Have you ever noticed that your neck and shoulders seem chronically tight?
Or your stomach tightens up so much especially in difficult situations, that you feel almost nauseous?
Perhaps you feel anxious much of the time but you don’t even know why. You try relieving your anxiety, but nothing works – Even yoga, meditation or working out.
Maybe you have physical pain and the doctors don’t find anything medically wrong with you. If you’ve gone from doctor to doctor and they find no cause for your pain, there’s a high probability it’s emotional and trauma based.
Or do you often feel numb as though you’re just going through the motions of living without feeling anything?
Your body and mind are trying to tell you something is really wrong, so you need to look further for what it’s really about.
All of these experiences can have their foundation from trauma that you don’t even remember! Trauma may change the structure in the brain and you won’t know it. In addition to leaving a physical imprint in the body, it affects the energetic nervous system and the energy field around the body as well.
Our brain is one of the greatest supercomputers on earth. It processes information and experiences rapidly, then stores our situations, memories and experiences in our brain and in our energy body.
To assist us in managing everyday life, people often repress these memories and stockpile them in their physical body somatically. Yet the memories are still lurking there in the background, making you feel from uncomfortable to downright miserable. You’re numb instead or maybe angry most of the time. It’s a way to dissociate from your body and what you actually feel. It’s a way to avoid the emotional pain.
Often what we go through doesn’t seem like such a big deal, certainly not a trauma, we tell ourselves. “I just didn’t feel my mother really loved me.” However, that feeling lives inside a person and they will reproduce the experience of not feeling loved in most, if not all, of their relationships, unconsciously connecting with people and playing out that experience over and over again.
When a person feels loved from early childhood, they create a very different life for themselves. Their life is easier somehow. But that doesn’t mean they have no issues. I believe if we’re here on Earth at this time, we all have some things to grow through emotionally and energetically.
Serious trauma, causing Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) is a much more serious issue. It affects more areas of a person’s life. They may have a more difficult time creating good jobs for themselves in an area they enjoy. Relationships might be their most difficult area if their trust was seriously broken from severe abuse. Or they’re in abusive relationships and may not even know it for years because it’s so familiar to how they grew up.
Or they numb out and feel nothing, including pleasure and fun. To the degree you shut off feeling your pain and discomfort, it is the exact same degree you cut off pleasure and positive feelings.
The more serious the type of trauma, the greater the likelihood that pieces of what happened aren’t stored properly. You might retrieve only fragments because it felt like knives going through you physically, even though it wasn’t physical. So you might overreact to someone with a similar voice pattern as the one who traumatized you.
What really opens people up on a deep level is when they have a breakdown or a breakup. This “break” is a time when you thought things were going well and all of a sudden you realized they weren’t. Maybe your lost your job, or your partner wanted to break up all of a sudden. What probably was happening is you were not totally present to truly see what was going on in your life.
Through my own experiences and those of many clients, I’ve come to recognize that at some point most of us experience falling apart or a breakdown. These are the times where the potential for deeper healing can take place, because it wakes you up.
There is a way to heal through trauma. There are a multitude of healing modalities through psychotherapy and healing techniques. Using meditation and yoga can be helpful along the way. Some of the main techniques for working through trauma are EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprogramming), AEFT (Awakening Emotional Freedom Technique), hypnosis, visualization, somatic processes, energy healing, Shamanic journeys, to name just a few of the methods we use at an Awakening Center.
When we acknowledge and express our wounds with a psychotherapist or a healer experienced with trauma, we come through the pain and suffering much stronger. Then you’re capable of living a fulfilled and more joyful life.
