Trauma
“Trauma is when we have encountered an out of control, frightening experience that has disconnected us from all sense of resourcefulness or safety or coping or love.”
Tara Brach 2011
Trauma causes dissociation. The healing process expands your capacity to experience and manage those feelings, needs and desires stuck in time by making sense of them today so that the compulsion to become defensive when life becomes difficult is replaced with trust in goodness again.
Trauma stops us in our tracks, breaks us, interrupts our freedom and makes us believe we are wrong or faulty. Recovering from trauma is something to do in a therapeutic relationship, where you can learn how to feel what you need to heal in a way that makes sense and is manageable to you and leads to releasing the stress responses that keep us stuck or in a shutdown.
Some of the symptoms of trauma are:
- IBS
- Chronic pain
- Breathing disorders
- Inability to think clearly
- Overwhelm
- Sensitivity to sound and light
- Panic attacks
- PTSD
- Anxiety
- Feeling spacey
- Memory loss
- Nightmares
- Palpitations
- Unexplained pain
- Hypervigilance
- Phobias
- C-PTSD
- Auto-immune diseases
Some causes of traumas and where I can help you are:
Developmental trauma
The early trauma and loss that happens in the child’s essential relationships, e.g. being abandoned and neglected and stops the developmental growth of the child
Birthing trauma
Post-natal PTSD Perhaps you were left in pain for hours or needed an emergency Caesarean section. You had severe tearing; postpartum haemorrhage or your baby was ill and had to spend time in intensive care without supporting you
Relational traumas
The constant disruption of a child’s sense of being safe and loved within the family, which shows up in adult relationships as the inability to trust and form relationships.
“It isn’t uncommon for a person suffering from chronic trauma not to be aware of it or not to realise they’ve been living in traumatic circumstances until much later.”
Paul Conti
The process of healing:
Safety, stability, and body awareness
These are an essential part of beginning to heal. It can be a gentle process that starts with a therapeutic relationship.
• Safety and stability in your body, your relationships and the rest of your life
• Regulating your emotions
• Strengthening the ability to manage unwanted experiences.
Once we have been working together for a while, and, more importantly, when you are ready, then:
Remembering and Mourning
• That is the time to begin making sense of what happened, remembering and grieving this.
• Working through the feelings of traumatic and abusive experiences and their negative impact on your life
• Grieving the experiences you did not get to have but that all children deserve
Contacting and working with your Inner Child is integral to this stage. It’s not what happens to you, as Dr Gabor Mate reminds us, but what happens inside you as a result of what happens to you and processing the loss and the grief begins to help move you to find resolution, healing and peace
Reconnection with life
• I am relearning to live, to do me!
• Reconnecting with people, meaningful activities and the goodness of life