How Does the Body Heal Emotional Trauma?

You might wonder how working with your body is going to help you to deal with stuff that's happened to you, that is wounding you or keeping you repeating patterns.   

Healing is a rumour until we listen to our body, because our body remembers everything that we've experienced. Often our mind does not remember what has happened, as when we are overwhelmed by what we are feeling, our mind often shuts down – like it goes offline. We have all had experiences like this, even if we can’t remember them, and it can happen more often when we are children. As children, we don’t have the internal experience, emotional tools, or power to deal with a lot of what we might experience when things happen in our lives. We don't have the same abilities and resources that we have when we were adults. And what happens is that you will experience something (it doesn't have to be a significant event to anyone else) and you are overwhelmed at that moment. You don't feel like you can cope, and you have a lot of sensations that go through your body. It’s the sensations in your body that you feel overwhelmed by.  

The situation itself is not always overwhelming, or it doesn't even have to be a big deal. It could be that your parents forgot to pick you up from the bus stop, and you were there for another hour, and you were just feeling really anxious, and you were only five or six, and suddenly you felt abandoned, or you felt all these sensations of, “Am I being forgotten? Is anyone ever going to come and get me? I am on my own and can’t rely on anyone.” Now, the event itself might seem like a small thing, but as a five-year-old you are depending on others for your safety. If you feel forgotten or abandoned, your body's nervous system goes into overdrive. The stress hormones and the amygdala all get heightened and flood your body. You may feel fear, loneliness, anger, powerlessness…  

 You may feel overwhelmed by that experience and your mind decides it is too much for you. Your mind might switch off from it, but your body remembers it like it happened yesterday, because that's the experience that you actually had. Whether you remember that experience or not, in some ways, it doesn't change the fact that the body remembers it. Your mind may never remember what happened, but what you know now is you have this experience of panic when somebody forgets you, or if your partner is half an hour late, you feel these overwhelming sensations. In your brain you know it's fine, but you'll go through a whole range of strong sensations and emotions like anxiety, maybe anger. You find yourself constructing all these angry things for the person who is late, even though you know you probably won’t say them out loud, but in your mind you are feeling too much. You may also have a part of you that is telling you it’s fine and that your reaction is out of proportion, but it doesn’t help you calm down. Maybe you shut down and sulk when the person arrives, pretending it’s fine, or perhaps you tell them off.  

It is understandable to be a bit annoyed when someone is late, but the strong emotions and sensations that flood your experience are a sign that you carry this experience from the past. It may not be someone being late that is your trigger, it may be you struggle to trust people, or perhaps you don’t feel OK being on your own, or perhaps you feel anxious if things are not predictable or if something does not go to plan. Those feelings – the sensations and the emotions – are how the body is showing you that it remembers events from your past that are not resolved. That's how those patterns get perpetuated.  

So, it doesn't matter what you try and tell yourself in your mind, your body still remembers it, like that five-year-old who got left at the bus stop. We need to be able to work with the body's memory of what happened when we heal trauma. You don't ever have to remember the originating event to heal trauma. Sometimes you will and sometimes you won't. But you'll know it's still there in your body. You'll know it's not healed because you feel a flood of sensations that can feel like a lot or out of proportion to the situation.   

In somatic work, we learn how to identify sensations. We learn how to feel resourced and supported, to be able to notice them without getting overwhelmed again. Because in that first incident, you are so overwhelmed that you disconnected from yourself. The sensations get stuck in your body in an overwhelming experience, and it cannot process the event in a healthy way.  

How the body processes experiences in a healthy way is when the mind and body are integrated, and then the situation doesn’t stick in the body. What happens normally, in an everyday moment, is that you're having an experience like eating your food, or taking a shower, or travelling somewhere, and your body will feel sensations in the body (even if you are not aware of them). When you're not overwhelmed, your body processes them like a movie playing at normal speed. Your mind and body say, “Nothing to see here. All good; we can keep moving forward,” and you'll be fine the next day and it won’t create a reaction pattern that shapes how you react to situations. The experience won't get stuck in your body, like a movie where the image freezes, and you might turn the movie off, but it is stuck there in the background at the moment when you were overwhelmed. The stuck image, like the frozen movie frame, carries all the uncomfortable emotions of the moment, and it comes to the surface whenever you are reminded of that incident (not consciously, a lot of the time). But when you split off from yourself somehow, either by dissociation, shut down, or freezing etc., the body can't process the experience as it normally would. That's how it gets stuck in the body.  

So, what’s the solution? What we need to do is reconnect. How we reconnect is being able to be with the sensations as they are in our body and stay present with them in a way that we couldn't earlier. The challenge is that we are so used to being overpowered by the sensations that we generally can't stay with them. We have learned to be scared of what we feel. We end up getting anxious or depressed or not being able to stay present with ourselves, or we might go to the fridge and over-eat, or go into gambling or drugs or excessive exercise, to try to self-regulate, to get rid of those feelings. I call the ways we try to avoid what we are feeling “checking out” of ourselves. Whatever your checkout mechanism is, it shows you that there's something going on that you can't be with, in yourself. You may want to blame the situation, and the situation may also not be great, but the real suffering is coming from your experience within yourself. When you can't be with it in your body, then your body can't process it and let it go. If you can’t be with your own experience in any situation, then you don’t have any freedom. It owns you. You feel like you have no choice but to act in a particular way, which is why we get trapped in patterns of behavior we know are not good for us, but we can’t seem to break out of them.   

For trauma healing, we need to find a way for you to feel safe, to reconnect with those sensations just a little bit at a time so you don't feel overwhelmed again and re-traumatized. Peter Levine has developed a technique that he calls pendulation, where you touch on the sensations relating to the trauma, and then move your attention away from it to an area in your body where you feel OK. To be able to look at the sensations that overwhelm you, there's a lot of resourcing that goes on around how to settle your nervous system to stay present. And then, when you can stay present, reconnect, feel the sensations. The body will then be able to process them itself.  

Peter Levine also talks about animals in the wild having a natural capacity to shake off trauma (literally) and that they can settle down again. Sometimes that's what we might need to do. We might need to shake. Or sometimes it might just be being able to be aware of the tightness in your chest and notice the sensations that are changing there and acknowledge it. Other times, there are other processes that we can work with.  

That's how trauma is connected to the body. If we don't work with the body's reaction, then that sensation in our body will continue to overwhelm us. Learning how to let go of the avoidance of the sensations and learning how to be with your sensations in a way that the body can process and let them go enables you to resettle and return to homeostasis. Homeostasis means normal, rather than heightened or flat effects or feelings.  

Well, that's a little bit of a snapshot of the connection between the body and trauma. So, if it feels like that resonates with you and that's an approach that would work for you, then give me a shout-out.  

Until next time, stop, take a slow breath, listen to your body.