauma happens when you experience intense fear, horror, or shock paired with the inability to act.
In other words, when a threat activates your body’s sympathetic nervous system and fighting or fleeing isn’t an option for you, your body freezes. This is trauma.
When an animal encounters a threat of a hungry predator, its sympathetic nervous system will prompt it to fight or run. If the animal does not get so lucky to escape the threat, it will freeze (dissociate) to mitigate the pain of what is happening.
This shut down, or dissociation, happens to us too when we feel helpless in the face of a threat.
When the animal does flee and escape, it will create a shaking motion through its body before returning back to its day as usual. This is the animal completing the stress cycle and the reason why it does not become traumatized.
Without completing the stress cycle, trauma can get stuck in the body in this way as well. This happens to us, for example, when we white-knuckle our way through a stressful day at work without properly processing the stress at the end of the day.
Trauma can come from extreme circumstances such as violence, and it can also occur from less obvious events, such as:
Not getting invited to your classmate’s birthday party in grade school
Getting scolded by a teacher or parent
Peer pressure or bullying
Being taught anything that invokes fear
Unresolved trauma causes fracture.
Experiencing trauma, whether that be one major incident or several “small” traumas over time, disrupts the sense of safety in your body. Your body, your home, which once felt so safe, doesn’t anymore.
So you sort of just…leave it.
Dissociation (leaving your body) can happen in an instance or gradually over time. And this is actually an amazing protective factor our bodies use to keep us safe. Like the example of the animal getting eaten by a predator, dissociation protects it from feeling pain. It protects us too when we go through physically or emotionally painful experiences. Our bodies know some things will overwhelm our nervous systems if we are present, so it protects us by dissociating.
However, sometimes it’s hard to return to our bodies. And here lies the problem.
If we don’t learn to return to our bodies, we continue to live disconnected from ourselves and guided by our trauma.
Brokenness.
Healing trauma involves returning to your body and feeling safe there again; it involves you experiencing yourself acting during a fear response instead of freezing. It involves learning to complete stress cycles instead of getting stuck in them.
Trauma divides, healing trauma is becoming whole again.
You can return home to yourself.
