A few thoughts on trauma and the body

Fundamentally, traumatized people need to feel safe in their bodies, not just their heads. It has to be more than just cognitive, it must be physical and emotional. You need to be able to feel what’s happening in your body to heal, but unresolved trauma keeps you disconnected. It’s a simple survival mechanism. The initial experience of trauma is too much to process in the moment, so you subconsciously sequester the feeling to a part of yourself and cut it off from the whole, so it can’t hurt more than it already has. Healing ignites from the encounter of self back to self. From the acceptance of your story and the integration of your body, mind, heart and spirit. 

Knowing what you’re sensing, how you’re breathing, what emotion you're feeling, or simply being present to your body, makes you more conscious of when something is happening. You can notice that something is really great or if something is terrible. When it’s terrible, you can say, “this really sucks,” but you realize that the experience isn’t you. It’s actually something that’s happening, which means you can choose your response and that keeps your body from getting hijacked by the stress or trauma. It keeps you in the driver's seat of your body.

The biggest struggle for people dealing with trauma is that they don’t own themselves anymore. They’ve surrendered a part of themselves to an experience. Their attachment to the experience shapes their identity and how they see themselves. Harsh words or even loud sounds can take over their physiology. Traumatized people lose control of the most fundamental of bodily functions. They breathe poorly, digest food and eliminate waste poorly, they sleep poorly, and because of chronically tense muscles they also move poorly. Being reconnected to your body allows you to be more mindful of the fact that your aren’t the experience, but that the experience is simply happening. Someone can say mean things to you and instead of being hurt you can notice the experience and think, “Interesting, this person is saying horrible things to me. How angry and hurt they must be in order to behave this way?” You can become an observer of the moment instead of swept up and carried away by it. Inhabiting your body makes you resilient to stress. Reconnecting to your body creates a space for healing trauma.