What is Trauma? When Cycles Don’t Complete…

Trauma is not a pathology, but an adaptive response. Our impulses to traumatic experiences need to be expressed and the emotions realized so the autonomic nervous system’s natural cyclical process can complete. By completing these impulses, feeling what needed to be felt through compassionate presence, and shedding layers of false identity, we can reconnect to our heart and true self which is innately healing and resilient.

Importantly and in my opinion, not everyone has experienced trauma. But its effects - the inability to be present and to express your authentic self - is healing many of us can relate to. Any healing that is not trauma healing is essentially coaching, it’s personal development.

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Trauma is anything that overwhelms the innate ability to be present and resilient. This is not a pathological disorder and is more an adaptation or even a survival strategy for many.

Our nervous system has two sides to it, the parasympathetic system which is the flattened “rest and digest” side and the sympathetic system which is the hyped up “fight or flight” side. Note, the nervous system with it’s two peripheral sides are the energy channels of the body. As is always the case, science lags.

Nonetheless, our nervous system is meant to operate fluidly between these two sides. So importantly, just being calm in the parasympathetic system is not healing and that can actually be a form of depression. Instead, our system is meant to oscillate, to move up and down, expanding and contracting between the states. Being “stuck” in either end is a trauma response.

Our nervous system is also cyclical, like everything else in nature. For example, when animals are in a frightening situation and encounter a predator in the wild, they move into a fight-or-flight response which is a state of arousal in the sympathetic nervous system. If this is not enough to survive, however, they then move into freeze and dissociation states, which is when an animal plays dead as its last resort. The animal is preparing for death at this stage and shuts down the ability to feel the pain. After the freeze state, the nervous system has to collapse and come back down to the beginning or the nervous system’s cyclical process.

Humans are animals too and we follow this same cyclical process, or rather we are supposed to. But when our physiological and emotional processes get stuck somewhere along this process and our impulses (our impulse to survive, to run, to yell, to stand up for ourselves, to assert boundaries, to ask for help, to reach your hands up, etc.) are not expressed, then those memories get stuck there, frozen in time.

If we experienced a traumatic experience in the past but rationally know that we are no longer in that environment, our bodies do not necessarily know that if there are these parts of us that are indeed frozen to those past memories. As such, they will still show up in our lives as if the experience was still happening. This manifests as keeping us in a heighted stress response state or in a fight-flight-freeze response.

Trauma, with its grip on the past, prevents us from being present and, as such, it is presence that liberates us from trauma. And healing requires these impulses to complete so we can release those past moments of time.

Trauma can be acute/shock based that’s from a specific event, developmental based from our early life experiences, from chronic stress, or repressed authentic emotions.

This last bit on repressed authenticity is important, particularly for developmental trauma. It’s this scenario that I believe to be the most common and am not always sure trauma is the best word for it. But the science that support it is the same. It is not just the impulses responding to an explicit traumatic experience that need to be expressed. Everything must be expressed. At the root of who we are is just a series of will, which are impulses and desires. An impulse so strong it gave birth to our existence, from nothing to something just to have the experience that is you.

But most of us do not live as our True Self. We live as our False Self. With trauma, this is its most significant burden: that the pain and shame of the trauma becomes so deep that we lose the connection to this true self, the connection to our authentic and deep self’s will. So we are not expressing our heart to ourselves or to the world.

Healing is about shedding these layers that cover the heart. all the layers of false identity, all the defensive mechanisms, and all the compensatory patterns. Whether it be from explicit trauma, chronic feelings of rejection, conditioning, shame, or similar, this blocks the life force that is our unique will, our will to be, our will to experience, our will to be present with life.

Trauma blocks our innate ability to heal, to be present, and to be resilient. Our true self, the authentic expression of the heart, is the antidote.

Somatic healing that supports our ability to connect to feeling our inner world and completing our impulses is how we heal trauma. And then it’s our heart inspiration that prevent us from cycling back again.

Don’t get caught up in calling every part of you a trauma response though as that’s not helpful. Instead, use this knowledge as liberation to understand your nervous and attachment systems had initially been responding in a way to protect you. And now, if you’re ready to change, you can do something new. I’d be honored to support you on that journey.

-Susan Reis