Complex Trauma Archives - Page 2 of 3 - Gwynn Raimondi, MA, LMFTA

Releasing our stories of too much, not enough, & shame

August 30, 2018 By gwynn

You cannot let go of anything if you cannot notice you are holding it. ~Neale Donald Walsch

Letting go helps us live in a more peaceful state of mind and helps restore our balance. It allows others to be responsible for themselves and for us to take our hands off situations that do not belong to us. This frees us from unnecessary stress. ~Melody Beattie

We are all of us stars, and we deserve to twinkle. ~Marilyn Monroe

Last week I shared with you where these stories of being too much and not enough and the shame we carry originates. Not a one of us were born with these stories, and yet they seep into our skin, bones, and sinew and impact the ways we are in the world and with ourselves.

Here’s a thing though: we don’t have to hold onto these narratives. We don’t have to allow the shame to continue coursing through our being. We can do the work of release, renewal, and reclamation – over time, with patience, practice, and self-compassion. It is work that is done in layers, over and over throughout our lifetimes. It is work that is perhaps never actually done, and yet the more we are able to move through the process the more we are able to move ourselves from a space of living only to survive and into a place of living to thrive.

As I mentioned last week, naming the narratives is a vital first step in this work. Until we name those stories that spin through our heads, and consider where they came from, we can never move into the work. After we name the narratives and realize they are not our own but were given to us by our families and culture, we can move into the space of release.

Release does not happen over night. It does not happen simply because we think it or wish it. It requires intention, ritual, practice. It requires patience, self-compassion, and time. It requires a deep, visceral understanding that these stories are not yours to carry.

A truth is we can know, logically, in our minds that these stories are not ours; that they are not actually true; that they have little to actually do with us, individually and everything to do with us collectively. However, knowing in our minds is not the same as deeply knowing in our bodies, in our core being.

To move from a mind knowing to a body knowing means… you guessed it… coming home into our bodies, finding where those stories live in our muscles and cells, and inviting them to leave, allowing for an openness to be where these stories once lived.

Coming into our bodies and releasing these stories that affect us in so many ways, is challenging work. It is uncomfortable in the beginning. And yet the shifts that come from this work can be amazing.

When we intentionally do the work of acknowledging those stories that do nothing more than cause us harm, we are able to begin to move into new ways of being with ourselves and others. This new way of being takes time to integrate into our bodies, minds, and spirit. It requires space for shifting which means that we need to learn to tolerate that sense of openness, that may mistakenly feel like emptiness, so our new ways of being can take root and grow. (More on this next week. Stay tuned.)

I talk about these ideas in the 9-minute video below.

This essay is the second of a four part series I have written exploring our narratives of too much, not enough, the shame we carry and how we can release them and reclaim our own strength, power, and daring. I hope you find it helpful and informative.

This essay series is also to introduce the themes we will be exploring in the fall online women’s circle Becoming Unleashed. We begin October 1 and space is limited to six women. You can learn more here.

Links to other essays in this series:

The Impacts of Inter-generational & Cultural Relational Traumas

Releasing our stories of too much, not enough, & shame (this essay)

The Goo: A time of Renewal, Restructuring, Re-evolving

Reclaiming our power, strength, & daring

The Impacts of Inter-generational & Cultural Relational Traumas

August 23, 2018 By gwynn

You cannot heal what you will not unveil.

~Sanjo Jendayi

You will be too much for some people. Those are not your people.

~Unknown

The most important day is the day you decide you’re good enough for you. It’s the day you set yourself free.

~Brittany Josephina

Let’s talk about our stories of how we are too much; how we are not enough; and all the shame we carry within our bodies. Super fun topics, right?

Here’s a thing about these narratives we carry in our minds and bodies and spirits need to be named. They need to be brought out of the dark shadows they live in and into the light.

Naming these narratives we all carry is powerful. It actually helps us to claim power over these stories instead of allowing them to run rampant in our unconscious and impact the ways we connect (or don’t connect) with others and with ourselves.

Naming these narratives, admitting that we each carry them in our minds and bodies and beings, is only the first step however. Once we have named them we need to find intentional ways to release them from our systems; to create space for our own incubation and transformation (and learn to tolerate uncomfortable feelings, because believe me, transformation is very rarely, if ever, comfortable) and to reclaim those parts of ourselves that we hidden, stuffed down, and or ignored: our own strengths, power, and daring.

Before we can move into this process however, I believe it helps to understand where these stories may come from, how they get under our skin and into our being.

I believe these narratives come to us from two different types of trauma.

The first is inter-generational trauma. I define inter-generational trauma as the trauma that is passed down to us by our family of origin through their words and actions. It is a lived experience trauma and we all experience it to varying degrees starting when we are very young. It is passed down in the ways we are told what we “can” or “can’t” do, how we “should” or “shouldn’t” act. It is passed down in the language used in our families and the ways we are told we are wrong, told we can’t trust our own inner wisdom, told we don’t know what we are talking about (even if we are actually an expert in the particular topic).

It is passed down in the ways we are silenced by our families, in the ways we experience from our primary caretakers that we require too much of their time or energy, that we are too loud, too opinionated, too fat, too thin, too quiet, too sexual, too studious, we take up too much space, we are simply too much.

It is passed down in the ways we are told we aren’t (good) enough by those who are supposed to love us unconditionally. It is passed down in the ways we are encouraged to compete, how we are reminded that our sibling/friend/neighbor/enemy/person we have never met is better at this thing or that thing (or all things) than us. It is passed down in the ways we are corrected (often “for our own good”). It passed down in the overt and subliminal messages we receive that our best efforts are never good enough.

All of these messages are passed down to us both unintentionally and intentionally by our caregivers. Likely all these messages were also passed down to them as they were passed down to our grandparents by their parents, and so on up our family tree.

These messages are most damaging because they come from the people we rely on for our very survival. These messages impact the ways we are able to form attachment bonds with not only our caregivers, but in later life with our intimate partners and close friends.

These messages are then solidified through what I call Cultural Relational Trauma (CRT). CRT is the trauma we experience living in our current patriarchal, white supremacist, misogynist, ablist, hetero and CIS gender-normative, capitalist culture. It is in the ways we other people not like ourselves. It appears in the media, in our homes, in our schools, in our places of worship.

It also shows up in the ways we judge ourselves. If we do not meet the “standard” or “normal” or “expected” ways of being in this world, due to our gender, the color of our skin, the ways our body functions, whether we have “enough” financial resources, etc, we internalize the message that there is something wrong with us. We internalize the message that we are not good enough. That we are too much in some ways. And the shame of who we are, how we exist, burrows deep into our bones.

Essentially, if we are not a white, CIS-gendered, hetero-sexual, able-bodied, wealthy male who has a strong dose of toxic masculinity running in our being, well… then we are certainly considered by our culture to be “not normal” and thereby not good enough and to take up too much space. Furthermore, we also receive the message of how we should feel shame for not meeting these “normative standards.”

I want to quickly clarify that something being normal does not make it right or just. Racism and misogyny are normal in our current culture. Neither is right or just.

We receive these messages from our families and the messages are compounded by the outside world. It is no wonder how we have internalized these narratives. Culturally speaking, this is intentional. What I mean by that is the status quo requires us to buy into the messages of how we aren’t enough, how we are too much, and how we should feel shame, so it can keep on keeping on. If those narratives weren’t running through our minds, bodies, and being 24/7, can you imagine the world we would live in? I am highly doubtful it would be in the authoritarian oppressive world we currently have.

I talk more about these ideas in the 11 minute video below:

This essay is the first of a four part series I have written exploring our narratives of too much, not enough, and the shame we carry and how we can release them and reclaim our own strength, power, and daring. I hope you find it helpful and informative.

To view the other essays and videos in this series, go to the links below:

The impacts of inter-generational & cultural relational traumas (this essay)

Releasing our stories of too much, not enough, & shame

The Goo: A time of Renewal, Restructuring, & Re-evolving

Reclaiming our power, strength, & daring

Healing Trauma or Processing Trauma?

July 12, 2018 By gwynn

Definition of heal

1a : to make free from injury or disease : to make sound or whole

…

3: to restore to original purity or integrity

Definition of process

…

2a (1) : a natural phenomenon marked by gradual changes that lead toward a particular results (2) : a continuing natural or biological activity or function

2b : a series of actions or operations conducing to an end; especially : a continuous operation or treatment especially in manufacture

Merriam-Webster online dictionary, December 2017

I stopped using the word healing as related to trauma over a year ago. I did this mostly in response to what felt like an onslaught of trauma coaches and therapists talking about how by working with them you can heal your trauma and everything in your life will be all flowers and sausages because of it.

These messages impacted me in a very negative way. At first I didn’t understand why I found the message so irritating. I mean, I used the term “healing trauma” too. So why did it bother me so much that these other folks were using this very common term?

With some quiet and self-reflection I found my answer.

My own personal experience of trauma therapy didn’t seem to “heal” my trauma in the ways that I thought about healing. Using Merriam-Webster’s definition above, if we heal our trauma, we make it go away, disappear, no longer exist.

Working with my own therapists, this was not my experience. My trauma still existed, even after years of therapies. The events didn’t miraculous not happen. The ways that they impacted me didn’t disappear. I still had memories, I was still triggered, I still had certain behaviors-some innocuous, some relatively harmful-that grew from these experiences.

My trauma was not healed. My trauma is not healed. It still exists. It’s still in me in a myriad of ways, some of which I am conscious of and I am sure some I am not.

This may sound rather hopeless. If we can’t actually heal our trauma, if we can’t actually undo what was done to us, what is the point?

What has occurred for me, through years of talk therapy, EMDR, Sensory-Motor approach, and most recently CIMBS (Complex Integration of Multiple Brain Systems – a body-centered mindfulness/somatic approach), is that I can process and learn to mitigate the impact trauma has on me and my life.

The events still happened. I am still sometimes triggered. My physical health is still impacted.

And.

I have learned how to become aware of some of my triggers. I have learned to listen to my body when a trigger is starting and then can slow down and calm my nervous system so I don’t move into a fully triggered (and out of body, back in reptile mind) state. I have learned how to actually feel comfortable in my own body, to enjoy pleasurable sensations and to tolerate uncomfortable ones.

I have not healed my trauma. And I have processed much of it and learned and am learning so much more about myself as I do it.

The processing of my own personal and ancestral traumas has been progressive. It has been both incremental, with the tiniest, almost imperceptible, shifts and it has also in some ways happened all at once, with seemingly huge changes happening in very short periods of time.

It has been a process. It will likely be a process for the rest of my life. A process of coming home to my body, of reconnecting with my Self and the world, a process of self awareness, a process of learning and unlearning, a process of soothing my nervous system, connecting to my boundaries and resources, finding my center and ground, and creating new neuro-pathways. A process of shifting and transforming into new ways of being.

I have witnessed similar experiences with my clients when we utilize my Trauma Informed Embodiment™ approach. The process is slow and gentle and also results can sometimes be seen rather quickly. This approach doesn’t make your trauma “go away,” it will not magically turn you back into the person you were before the traumatic events happened. It will give you tools and new ways of entering into your Self and your life that are more mindful, pleasurable, and joyful.

I talk more about all of this in the 13 minute video below.

This essay is the fourth and final of a four part series I have written exploring trauma, what it is, how it impacts us, and how we can begin to process it. I hope you find it helpful and informative.

This essay series is also to introduce the topics we will be exploring in my new six month program Trauma Focused Embodiment Level 1. We begin August 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.

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.

If you missed the first three essays and videos their links are below ::

The Traumas Living Within Us

The Physiological Impacts of Trauma

The Psychological & Emotional Impacts

Processing or Healing Trauma (this essay)

The Psychological & Emotional Impacts of Trauma

July 5, 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

• Inability to trust others, even those you are in intimate relationships with

• Struggle expressing your feelings in a calm or non-agitated way; often “lash out” at others when feeling hurt

• Anger tends to be the “go to” response to emotional pain including sadness and grief

• Hyper emotional defensiveness

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 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 no 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 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 10 minute video below:

This essay series is also to introduce the topics we will be exploring in my new six month program Trauma Informed Embodiment Level 1. We begin August 1. You can learn more 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.

If you missed the other essays and videos in this series their links are below ::

The Traumas Living Within Us

The Physiological Impacts of Trauma

The Psychological & Emotional Impacts (this essay)

Processing or Healing Trauma

The Physiological Impacts of Trauma

July 3, 2018 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 physiological signs and “symptoms” of trauma are both universal and individual. They 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 (specifically sexual trauma and reproductive system cancers).

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, then 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 lived life (including the list of experiences found on the Adverse Childhood Experience study (ACEs)) but also those of our ancestors and to also consider the traumatic impact of living in our current oppressive patriarchal culture.

Our bodies know. Our bodies 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 and lives.

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, 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 of a four part series I have written exploring trauma, what it is, how it impacts us, and how we can begin to process it. I hope you find it helpful and informative.

This essay series is also to introduce the topics we will be exploring in my new six month program Trauma Focused Embodiment Level 1. We begin August 1. You can learn more here.

Also 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.

Links to the other essays in this series::

The Traumas Living Within Us

The Physiological Impacts of Trauma (this essay)

The Psychological & Emotional Impacts

Processing or Healing Trauma

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