When you get excited, you might experience physical reactions, like a fluttery heart, a big smile, or a sense of lightness.
When you get sad, you might feel your stomach twist in knots or a weight on your chest.
Just like how you physically react to your emotions, trauma is something that your body holds onto, especially if you avoid acknowledging it. You could experience unexplained headaches, stomach problems, and exhaustion, all because of unresolved trauma. Plus, at the sign of a trigger, you may experience a quicker heart rate, shaking, or muscle tension.
How do you heal trauma in the body? Let’s dive in.
First: What Can Trauma Look Like?
You might hear the word “trauma” and think of society’s best-known examples, like experiencing war or sexual abuse. However, there are more common occurrences that can still be traumatic for people.
For example, surviving a serious illness or witnessing a loved one go through serious illness can leave you with some trauma. Other traumatic events include experiencing the death of a close friend, breaking up with someone who was important to you, separating from a community that you loved, or living in a relationship that doesn’t emotionally safe or rewarding.
What Does the Body Go Through During Trauma?
Upon facing a traumatic event, the body responds in one of three ways: fight, flight, or freeze.
If the body chooses to run or fight, your heart rate rises, your muscles tense up, and your digestion slows down. This prepares your body to fight back or run and escape.
If the body freezes, as often happens when trauma is inescapable or overwhelming, you enter more of a detached state of consciousness. The emotion-heavy parts of the brain light up with activity, while the decision-making parts power down, leaving you frozen in place.
The “ideal” way to heal from a traumatic event is to experience the stress response, feel the negative emotions and even perhaps feel pretty emotionally exhausted for a few days, then slowly release anxiety surrounding the event until it becomes a completely (or almost completely) neutral memory for you. This process could take about a month.
Unfortunately, many people get stuck in the fight, flight, or freeze response. This is what life with Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) can feel like: constantly living in a state of hyper-vigilance that resembles your immediate stress response.
It’s like when you sit at the top of a roller coaster hill. The height makes your head spin and you just sit there, waiting for that scary fall.
How Do We Relieve the Body of Its Trauma?
Massage therapists, acupuncturists, and yoga teachers alike know that now and then, they’re going to have a client cry on their table or mat. Tears are a big release of the negative emotion that have been stored in the body; in fact, when we cry we release toxins from the tear ducts.
In Chinese medicine, areas of the body where negative emotions have been stuffed down are seen as “stuck chi”, or a dense, energetic spot in the body that holds onto repressed feelings and memories. Moving your body, especially in yoga, or getting massage or acupuncture help release trauma which has been trapped in the body. Activities that involve balancing out your sympathetic (high alert state) and parasympathetic (rested state) nervous systems can be helpful to pair with talk therapy. ful to process.
You can also cope with traumatic memories safely by journaling through them, or by speaking with a therapist. Looking to get started resolving trauma or negative memories? Contact me today.
Click here to learn more about treating trauma therapy.