Audre Lorde said: “Pain is important: how we evade it, how we succumb to it, how we deal with it, how we transcend it.” You could say something similar about trauma. We have learnt a lot in recent years about the impact of trauma on mental and physical health: “We have learned that trauma is not just an event that took place sometime in the past; it is also the imprint left by that experience on mind, brain, and body (Bessel van der Kolk).
HOW WE EXPERIENCE IT
This imprint can be profoundly painful. We can experience it as an unbearable feeling of unsafety and discomfort – an uproar in the body as alarm bells in the nervous system ring; or as a shutting down – a silencing of that uproar that silences everything else as well. Bessel van der Kolk in The Body Keeps the Score describes the experience of many traumatized people:
Traumatized people chronically feel unsafe inside their bodies: The past is alive in the form of gnawing interior discomfort. Their bodies are constantly bombarded by visceral warning signs, and, in an attempt to control these processes, they often become expert at ignoring their gut feelings and in numbing awareness of what is played out inside. They learn to hide from their selves.
The body sensations that occur when our body’s alarm bells are going off – the twisting in our stomach, the tightness in our chest – can feel pretty terrible but for much of our history they helped keep us alive. Threats, like a sabre tooth tiger on the horizon, activated a stress response in the body that helped us to respond – to quickly run away or gear up for a fight – our hearts beating faster, our muscles tensed. We can see in other animals the fight, flight and freeze (think rabbit in headlights) response at work. The difference with humans is that we have a powerful capacity for remembering, drawing conclusions, making generalisations, and imagining possibilities. Threats are no longer just the thing happening right in front of us but things that have happened in the past, that could happen in the future, that might be happening. So as humans lots and lots of things can activate our threat system, and things that happened to us before can impact how easily and in what ways that threat system is activated. Trauma can create a state of almost constant activation. The alarm bells seem to never stop ringing.
HOW WE COPE WITH IT
That feeling of activation and unsafety is painful and hard to live with, so people try to find ways to cope with it, or deal with it, or evade it. Bessel van der Kolk argues that “many mental health problems, from drug addiction to self-injurious behaviour, start as attempts to cope with the unbearable physical pain of our emotions”. The defences we have – the self-medicating, the avoidance, the survival tactics, and escape strategies – however frustrated we may feel towards them at times, come from a place of trying to cope. They are our system trying to find a way to get by, with the tools it has, in the situation it is in. Recognising, honouring, and appreciating that can go hand in hand with discovering new ways to cope.
HOW WE SHUTDOWN
There is a state on the other side of fight-and-flight, which doesn’t feel like activation. Sometimes when our body feels under threat and powerless to do anything about it, it shuts down. Our heart slows, numbness sets in, inertia takes over, and our mind feels foggy. I think of it as our body playing dead – becoming limp and lifeless as a last ditch effort to survive what it cannot escape. It can feel deeply unhelpful, but it can be understood as a desperate measure for desperate times – a way to bear the unbearable. Being able to move into that state can help us survive, but getting stuck in that state doesn’t always feel like fully living.
HOW WE CAN RELATE DIFFERENTLY WITH IT
As people learn about uproar and shutdown states, one of the first things they want to figure out is how to move from that state of uproar or shutdown into a calmer, more comfortable feeling of safety. I’m not sure that we can ever permanently reside in a feeling of safety. In a world that contains risks and threats, perhaps a permanent feeling of safety might not even be advisable. A warning system exists for a reason. But we can find ways to come back home to a feeling of safety more easily and more often. We can learn how to connect to and nurture feelings of safety, comfort, aliveness, peace, and pleasure. That capacity exists within us and, though trauma can try to break it, it is a resilient thing. It resides within our body; accessible in physical spaces and moments in time that are, even very briefly, free of immediate danger.
Many trauma-informed practitioners believe that if trauma is held and experienced in the body, then the body has to be included and centred in our process of healing. Bessel van der Kolk argues that:
In order to change, people need to become aware of their sensations and the way that their bodies interact with the world around them. Physical self-awareness is the first step in releasing the tyranny of the past.
He suggests that: “Once you start approaching your body with curiosity rather than with fear, everything shifts.” But it can be hard to grasp what relating to our body differently would look like – what it would mean to neither push away, deny, dismiss, or fight body sensations, nor be lost in or taken over by them. For me it is about leaning into these four processes:
Noticing the body’s experience
Extending curiosity towards the body and its experience of the world.
Asking ourselves questions like, “What’s the weather in my body like right now?” or “Where do I feel that emotion in my body?”.
Respecting the body’s experience
Acknowledging that our embodied threat response can be very powerful and visceral – and not always easy to sit with.
Remembering that our threat system is trying to keep us safe.
Recognising that it’s not always right and can overreact, but it also isn’t the enemy or without value.
Giving ourselves permission to feel what we feel, even when we would rather not feel it.
Grounding the body
Bringing the body back to the present and to an awareness of its aliveness, by tuning into and stimulating the five senses.
Shifting the body’s attention from threats in past and future, to the hopefully safe here and now.
Asking ourselves, “What can I see, hear, smell, touch or taste around me?”.
Offering ourselves safe sensory experiences (from a hot shower, to heavy metal, to a walk in the cold) that are loud enough to be heard, however faintly, through the fog or noise of our body state.
Soothing the body
Helping the body settle and experience the amount of comfort it can, in that moment, receive.
Offering it gentleness, nourishment, and pleasant experiences.
Reminding the body, not through words but through little tangible acts of care, that there are enjoyable and restoring sensations to experience in the world as well as scary ones.
Giving ourselves permission to take a break however temporary from an exhausting state of activation, stress, and hypervigilance.
These processes don’t always feel possible. When sensations within our body feel overwhelming, or feel locked away behind glass, it can be incredibly difficult to access these ways of relating to the body; but it does get easier with practice. It can help to start small – perhaps by acknowledging how hard those sensations are to be with and offering the body a hot drink, a cold splash of water on your face, a sour sweet, a deep breath, a gentle head scratch, an open window, or a thick blanket. Whatever feels possible. That isn’t a solution, but it is an opening and an anchor. It is an offering of care, and an invitation to connect to the capacity for healing and pleasure that exists within us, however remote or small that capacity might seem in difficult times.
If you aren’t able to commit to or afford ongoing therapy at this time but would like some support in developing an individual trauma-informed embodied self-care plan please get in touch. I can offer an extended one-off session or a set of three sessions at my normally hourly rate to help you identify and explore practical self-care strategies to help you feel safer in your body.