What is Trauma ?
Peter Levine, the pioneering psychotherapist who developed Somatic Experiencing, makes it clear that ‘trauma is in the body, not the event’.
It’s not the event itself that creates trauma, but the response our bodies have to an overwhelming situation.
Trauma can arise from both one-off events and over a prolonged period of time, including:
Sexual Assault Physical Attack
Surgery and anaesthesia Falls
High-impact collisions and car/motor vehicle accidents Birth, for the mother and infant
Physical, sexual and emotional abuse Neglect and abandonment
Lack of connection and attunement in childhood Injuries and severe illnesses
Prolonged immobilisation Secondary trauma (being exposed to/ witnessing a traumatic event)
Natural disasters War
When we experience something as traumatic (both one-off events and over prolonged periods of time) our nervous-systems and bodies become overwhelmed. This is a protective, physiological response known as ‘freeze’ whereby our mobilising fight-flight responses become thwarted, leaving the incomplete survival energy trapped in our body. It’s this stored survival energy that leads to various problems and traumatic symptoms including:
Panic Attacks Flashbacks and Nightmares
Sleep problems Hypervigilance and always feeling on guard
Migraines Feeling overwhelmed
Chronic Pain and muscular tension High sensitivity to sound, light and smells
Digestive problems including IBS Anxiety
Memory loss. Mental health problems
Chronic health problems Chronic fatigue, fibromyalgia and other syndromes
Dissociation (feeling spaced out, disconnected, not in your body)
Trauma and Somatic Experiencing
Under threat, wild animals will mobilise into a flight and/or fight response.
If there’s no way for them to flee or fight their way out, they’ll go into freeze as a last-resort survival strategy. Afterwards, when it’s safe to do so, they’ll shake or re-enact their fight-flight responses to discharge any left-over survival energy and move it out of their bodies.
As humans, we have the same nervous-system physiology as other mammals.
When faced with stressful and potentially traumatic situations, our bodies will also go into mobilising survival responses of fight-flight.
Or, if we’re overwhelmed by a situation and unable to fight or flee our way out of it (due to age, size, strength, power dynamics or being physically immobilised) our bodies go into an immobilised freeze response.
Unlike other animals we as humans tend not to discharge this survival energy from our bodies once we’re safe enough to do so causing it to become locked into our bodies both physically and psychologically. This is where we start to see trauma and PTSD symptoms appear, sometimes years after the event. Often we’re unable to realise that we’re now safe; our bodies and brains continue to behave as if they’re under threat.
Trauma can be the result of a one-off event such as from a car-crash or attack, but there are also many extended situations that we may have been in that were traumatic including those relating back to our childhoods.
We were all born with a blueprint to be met with welcoming and love, to form healthy attachments to our care-givers and to receive a certain degree of attunement from them. As children we also required care-givers who could offer us co-regulation in order to gradually develop the skills for healthy self-regulation as adults.
If we didn’t have care-givers who we could healthily attach to, who couldn’t attune to us, or were unable to support us to regulate in stressful experiences, we would have experienced this as a survival threat (although not necessarily consciously).
If we had care-givers who were dominating, controlling, abusive or regularly overwhelmed us in any way, we’ll have had survival responses of fight-flight. As children though, we’re usually unable to fight our way out of situations (or we quickly learn it’s unwise to do so) and fleeing is not an option since we are dependent on our care-givers for our survival. Often, shutting down into a freeze state becomes the only way we can survive.
Somatic Experiencing works with our stored survival energy and any responses that were locked in by our freeze response from both one off events and prolonged situations, allowing them to gently release. Over time this supports the body to experience an expanding sense of safety and, thanks to the brain’s neuroplasticity, create new neural pathways.
When we develop new neural pathways, we begin to have more life-affirming options available to us to deal with challenging situations, rather than automatically moving into our same old knee-jerk responses and attempts to self-regulate that may not be beneficial to us.
By creating space for the body to be listened to, SE is often effective at resolving psychological and physical trauma symptoms, including chronic-pain and chronic health issues as well as anxiety and overwhelm.
If you’d like to read more about a Somatic Experiencing approach to healing trauma then visit: https://www.somaticexperiencing.com/somatic-experiencing
I also recommend Waking the Tiger by Peter Levine to clients.
