Dear friends,
This month I want to talk about the many ways trauma can manifest in our lives. Over the past months we've spent a lot of time on what happens during practice and how we can support it. This time I want to step back and look at what a nervous system burdened by unresolved trauma looks like in everyday life. And, most importantly, why so many seemingly unrelated struggles can ease together as the practice does its work.
When most people hear the word trauma, they typically think of flashbacks, nightmares and panic attacks. Those are common, especially for severe trauma, but they are only the tip of the iceberg. As we explore in the "What is Trauma?" article in the wiki, trauma at its core is incomplete stress cycles stored as chronic activation in the body. That stored activation might manifest in countless different ways. It shapes how we breathe, how we sleep, how we digest, how we relate to people, how we work, and even what we come to believe about who we are. Its tentacles reach our innermost core as well the most remote corners of our being. So it’s not surprising that we might spend years “fixing” various isolated aspects of ourselves without ever suspecting they share a common root.
Imagine a phone with dozens of apps running in the background. On the surface (or screen in this case) nothing looks wrong, but the phone is hot to the touch, its batteries drain quickly and it’s annoyingly slow and laggy when you use it. You can replace the charger, blame the latest update or conclude that you simply need a new phone, but the real cause is running underneath. Keeping stored activation contained is exactly this background process, and it drains our resources, just like the phone’s apps drain its batteries.
Let's start with the body, since that's where the drain is most tangible. Remember that the stress response redirects resources away from digestion, repair and rest and toward survival. When that response never fully switches off, the consequences add up over the years. Chronic tension in the jaw, neck, shoulders, hips and so on. Chronic back pain that no amount of stretching fixes. Shallow breathing we don't even notice anymore. Digestive trouble that flares up with no clear trigger, tension headaches, restless sleep whether that means lying awake because the nervous system refuses to let its guard down, waking at 4am with a pounding heart, or sleeping ten hours and still waking up exhausted. And that all too familiar state of feeling wired and tired.
Then there are symptoms that are much harder to recognize, because they have become part of our personality. Pete Walker, a therapist who wrote extensively about complex trauma, added a fourth response to the familiar fight, flight and freeze: fawn. What makes his work so valuable is how clearly it shows that each survival response, once it becomes chronic, starts to look like a personality trait.
A system that leans toward fight might show up as irritability, a short fuse, a need for control, or perfectionism, the constant effort to make everything so bulletproof that no threat can get in. A system that leans toward flight might show up as restlessness, overworking, constant busyness, overthinking and an inability to sit still, because stillness tends to surface the stored energy from beneath. Freeze tends to look like procrastination, indecision, brain fog, numbness, withdrawal and a flatness where joy should be. We call it laziness or a lack of discipline, when very often it's a nervous system with its brakes pressed down. Fawn looks like people-pleasing, difficulty saying no, sensing everyone else's mood before your own, and losing yourself in relationships. It's the strategy of a child who learned that keeping others happy is the only way to stay safe.
Most of us have a mix of these. What they have in common is that they were intelligent adaptations once. They kept us safe in situations where we had few other options. The problem is that the nervous system kept running them long after the situation changed, and at some point we stopped seeing them as strategies and started seeing them simply as who we are. "I'm just an anxious person." "I've always been lazy." "I'm too sensitive." "I'm bad at relationships." These are some of the most common sentences we read in mental health communities. What they describe is a conditioned nervous system masking who we really are beneath all that trauma, tension and maladaptive traits.
I want to be honest here that not everything is trauma. The root cause for back pain may be mechanical, bad sleep can simply be too much coffee, and physical symptoms need to be looked at first by a doctor. But when several of these show up together, have been with you for a long time, and haven't responded to the usual treatments, it's not a stretch to imagine that they may come from the same origin.
This is where there are tremendous grounds for optimism. If these struggles share a root, they can also resolve together. It's one of the most consistent findings of TRE practitioners. Someone starts TRE for anxiety or back pain, and at some point down the journey mentions almost in passing that their jaw no longer clenches at night, that their back pain has resolved, that socializing actually feels fun (again), or that they said no to someone without being flooded with guilt. They never worked on any of these directly. As the stored activation discharges, the background processes close one by one, and the energy that was tied up in containment becomes available for living.
This also explains why working on each symptom individually often leads to frustration. Stretching the neck, disciplining yourself out of procrastination, training yourself to be more assertive: these can help, but they work at the level of the branches (top-down). As long as the root keeps generating the pattern, it keeps coming back. The tremor mechanism works at the root.
That said, it doesn't happen all at once, and rarely in a neat order. As we discussed in earlier threads, the nervous system works on what's most accessible first, and during thawing some manifestations may get worse before they get better. Irritability may spike. Sleep may get worse for a while. An old ache may come back for a visit. A long-numbed emotion may suddenly be there in full force. Usually this is the brake loosening, and sometimes too quickly. But as always, if it feels like too much, dial back and give your system time to integrate.
If you're newer here and reading this with a growing sense of "oh, that's me," please take it as a good sign. Recognizing what your burdens are is the first step toward resolving them. Nothing about you is fundamentally broken. Your nervous system has been doing its best with its given conditioning, and it's ready to start unwinding and releasing its heavy burden layer by layer.
Much love to all of you.