That’s right. Heal your fucking trauma.
It’ll do you and everyone else you ever come into contact with a lot of good. But mostly you.
What is trauma anyway?
Ask 100 different people and you’ll get 100 different answers. Well I’m going to add to that list.
But really, most of what you’ll probably hear from other people is same’ol answers like “child abuse”, “rape”, car accidents”…please. These things are NOT trauma. They are terrible, don’t get me wrong. And yes, most likely they are are traumatic. But they are not trauma itself.
So what is trauma? If we’re going to heal something, we have to understand it. And to understand something, we have to use words and concepts we already know and understand.
Here’s what I think trauma is…and this is based on my own personal experience:
Trauma is excessive high-frequency energy stored in the body.
Simple.
Like a tuning fork that never runs out of vibration…but like 50 of them…all in your body and all different tones.
Or like a magnet covered in iron filings. Tons of them…and stuck like shit to a blanket to the magnet.
If you don’t already know/believe/understand that everything is energy, then please go do a quick search on quantum physics. I’ll wait…
…ok so everything is energy. Or at least…everything is mostly energy. Like 99.999% energy…and a little bit of mass.
So, if our bodies are mostly energy…then it makes sense that trauma is energy. I mean…have you ever seen a trauma? What color is it? Yea I didn’t think so.
Why is trauma excessive energy? And why do we / are we storing it?
Great questions!
Ok, so we’re all animals. (If you disagree with this, you might as well leave now.)
And since we’re all animals, we still behave in ways that animals do.
The main thing to look at here is our fight/flight response. Its an animalistic biological response that kicks in when we’re confronted with some sort of threat. Our bodies get all full of adrenaline as we prepare to LITERALLY fight or run FOR OUR LIVES.
Animals do this with lions chasing them.
But we’re also human, so there is an aspect of our (human) existence that animals don’t have.
We humans don’t have lions chasing us anymore. We have bosses. We have in-laws. We have parents and siblings. (Do you know ANYONE who hasn’t been fight/flight triggered by one of these people?)
Ok so animals and we humans both enter the fight/flight response in our normal lives. And this fight/flight response gives us A LOT of energy. Remember its that FOR OUR LIVES energy. So where does that energy go?
Well, into the fight of course! Or into the flight. You need a shit ton of energy to outrun a lion. But what happens when the animal is overwhelmed and can’t outrun the lion?
The animal FREEZES.
So its really the fight/flight/freeze response. There’s that third “option”.
And what happens when we freeze?
Well…uh…nothing…we’re frozen.
Ok that’s only partially true. All that fight/flight energy had to go somewhere. Where is it now? In our bodies, ready to go. Where is it when we’ve frozen? Still in our bodies.
But does it get sucked up back into the brain? Do the adrenaline and other chemical juices that caused this turn back into happy relaxed chemicals? Nope.
For whatever reason…this energy gets stored in our nervous system…but I’m getting ahead of myself.
First, watch this video:
What’s shown is that the fight/flight energy gets stored when animals go into the freeze response. And THEN, when they finally exit the freeze response, they LITERALLY SHAKE IT OFF. Thanks T. Swifty.
Seriously though…animals wake from the freeze response, by now their threat is gone, and they literally shake off / shake out their excess fight/flight energy.
HOW COOL IS THAT!
But what about humans…
Well…this is where mother nature / evolution / god / whatever didn’t do such a great job. You know our problem? We can THINK. And more specifically…we can think about the PAST and we can think about FUTURE.
So when we’re threatened (wife, boyfriend, parents, boss, older sister, whoever) we continue to think (ruminate) about what HAS happened and what else MIGHT happen.
(What does this mean? This means we’re RELIVING THE THREAT in our heads! That, plus the fact that us humans don’t really pass out or anything when we enter the freeze response…it means we’re kinda just walking around in a chemical cocktail of fight/flight stress energy….but this is slightly beside the point.)
Where were we…?
* Animals: happy -> threat -> fight/flight -> overwhelm -> freeze -> … -> shake shake
* Humans: happy -> threat -> fight/flight -> overwhelm -> … -> think about the threat past & future
Do you see the difference?
ANIMALS HAVE A NATURAL WAY OF RELEASING STORED FIGHT/FLIGHT ENERGY AND US HUMANS AREN’T DOING IT!!!
THAT is trauma.
But wait…HOW is it stored in our bodies?
I wish I knew the mechanism…I don’t think anybody does. What I do know is this. It gets stored in our nervous system. And such…just like any container that carries more than it is designed to hold, the container goes under some change (breaks, expands, whatever).
In the case of our nervous system, here is what I think is happening.
We lose sensitivity. Emotionally AND physically.
This trauma makes our nerve endings fray. Or maybe they retract like turtle heads into a shell. I’m not exactly sure. Again, I don’t think anyone is.
And overtime…our personality changes. And we wake up one day years later wondering why the heck we aren’t as stoked on life as we were when we were younger.
I have felt some pretty amazing things and differences in my body as i’ve gone through my own process of releasing my pent-up energy (trauma).
I’ll have to save that for another post…