On Trauma :: The Emotional and Psychological Impacts of Trauma

January 4, 2018 By gwynn

In PTSD a traumatic event is not remembered and relegated to one’s past in the same way as other life events. Trauma continues to intrude with visual, auditory, and/or other somatic reality on the lives of its victims. Again and again they relieve the life-threatening experiences they suffered, reacting in mind and body as though such events were still occurring. PTSD is a complex psychobiological condition.

~Babette Rothschild, The Body Remembers: The Psychophysiology of Trauma and Trauma Treatment

It is true that our minds and bodies are connected. What our body experiences impacts our emotional and psychological states. Consider how when you have a cold or the flu you also feel crabby or irritable. Or how when you physically feel good generally your mood is also good.

The unprocessed traumas that live within our bodies also impact our moods and ways of being and connecting with our world, including the people in it. Some of the ways trauma appears via our emotions and mental state are:

Unexplained or “illogical” fear
Anxiety, including “panic attacks”
Depression
Hyper-vigilance (also related to fear and anxiety)
Extreme (for you) irritability
Emotional dysregulation (mood swings; cannot soothe self easily; once triggered into anger or sadness or fear cannot easily come out of it)
Disassociated from the present (stuck in past and or future thinking)
Inability to concentrate and stay focused on one thing for an extended period of time
Self-isolation (withdrawing from or not connecting to others)
Feelings of shame and self-blame and claiming responsibility for things that are out of your control
Addiction

Our pasts impact our present and future, this is true. Our experiences impact the ways we interact with our world. And while it is true that many, if not all, of our traumatic experiences were out of our control, it is also true that we have a choice as to how much we allow those experiences to determine our path.

Often when we have experienced a trauma our sense of choice is altered. Because the experience was out of out control, and not our choice, our brain shifts into thinking-both un/subconsciously and consciously-that we have not control over the impact of the traumatic events. The event actually impacts our neuropaths and our ways of thinking and the more we think we are stuck and don’t have choice, the deeper those paths become and the more ingrained those thoughts are.

I often think of entering into trauma processing or “healing” in relation to the Physical Law of Inertia :: A body in motion will remain in motion unless acted upon by an outside force.

In addiction circles this “outside force” is called “hitting rock bottom” – something so awful happens to us that it is a wake up call to seek help and change.

I believe trauma works in the same way. We will be willing to live with the impact of trauma, physical, emotional, psychological, until something happens that “forces” us to move towards processing and shifting. This could be something huge or small, some action we take or path we start down that is so very much not who we are that we are left looking at ourselves and making a decision to change.

Unfortunately, many people do not understand that it is unprocessed trauma that is driving them through their unconscious. Perhaps a person’s mind has blocked the memory of a traumatic event so they don’t even know it happened, or perhaps a person doesn’t understand the wide impact trauma has on the mind and body. Because of this many people are left scrambling for help – going to medical professionals seeking relief from physical impacts and or to mental health professionals seeking relief for their depression or anxiety and not seeing the connection between the two.

Again, this is why it is vital when we seek professionals who are trauma informed. It is also why we ourselves need to better understand the far reaching impacts of trauma.

The more we are willing and able to learn about our Self, the more we are willing to bring our unconscious into consciousness, the more we are willing to face our fears of the discomfort and change that comes from processing our trauma, the more we will be able to reconnect to our Self and our world, in meaningful, loving, and compassionate ways.

I talk more about all of this in the 12-minute video below.

This essay is the third in a four-part series introducing the topics we will be exploring in my new six month program Trauma Focused Embodiment Level 1. We begin February 1. You can learn more here.

Additionally the main focus of my individual work is trauma and utilizing trauma informed embodiment with my clients. If you are looking for an individual therapist, you can learn more about me and my individual therapy work here.

And finally, I facilitate a free online group on Facebook where we explore trauma, grief, embodiment,and their intersections. It is called Trauma Informed Embodiment and you can join us right here.

Other Essays & Videos in this series ::

On Trauma :: Types of Trauma Living Within Us

On Trauma :: The Physiological Impacts of Trauma

On Trauma :: The Psychological and Emotional Impacts of Trauma (this essay)

On Trauma :: Processing or Healing?

On Trauma :: The Physiological Impacts of Trauma

December 28, 2017 By gwynn

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.

~Bessel A. van der Kolk, The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma

Many have researched and written about the truth that trauma is not all in our heads, but that it also lives in our bodies. It is there in our epigenetic DNA, in our cellular memory, in our muscle memory, in our sense memory and lives on in our nervous systems (which then impacts the functioning of every other bodily system).

The ways this trauma shows up in our bodies is both universal and individual. It can appear as any (or any combination) of the following ::

autoimmune disorders
gastrointestinal disorders
fatigue
insomnia and/or nightmares
racing heart beat and shortness of breath (panic attacks)
muscle tension
sexual dysfunction
reproductive system disorders
chronic pain
migraines
“clumsiness” (i.e. bumping into things constantly or finding bruises on your body that you don’t know where they came from or when you got them)
neurological disorders (numbness, loss of use or sensation in extremities or in your face/jaw

There has also been research around certain types of cancer and the correlation to specific types of trauma.

As Bessel van der Kolk and Babette Rothschild have both stated : Our bodies know, and they keep score.

Having trauma living within us causes physical discomfort and dis-ease. Multiple studies have found this to be true. When we consider that all of us have unprocessed trauma living within us -if not from our own lived experience, than from that of our ancestors- we can begin to make sense of the different medical diseases and disorders we see passed down through generations.

It is important for us to not only expand our definitions of trauma to include the experiences of our own live life (including the list of experiences found on the Adverse Childhood Experience (ACE) study) but also those of our ancestors and to also consider the traumatic impact of living in our current patriarchal culture.

Our bodies know. And they remember. Trauma is not something that can be ignored forever. It does not just “go away.” If one generation does not process the traumas they have experienced, future generations will feel the impacts of those traumas within their own bodies.

It is vital when we seek professionals to work with in processing our trauma that they understand and know how to work with the impacts trauma has on our physiological systems. It is vital when we do our trauma work that we have others versed in body-centered and somatic approaches. Studies have shown how not having a somatic/body-centered component to trauma work, and only using talk therapies, can actually be re-traumatizing.

As professionals we need to be trauma informed. Not everyone needs to be an expert, and I do believe that any person working with other humans in the medical, mental health and body-work (massage, chiropractice, acupuncture, physical therapy, etc) need to have a basic understanding of trauma, how it impacts the body, and have some very basic tools to help their clients, and have a list of referrals for those who need someone more well versed.

I talk more about all of this in the 10-minute video below:

This essay is the second in a four-part series introducing the topics we will be exploring in my new six month program Trauma Focused Embodiment Level 1. We begin February 1. You can learn more here.

Other Essays & Videos in this series ::

On Trauma :: Types of Trauma Living Within Us

On Trauma :: The Physiological Impacts of Trauma (this essay)

On Trauma :: The Psychological and Emotional Impacts of Trauma

On Trauma :: Processing or Healing?

On Trauma :: Types of trauma living within us

December 21, 2017 By gwynn

The ORDINARY RESPONSE TO ATROCITIES is to banish them from consciousness. Certain violations of the social compact are too terrible to utter aloud: this is the meaning of the word unspeakable.

~Judith Lewis Herman, Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence – From Domestic Abuse to Political Terror

There are wounds that never show on the body that are deeper and more hurtful than anything that bleeds.

~Laurell K. Hamilton, Mistral’s Kiss

As we move through the close of 2017, as we move from the ever growing darkness into the expanding light here in the northern hemisphere, I want to take some time to speak about trauma, how it lives within us, how it impacts us, and what all trauma truly is.

You may be thinking, what a depressing topic to talk about as we are supposed to be celebrating and jolly. My response to this is, that what better time to talk about our shadow parts, what better time to bring what is hidden within us into light, as we are celebrating new beginnings, awakenings, and births?

And so, let’s talk about trauma. Because it lives within all of us. Whether it be trauma from our own lived experiences, trauma from our ancestors, or trauma from our oppressive culture, we each carry trauma in our bodies and psyches and spirits. So today, let’s explore the different types of trauma that we each have within us to better understand what I mean when I say “we all have trauma” and so we can all better understand our own Self.

TYPES OF TRAUMA

Lived Experience Trauma. This is the trauma that lives within us as a result of the traumatic events we personally experienced in our lives. It can be chronic (multiple events, like ongoing childhood sexual abuse, physical abuse by a caregiver or later in life an intimate partner, neglect, living in poverty, etc) or acute (one time events like a surgery, car accident, a one time assault like a rape or mugging). This trauma is based in our own personal history and story. We may remember or not remember events, and either way they occurred during our lifetime.

Ancestral and Inter-generational Traumas. These are the traumas that are passed down to us from our family. Ancestral trauma, in my definition, is what is passed down through our bloodline – it appears in the epigenetic markers of our DNA and our cellular memory. Inter-generational trauma is passed down by our family too, however it is passed down through actions. The impacts of a trauma experienced by a mother for example would include how she was able to care for her children, and could impact attachment bonds. Additionally inter-generational trauma can also be passed down through language (we all have specific “trigger” words that either we don’t want to be associated with or we desperately do want to be associated with and our reactions to these words influence our own actions and thoughts; these words are often passed down through generations).

Cultural Relational Trauma. This is the trauma of living in a white-supremicist, misogynist, ablist, homophobic, capitalist, patriarchal culture. It is a trauma that lives in all of us, but to varying degrees. It is the trauma we need to explore when considering intersectionality and remembering that not all of us are having the same experience in our world.

All of us carry at least two of the three traumas in our own bodies and being : inter-generational and ancestral trauma and cultural trauma. Most of us also have our own lived experience traumas coursing through us too.

Having an understanding of these different types of trauma allows us to begin to understand what is impacting us, what our triggers are, how some of the ways we view world are from our own experiences and also much of how we view the world is from those who came before us.

As we are able to unravel and decipher our traumas, we are able to dismantle and process them out of our bodies and being. This is intense work and cannot be done alone in a vacuum. It is work that needs to be done in community, with some parts worked through in settings with only one other person and others in larger groups.

We are relational beings and trauma impacts our ability to relate with each other. As we learn more about trauma and our own trauma we can also begin to understand how others are also impacted and influenced by trauma.

I talk more about this in the 10-minute video below.

This essay is the first in a four-part series introducing the topics we will be exploring in my new six month program Trauma Focused Embodiment Level 1. We begin February 1. You can learn more here.

Other Essays & Videos in this series ::

On Trauma :: Types of Trauma Living Within Us (this essay)

On Trauma :: The Physiological Impacts of Trauma

On Trauma :: The Psychological and Emotional Impacts of Trauma

On Trauma :: Processing or Healing?

Unleashing Our Self :: Disconnection, Shame, and thinking it is us

March 23, 2017 By gwynn

My own relationship with my Self has been a rocky one most of my life. From a very young age I received and internalized the messages of how my body was not mine, how I was to be seen and not heard, how I took up too much space, how I was too smart, how I wasn’t good enough at this or that or anything. I had feelings of shame for even existing as far back as I can remember. These messages came from many places, family of course, but as I grew older and started reading teen magazines and Cosmopolitan, watching movies, really listening to music, the message became very clear that my sole purpose on this earth was to look pretty and to get a boy or man and that in order to do that I had to look and be a certain way.

And of course I didn’t measure up to the standard idea of beauty – my thighs were too big, my hair too mousy; I was too short; I wore glasses. My clothes were hand-me-downs or homemade and never in style. I would never fit that Ideal and so I would likely never catch a boy or man. In addition, I was smart, and, well, we all know that smart girls can never ever be pretty.

Since my worth, according to media, according to popular (i.e. patriarchal) culture, was measured by whether I could get a boy/man, I was clearly worthless.

This didn’t get much better as I grew older. In college I spent the first three years or so proving how very stupid (and therefore how very pretty) I was. There were periods of self harm that included drugs and drinking and hitting myself, usually my legs, so hard that I would bruise.

All of this I hid from others for the most part. All of this I had to hide because it was only more proof of how flawed I was because I couldn’t “handle” life and very clearly didn’t have my shit together.

Eventually I did meet my now husband and our love story is one for another day. But my not measuring up didn’t stop with falling in love with, and more importantly being loved by, this man. I had my career, then an electrical engineer, where I was constantly pushing myself beyond my limits by working 50, 60, and even 70 hour weeks to prove I was as good as The Boys and trying to find the balance of my femininity and my power. And then when I had my first child things became even worse.

Now I had to juggle career and motherhood and I could not fail at either. And failure, by the way, basically looked a lot like being human. I kept up a persona and mask that everything was Fine when the truth was I was suicidal and on the brink of a complete mental collapse. I hated myself, and blamed myself as obviously lacking, because I couldn’t do it all and my career, marriage and motherhood were all flailing.

I was never ever enough on the one hand and I was way too much on the other and no matter what I did or how hard I tried, I could never “win”. I could not feel, now matter how much I did, that I deserved any of the success that came my way. If someone tried to compliment me on some thing or another I would come back with a list of all the things that were wrong or imperfect or all the ways I fucked this or that thing up.

And boundaries… what were those? I wouldn’t dare set a boundary for fear of being considered rude or a bitch or selfish or not committed to my work.

And at my core, I didn’t like myself. In fact, I really hated myself. I truly did not believe I was worthy of being loved. I did not believe that I was lovable. I didn’t respect myself. I was ashamed of who I was, how I looked, and almost everything I did.

There are many things that contributed to the shifting of my relationship with myself. There was therapy, and then my pregnancy with my daughter and then her birth and life. There was leaving engineering and going to graduate school to study psychology. There was mindfulness and yoga and writing the words breathe or love or gentle on my arm. There were a million books. There were friendships that saved me. There was my husband. And there was more than all of this.

One of the things that finally helped make it click for me though, was the realization that it – all that self hatred and loathing, all those feelings of not measuring up or taking up too much space or needing to prove I deserved to even exist – wasn’t my fault.

None of it was my fault.

It was the realization that our culture purposefully trains and conditions us to think we are undeserving and unworthy of love as we are and so we must keep striving and proving and fixing ourselves. That if we have boundaries we are cold and uncaring and will alone. That we must bend and mold ourselves ways of being to always please others and make sure they are comfortable.

When I started to dig into the ways the system was truly and actually stacked against me – against all women, and definitely some more than others – light bulbs started to go off in my head.

Our culture doesn’t want us to have healthy or loving or connected relationships with other women – because when we do come together and rise up the status quo is going to be destroyed.

And more than that, our culture doesn’t want us to have any type of healthy relationship with our Self – with our body, our mind, our spirit or our soul.

It wants us living outside our body while also being focused on changing it, on starving it, on torturing it, on hating it.

It wants us disconnected from our mind and so keeps us distracted with all the menial ways we “fail” and don’t measure up, be it the clothes we wear, the home we live in, the way our children act. It wants us constantly striving and striving and striving, never being satisfied with anything we have, because if we feel satisfied with ourselves, with our life, we might actually take the time to stop, and breathe, and look around and see how fucked the entire system actually is – and then, and then, we might actually also have the time and energy to do something about it.

It wants us believing in a spirituality that doesn’t feed us, that oppresses us, that doesn’t allow space for women.

It wants us cut off from our soul, from our core, from our very being.

By keeping us disconnected, disembodied, and cut off from our Self, our culture, and those in power in our culture, is able to keep us distracted, compliant and complicit. By keeping us severed from our Self, it is able to continue oppressing us and in turn have us passing this oppression down through the generations.

To all of this I say:

No More.

Not on my watch.

You are my sister, my comrade, not my competition.

And

I am connected to my Self.

I have compassion for my Self.

I honor and love and cherish my Self.

I invite you to join me in the resistance to our culture. To the gas lighting. To the shaming. To the stories and lies of how we aren’t enough and are too much and aren’t lovable and need to be “fixed.”

I invite you to sing and shout and whisper and scream and roar with me:

No More.

Not on my watch.

You are my sister, my comrade, not my competition.

And to

Connect with your Whole Self – body, mind, spirit and soul.

To have compassion for your Self, your stumbles along the way.

To honor and love and cherish your Self, as the beautifully profound and amazing being you are.

I invite you to join me in this rebellion of connection, of wholeness, of love and in so doing burning down a culture that dare to hold us down.

I talk even more about how our culture encourages us to disconnect from our Self in this 20-minute video below. I hope you enjoy it.

This essay and video are the third in my three-part series Unleashing Our Self as an introduction to the topics we’ll be unearthing, examining, dislodging and embracing in the six month circle Unleashing Our Mothers, Unleashing Our Selves. We begin April 1. If you are interested, you can learn more and request an application here. xoxo

You can find first essay & video in this series right over here and the second one right over here.

Spring flowers, ancestors and origin stories

March 21, 2017 By gwynn

Each year at my first siting of the crocus rising up from the winter-turning-to-spring ground, I remember my grandmother. Her yard had crocus planted in the flower beds and I remember that each spring when those flowers came up, she noted them with a wistful smile on her face. I don’t know what memories those flowers brought forward for her, she never shared that with me and in my youthful ignorance I never thought to ask. But now, and for as long as I can remember, whenever I see them popping up, I think of her.

Thoughts of her lead me to thoughts of her daughter, my mother. And I miss her more in the spring than I do most other times of year. Tulips were my mothers flowers and so when I see them I think of her.

And then there is the bearded iris and the roses that also bring these women into my mind and being and so spring is always all about them, much as the month of December is for different reasons.

But the flowers… I know why they remind me of them, but I don’t know they chose those flowers. I don’t know why both my grandmothers loved roses so. I don’t know why my maternal grandmother fawned over her iris in the way she did. I don’t know why my mother never planted a flower in her life and yet had plants and flowers that were about her in all the many ways.

I have a Christmas Cactus that blooms whenever it seems to feel like it. It was my mother’s plant and I remember if from my own childhood in the very pot (and probably the same dirt) it is still in today. The cactus has blossomed around my daughter’s birthday in April, the day of my baby shower for my son and then the same year the week of his birth (these events being about a month apart). The cactus bloomed immediately after each of my miscarriages. It has bloomed around my birthday and at the time of my grad school graduation. There doesn’t seem to be rhyme nor reason to it’s blooming and even though I am not a very woo-woo person, I tend to believe that the blooming of this plant is my mother saying hello in her own way.

My maternal grandmother loved her garden and my mother avoided gardening and I have a bit of a black thumb though I do try and then my daughter, of she is all about the plants and can’t wait for a house with a yard so we can grow All The Things. I see in her the creativity and naturalness of my grandmother, but not the harshness and I am hopeful she, my daughter, is able to stay soft in all the right ways.

My grandmother taught me that family is everything, and that they are our roots. And even with this, I consider how little she ever really shared about her family and how little I actually know about people either of my maternal grandparents came from. And while I could dig into genealogy that’s just not where I am right now in my life and knowing dates and names isn’t really what I care about anyhow. I want the stories. I want the hows and whys and feelings. I want the details that live in my body but don’t have words to have structure and be concrete instead of nebulous.

We all have origin stories, we all have people we come from, and some of us may know some things about some of those people and some of us may know a lot of things about a lot of those people and some of us may know little to nothing about any of those people. At least, if we are talking about conscious knowing, about verbal knowing, about the knowing as it relates to stories and dates and facts.

And even when we don’t know the stories or the who the people were or the dates or any of the facts, our bodies do. These people who lived before us, live within in. They are there in our DNA and show themselves in the color of our eyes or the shape of our chin or the width of our hips. They are there in our DNA and show themselves in the “illogical” anxiety and the “unreasonable” depression and “hysterical” responses we have to seemingly innocuous things. They are there in our DNA and show themselves in our resilience, and willingness to keep trying, and our strength to carry on despite or in spite of or because of it all.

These people who came before us are part of our origins, whether we know, consciously, the details of them or not.

And while these people who came before, who we may have known or may not have, who we may have known parts and pieces and aspects of but never the whole story of them, while they are a part of us and our story, they are also not our whole story.

They are a piece of our origin stories. But not the whole part. And while they contribute to who we are and how we may be in the world, we do not need to allow them to define us or to create our narrative about our life for us.

For years I compared myself to my maternal grandmother, my being and my life itself. The fact is that the egg that made me was created within her womb as the woman who would later gave birth to me formed and came into being. And so there is a tie to this woman who gave birth to my mother, who create 50% of what would become me, that I have that is beyond words and time and is all biology and physics.

But my tie to her was greater than that in ways that I can’t explain with words because they are feelings that are so strong there are no words for them. And because of this tie I wanted my life to be the life I made up that was hers. And I tried to measure up to this fantasy I had created in my head, that couldn’t possibly be real because all the facts of my own lived experience told something different. But sometimes in order to survive we push facts and reality aside so our brains can stay unschismed.

And so for years I tried to live up to a fantasy and then finally, in time I realized what the fantasy was – not real – and slowly began to let it go and started to have compassion for myself and for these women who came before me and shaped me in so many ways.

This compassion, this is the thing I hope to pass on my daughter. My hope is always that her own origin story will be something of fire and ocean and vast forests and deep knowing and so much self loving that her heart sometimes bursts.

Because as I have more compassion for me and for them I am able to make the changes and shifts in my own ways of being. To make choices because of conscious knowing instead of following a cycle because that is what one may do.

All of this and more is why each spring I offer a circle on our female lineage, on our ancestors, known and unknown. So we can bring into knowing ourselves, so we can each write our own origin stories, so we can find compassion, so we can come together in community and see we are not so alone.

We will begin on April one and there are still a few spaces available. If this sounds like your own next steps in your journey of self actualization and liberation you can find more details and request an application here.

I’d be both honored and thrilled if you chose to join us.

xoox

Other Essays & Videos in this series ::

Other Essays & Videos in this series ::

The ORDINARY RESPONSE TO ATROCITIES is to banish them from consciousness. Certain violations of the social compact are too terrible to utter aloud: this is the meaning of the word unspeakable.

There are wounds that never show on the body that are deeper and more hurtful than anything that bleeds.

TYPES OF TRAUMA

Other Essays & Videos in this series ::

None of it was my fault.

No More.

Not on my watch.

You are my sister, my comrade, not my competition.

And

I am connected to my Self.

I have compassion for my Self.

I honor and love and cherish my Self.

No More.

Not on my watch.

You are my sister, my comrade, not my competition.

And to

Connect with your Whole Self – body, mind, spirit and soul.

To have compassion for your Self, your stumbles along the way.

To honor and love and cherish your Self, as the beautifully profound and amazing being you are.

I invite you to join me in this rebellion of connection, of wholeness, of love and in so doing burning down a culture that dare to hold us down.

Let’s explore trauma, grief, & embodiment together!