Trauma is a wound that shapes our world view, our brain, our nervous system, our relationships.
It creates rigidity and shame. It separates us from our gut feeling and from the feeling of who we are. There is wisdom in trauma. Not that we want to inflict trauma on someone as a learning experience, but in the sense that our traumas that have detached us from our essence hold the keys that can lead us back to ourselves when we can maintain a curious attitude and do not dwell in self-judgment.
So what does it really mean? Writes Gabor Maté in his seminar, referring to a quote from AH Almaas or Hameed Ali, who wrote somewhere that "the basic thing that happened and the biggest catastrophe is not that there was no love or support in childhood The greatest misfortune caused by that first misfortune is that you have lost touch with your being. That is far more important than whether your mother or father loved you or not." So the basic trauma is the loss of connection to oneself. When we talk about trauma, this disconnection from self is the biggest wound.
Trauma is a somatic phenomenon, it gets “under the skin”. It also builds on previous trauma. For every traumatic adult experience, there is a prior separation from self that happened in childhood. Trauma is somatized by epigenetics, by telomere shortening, by inflammation, and by altered brain development. Trauma is passed down through generations, through epigenetics and through unconscious messages. It is intergenerational and collective. Mental illness is an adaptation to trauma. The way we carry life experiences in our minds limits our ability to respond to life.
The topic of trauma is certainly not an easy topic and especially our own inner resistance makes it very difficult for us to deal with it.
The desire for healing is great, but the fear of falling into a deep hole again and losing control of one's own life is just as great.
Your self-healing powers may seem buried, but they are there!
A trauma means: loss of connection to ourselves,
our bodies, our families, to other people and the world around us.
It is healing to gently rediscover these connections.
When working with trauma, you activate your innate abilities to heal yourself, strengthen your resources.
I will support you carefully and purposefully in order to reconnect with these forces.
The immediate symptoms after trauma can include:
Over-excitement – tachycardia, sweating, cold sweats, rapid and shallow breathing, feeling like you cannot breathe, hyperventilation, racing thoughts
Tension – at the muscular level as the nervous system goes into emergency mode to mobilize all the forces in the body to be able to fight or flee; the muscle turn is thereby increased and goes into the absolute readiness for fight or flight, which is why everything is so tense and the oxygen-rich blood is directed to the arms and legs, while the digestive activity is inhibited because it is not important at the moment; this can cause one to fall into a dazed, trance-like state
Dissociation – this protects us from being overwhelmed by fear and pain; certain areas of perception are exhibited in the body as well as in the mind to endure the things that are normally beyond tolerable; a survival strategy from the nervous system.
The dissociation can also take place via the body, so it can also be the case that certain body parts and areas of the body are perceived as unconnected or not noticeable. It is the case with most of the women I work with who have experienced birth trauma that they perceive their lower body as non-existent and cannot feel it. It's like numbness, like that area of the body just isn't there. Dissociation can also show up through chronic pain, so that certain parts of the body draw attention to themselves through the pain.
Denial - is a form of dissociation, a separation between the person and their memory. You can then simply no longer remember the event, like a film tear.
Sometimes it even goes so far that it is denied that a certain event actually took place. Especially in the case of serious cases of abuse in childhood, we now know that the experience is hidden in the subconscious and never appears in the conscious mind and in the memory. The reason for this is that the event was experienced as being so extremely bad that it remains hidden down there. So you act like it never happened because that pain and fear of it would overwhelm you.
Helplessness and inability to move – the freeze or inability to move occurs when the nervous system is over-excited in a traumatic situation. The emergency brake is pulled to decelerate. The feeling of being completely unable to act, of being totally powerless and frozen is not imaginary in this situation. Many people describe this as completely real and it is real. In this situation, the nervous system goes into a kind of "shut down" because otherwise it would be too much for the entire nervous system.
Delayed symptoms after trauma:
Over-alertness - feeling like your body just can't calm down and you might not even be able to fall asleep. You get jumpy and overactive. This can cause you to have sudden mood swings, have a violent outburst, or cry very hard and not be able to stop. Troublesome images can also appear or flashbacks, where you can see real film scenes from this traumatic event playing out in front of you.
Extreme sensitivity to light and noise also shows how severely the nervous system is overburdened by the trauma.
Nightmares, night anxiety attacks, and trouble sleeping show that there is something in the subconscious that wants to surface and be resolved. Of course, this then leads to the fact that it puts pressure on the entire organism and completely destroys the life energy.
You become unable to cope with stress, you feel empty and weak, you lack self-esteem and you feel ashamed that you feel this way and that you are in such a bad way.
Symptoms long after trauma:
These can be panic attacks, fears and phobias that you develop, or the development of addictive behavior for a wide variety of things. A symptom is also the feeling of not being there and having a kind of emptiness in the head.
There is avoidance behavior, in which certain people and places are avoided because one is afraid of going back to that original event.
Then there is the addiction to dangerous situations. In this case, people want to relive the sense of threat and emergency because the whole system hopes to bring the emergency situation to a positive end.
Other symptoms can include excessive or decreased sexual activity, memory loss, and forgetfulness.
But also the inability to feel love, where you realize that the heart area is completely numb and it's very difficult for traumatized people to open the heart again because it's been hurt like that.
Then of course there are the symptoms that can appear after a long, long time: such as excessive shying away from people or new situations, chronic fatigue, immune deficiency, hormonal problems, chronic pain (headaches, migraines, neck and back problems ), asthma, skin and digestive problems. Depression is also an absolute part of it, as are fears of the end of the world and a general feeling of alienation and isolation. There is a feeling that life and the world takes place without you, you are left out and you feel alone and lonely with the whole situation.
All of these symptoms can be stable, i.e. permanently present, or they can also be unstable, which is actually more common. That means they only show up sometimes and especially at very stressful times when it becomes acute again.
The fact is that these symptoms often appear in groups that become more and more complex over time and at some point you can no longer make this connection to the original traumatic event.
That is why many traumas are hidden and so subtle.