Gwynn Raimondi, MA

On Trauma :: The Physiological Impacts of Trauma

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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.

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 (this essay)

On Trauma :: The Psychological and Emotional Impacts of Trauma

On Trauma :: Processing or Healing?

Unleashing Our Self :: The loss of sisterhood

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We’re connected, as women. It’s like a spiderweb. If one part of that web vibrates, if there’s trouble, we all know it, but most of the time we’re just too scared, or selfish, or insecure to help. But if we don’t help each other, who will?

~Sarah Addison Allen, The Peach Keeper

I hear over and over, and also know from my own lived experience, that there is a longing within us as women to find Our People, our community.  I know that at various points in my life I had that inner circle of women who I knew had my back and I had theirs, and then at other points in my life I longed for that inner circle, feeling the empty space within me that it would fill.

Now, I need to point out, there are  inner circles and there are Inner Circles, and one is a true community of love and support and is a quiet (or not quiet) form of rebellion and the other is a Mean Girl dynamic that buys into and promotes our culture.

I would love to tell you that in my younger years I had this amazing community of love and support.  And, in truth, with certain women, I did. And also in truth, I was very much a part of Mean Girl culture and tearing other (young) women down.

In my mid-20s life it was all about competition.  Who was cuter, who was smarter, who had the better boyfriend, car, cat, clothes.  And there was definitely a stepping on top of and shoving down that happened.

I am not proud of this part of my past, this part of me. And yet, this is part of me, of who I was and a part of what makes me who I am today.

Here’s a thing though, we are conditioned in our culture to be Mean Girls and if we aren’t part of the actual Mean Girl Inner Circle, boy howdy, we’d best do all we can to be.

This is patriarchy.  This is misogyny.  This is also ablism and racism and homophobia and xenophobia and and and and… because if you are different, in any way, from the leader of the Mean Girl Pack, you are a target.

What is interesting for me to look back on and dissect a bit, is that I was only a Mean Girl during a very specific period in my 20s.  Prior to that, I was relatively oblivious to Mean Girl culture.  Many people talk about their horrible experiences in middle school, but I had great experiences.  I wasn’t one of the “popular kids” but I had my good friends and we had fun and I never felt any need to be a part of any other group.  This was also true of my experience in high school and even early college.

But something clicked in my brain as I approached my early-mid 20s that I needed to be at the top of the heap.  I can’t tell you what it was or if there was a specific event that triggered this, but it did happen.  And it lasted a couple years and then mostly stopped until my daughter was born.

I’ve written before about how the birth of my daughter was a huge turning point in my life.  This is true in so, so, SO many positive ways.  But it is also true that it brought about the Mommy War Syndrome in me and I was constantly comparing myself to other moms and comparing them to me and each other.  I had a constant running dialogue in my head of how this mom wasn’t doing enough here and that mom was failing there and this other mom should never have been allowed to have children and so on and on and on.

From the other side of this, I could tell you this had everything to do with my own insecurity as a new mother, my own feelings of failing, and my need to feel like I was at least doing better than HER (whoever that “her” was on any given day).

And sure, that was probably part of it.

But here’s another thing: I was feeling insecure and like I was failing at motherhood because we live in a culture that sets mothers up to fucking fail.

Yes, I have a husband who has always been very involved with the upbringing of both our kids and who never once expected me to Do It All nor has he ever said “oh, this is your job because you’re the mom.” But he is one person, one voice (and yes one important voice, but only one voice nonetheless) against a cacophony of voices about how mothers should be, how working mothers should be, how working mothers are failing their children, how mothers who stay home are failing society and their children, how if I only had my shit together I could actually Do It All and don’t I dare “expect” my husband to do anything.

So.  Lack of support of mothers in our culture definitely played its role.  Which includes lack of affordable childcare, lack of decent healthcare, and a lack of true communities.

The culture we live in wants us in-fighting.  It wants us to be looking at other women and judging the ever-loving hell out of them.  It wants to be pointing out all the ways they all do it wrong, all they ways they are all failures.  It wants us climbing on top of each other to be the cutest, the smartest, the best mama, the best worker, the best wife, the best housekeeper, the best crafter, the best, the best, the best.

And if we aren’t the best, well, clearly we just aren’t trying hard enough.

Here’s yet another thing, though: If all we are doing is looking at other women as some sort of measuring stick of our own value and worth, we will never come together in community.

This is intentional.  This is by design.

There is a reason many of us are longing or have longed to find Our People.

Because our culture isolates us.  It tells us resources (men, food, money, prestige) are limited.  It tells us there is not at all enough to go around and if she gets some, then you certainly won’t.

To which I call bullshit.

Resources are not actually limited. There really is enough love, enough success, even enough food and shelter, to go around.

It is not true that if Jane succeeds then Sue can’t.  It is not true that one person’s version of success has to even look like another’s.  It is not true that we have to constantly be clawing at each other so we can each “get ours.”

Our culture wants us separate.  Those in power know that we as women come together  in true sisterhood, as true comrades in arms, that shit is going to burn the fuck down.

And because of this, our culture encourages us to compete with other women, to distrust them, to consider them less than so we can be “enough.”

Here’s some good news though: we actually don’t have to follow the conditioning and training of our culture.  We can say No thank you and No more and Not on my watch. We can dig into the stories we have about women, others and ourselves, dislodge them, and come together in community.  In true community, where we are all comrades, locking arms, supporting each other, lovingly pushing each other outside of our comfort zones, and doing the work to create a better world for the generations to come.

I talk even more about the complexity and intricacy of mother-daughter relationships in this 20-minute video below.  I hope you enjoy it.

This essay and video are the second 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

If you’d like to read the first essay and watch the first video in the series, you can click right over here and to read and watch the third you can click right here.

My grandmother

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But there’s a story behind everything. How a picture got on a wall. How a scar got on your face. Sometimes the stories are simple, and sometimes they are hard and heartbreaking. But behind all your stories is always your mother’s story, because hers is where yours begin. ~ Mitch Albom, For One More Day

The last few days I have been going through a bin of pieces of my grandmother’s life from before she married my grandfather and gave birth to my mother. There are a lot of old photographs of a a lot of people I don’t recognize. And of course there are a lot of images of my grandmother as a child and then a young woman.

I wrote this piece on Instagram a year ago:

I’ve been looking through the rubber maid bin that contains the pieces of her life before she married my grandfather and gave birth to my mother. There are a couple pictures that have someone cut out of them and I am guessing it was her first husband. And there is this picture that reached out and stole my heart and breath. She must have been in her early 20s or maybe late teens. I’m guessing this was before she lost her son before he was born because in later pictures there is a shadow in her eyes that isn’t here. I didn’t know the woman in this photo. I only knew the woman she became decades later. After her son was born dead and she divorced her first husband and a world war raged and she had a career as a business teacher where she met my grandfather and after she married him and gave birth to her daughter who lived for 59 years. I only knew her after a lifetime. Our eyes met each other for the first time when she was 61 and had been a mother to a living daughter for 22 years. But the egg that makes up half of me was made and nurtured in her womb. We are connected by blood and tears and wombs. She made half of me, both literally and perhaps figuratively. I love her even knowing her imperfections and probably because of them. And oh how I wish I could have known this woman in this picture before the shadows and still holding within all the possibility that would become my mother and me. #liberatedlines #startingmoments #inherskin #storieswithin #awakeningourwomanline #embodied #dare #grandmothersroar #amamaslife

I’ve been thinking a lot about the women who have come before, how they shaped me, how parts of my life trajectory were begun before I was even conceived. I have been thinking about my great-grandmother, a woman I never met and don’t even know the name of, and my mother and their relationship. I wonder about my grandmother and her relationship with her mother and her own grandmother.

I grieve for the too short relationship my mother had with my daughter and my niece. I look at these girls and see the fire of my mother, her independence as well as her simply wanting to be loved. I wonder how much of this was passed through our wombs, grandmother to grand-daughter and how much is in our relationships with these women who came before us and before our own mothers.

I wonder about the spider web of connections that has been woven over the generations. How each woman was partially created inside their grandmother’s womb. How laughs and attitudes and facial expressions can be passed down without ever knowing.

And then I get to wondering about my grandmother’s womb itself. The place that my mother was created and incubated and where the egg that later became me, was first formed. A womb that carried and grew a baby boy and was the place of his death before he was able to take his first breath in this world. I wonder if there were other deaths within my grandmother’s womb. I wonder what scars and grief and pain she carried within that organ.

And so my mind wanders and wonders. I know many stories of my mother’s womb, the deaths within it and how ultimately that system was the cause of her death when the tumors first born on her ovaries spread throughout her body a second time.  And of course the stories of my own womb, the deaths within, the sickness, the wounds. What about the stories of my great-grandmother’s womb? Or my great-great-grandmother? Or the female ancestor who live 500 years ago? Or 5000? What stories did their own wombs hold? What hurts and joys and wounds and healing lived within their uniquely feminine organs?

What pieces of those stories were passed down to their daughters? Were grown in their granddaughters?

It all comes back to the stories. Our origin stories do not begin with us. And I do not believe they begin with our mothers either. Our personal origin stories begin thousands of years ago with women we never knew and likely rarely, if ever, think of.

And what does that mean?

Maybe nothing. Maybe everything. Maybe it’s somewhere in-between nothing and everything, that this in-between is where the meaning lives. Or maybe the meaning lives in the nothing and the everything and in-between, perhaps the meaning is everywhere and nowhere all at once.

Of course in thinking about the women who came before, their wombs, my own womb, the ideas of oppression, patriarchy and misogyny and how they deeply impact us, over and over, across the generations, also comes to play in my mind.

I want to make sense of it all and I also know there is no sense to most of it. The women who came before me lived their lives and carried their wounds just as I do today: as best they could. Perhaps some were able to heal a bit more, passing down a bit less to the next generations and perhaps others did more wounding than healing, passing down more pain, and shame and wounds.

This I do know: they were each perfectly imperfect woman and they each live within me, not only as markers in my DNA but also as my own deep knowing and truth.

So I continue to look at these old photographs of women who in some way are related to me, if not by blood then by experience and shaping the lives and psyches of the women who are my genetic ancestors. I wonder about them and wander down this path of unraveling the stories, of healing the wounds, of dancing with the shadows and finding my own sense of peace, being and embodied knowing.

 

If you would like to explore your own relationships with your female ancestors, I have a six month circle that will begin on April 1.  You can learn more and request an application here.

Did you enjoy this essay?  It is actually a copy of a love letter I sent out last year.  If you’d like to sign up to receive future love letters, you can do that here.

Mothers and daughters

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Love her but leave her wild. ~Atticus

Most of us were tamed as children.

We weren’t allowed to run wild. Or if we were, only in certain circumstances.

I remember longing to be a tomboy in some ways, although I was very much a girlie-girl. The tomboys always looked like they were having so much fun climbing trees and getting muddy and having snarled up hair. I watched them, intently, with my brushed neat hair and pressed dresses, sitting as lady-like as possible on the porch steps or the sidewalk.

I think my mom longed to be a tomboy too. She wore jeans and it seemed like such an act of defiance. Her jeans and t-shirts were her own special fuck-you to my grandmother I think.

I know she, my mom, was raised to be lady-like too, to be girlie, to wear dresses and always have her hair neat, to speak properly and only when spoken to. And so, as an adult, she wore jeans and tied her hair back in messy pony-tails and swore like a sailor.

But not around my grandmother, her mother. Never then.

And of course, we were never allowed to be anything but proper around our grandmother too.

And so the lessons were learned early on to hide parts of myself. To hustle for love and acceptance. To bend and mold myself to another’s liking, no matter what.

This all came to a somewhat abrupt stop when I was pregnant with my own daughter. And the vows I made so many years before that all the abuse and shame and neglect would end with me came crashing forward and I claimed those vows again.

I wanted different for my own daughter. Hell, I wanted different for me.

I saw the pain in both my mother’s and grandmother’s eyes when they tried to connect, to interact with each other. My mother always on guard for the next criticism, my grandmother having the best intentions but always picking and pointing out all my mother’s “faults”.

I saw the pain in my own mother’s eyes when she tried to connect with me and I knew my own reluctance and resistance to letting her in for all the reasons I had.

I knew their heartache and I knew my own.

I didn’t want that for me and my girl. I still don’t.

Some days are better than others and some days my grandmother’s harsh voice comes out of my throat and some days my daughter watches me with weary eyes and some days we connect in ways that I never knew possible for a mother and daughter and my heart swells and I know that cycles are breaking.

These cycles that go back beyond my own grandmother. Back generations and generations. Back to the times when patriarchy took root and women began to be disregarded and de-humanized. Back to a time when women first learned the lessons of what they must do to survive, what they must do for their girl-children to survive.

The cycles, the trauma; the looks, the tones; the violence, the neglect; the complicity, the compliance. Passed on and down, over and over.

All leading to isolation and loneliness; anxiety and depression; disconnection from the women who came before and the women who came after. Passed on and down, over and over.

I was very young when I made the vow that it all stopped with me. Maybe five or six. And for a time I thought that meant never having children, as it was the only way I knew to guarantee none of it would be passed on and down again.

And then biology and wanting and the meeting the right man and well, here I am today.

Ten years ago I renewed my vows that it all stops with me. And every day since I renew them again and again.

Part of the renewal is continually finding ways to connect to the women who came before, to continually re-examine my own relationships with my mother and grandmothers and their relationships with each other. To step outside myself and see what is still being passed on and down and doing as much of my own course correction as I can.

This is one of the ways we burn it down. This is one of the ways we change our culture and world for future generations. By doing our own work of unearthing and unraveling and dismantling and dislodging and embracing and being.

On April 1, an intimate group of women will begin to gather for my next six month online women’s circle. (CIS, Transgender, and AFAB non-binary all welcome). We will explore our relationships with other women, with our mothers and grandmothers, their relationships with each other and connect to our female ancestors to heal wounds and trauma and embrace their strength and power. If this sounds like part of your own journey of self actualization, of social liberation, of becoming unleashed, then I invite you to learn more and request an application here: http://gwynnraimondi.com/unleashingourself