Self Awareness

The Holidays, Trauma, & Our Nervous Systems

October 4, 2018 By gwynn

When we self-regulate well, we are better able to control the trajectory of our emotional lives and resulting actions based on our values and sense of purpose. ~Amy Leigh Mercree

We are entering into that time of year again. That time here in the northern hemisphere where the light recedes and we enter into more and more darkness as each day passes. It is also the time of year of the fall and winter holiday celebrations, which can for some of us, bring their own darkness with them.

I have always declared that the winter holiday season begins with my birthday in mid-October. Then quickly follows Halloween and All Souls and All Saints Days. Next is Thanksgiving. And then we move into December when most religions and spiritual traditions have a festival of lights celebration of one kind or another. With all these holidays often comes gatherings with family – ones that we either attend or avoid. With these gatherings come all the stresses of connecting with our families, be that in person or in spirit.

There is also the truth that for many of us this time of year is a painful reminder of the people we have lost in our lives, either through death or severing of ties. It can be a reminder of those we loved who aren’t here to celebrate with us, and the grief that comes forward has its own way of showing up at a time of year we are told over and over we need to be joyous.

There are a million plus different reasons why the this time of year can be challenging in many ways and why we all need to remember self-care, real self-care, during the coming season.

One of my frustrations with our current culture is how the term self care is defined. For many this term has a very white, privileged look to it. It looks like spa days or mani-pedis, or days at the salon, or weeks at some tropical local. It’s looks like, according to many, something only the wealthy can afford.

I have a very different definition of self care.

For me, self care is first and foremost about calming and soothing our nervous systems. It is self-regulation and being able to bring ourselves back from a “triggered” or highly emotional state. This can look like many different things, including drinking water, getting sleep, any of the numerous Nervous System Soothing tips I share with you in the weekly love letter and on social media, drinking herbal tea, locking ourselves in the bathroom for five minutes of solitude… all of those things are self care. These are the small, non-glamorous things that keep us going and keep us feeling calm and sane.

And, self-care isn’t 100% regulating our nervous systems. Another big piece of self care, for me, is boundaries.

You know, that whole being able to say No thing. (I’ll talk more about boundaries as self-care next week.)

However, I do believe that before we can really connect to, and then honor and enforce, our boundaries, we need to be able to connect to our bodies and calm and regulate our nervous systems.

What do I mean by “calm and regulate our nervous system,” “triggered state,” or “activated nervous system”?

I deeply believe that all of us have trauma living within our bodies. It could be a trauma (or multiple traumas) of our personal lived experience. This could look like abuse, neglect, rape, or car accidents, surgeries, living through natural disasters. Any and all of those events that we may personally experience our bodies can experience as traumatic events.

In addition, we have ancestral trauma living in our DNA. Epigenetics has shown us how these “trauma markers” are passed down through the generations and how they are “mutable” or “reversable”. This means that the unresolved, unprocessed traumas of our parents, grandparents, and back to the beginnings of time, live in our bodies today.

Finally, there is what I call Cultural Relational Trauma. This is the trauma we experience living in a white supremacist, capitalistic, misogynist, patriarchal culture. This is the trauma of isolation, of being told we are less than, not enough, too much, that we should feel shame for who we are and for existing at all. This is the trauma that tears us from our communities and teaches us that one “group” is somehow superior to another. It is the trauma we hold in our bodies that is put in us every day.

Because we all carry trauma in us, our nervous systems are generally all out of sorts. What this looks like day to day is that we are easily irritated, or anxious, or depressed, or have rapid and far ranging mood swings, or feel like we want to crawl out of our skin on a regular basis – but with all of these things happening we can’t always pinpoint the why or what actually caused the dysregulation or what is also called an “activated” nervous system or a triggered state.

Calming or soothing our (sympathetic) nervous system brings us out of this activated state. It allows us to feel good in our bodies, to be in our frontal lobes (where empathy and logic live), and eventually to respond to stimulus (or triggers) in a way that isn’t harmful to ourselves or others (and by harmful I mean not only physically, but also emotionally, psychologically, and physiologically).

I talk more about this in this 7 minute video.

This essay is the first in a three part series I have put together to introduce some of the topics we’ll be exploring in my winter self-care circle, Self Care for the Holidays. If you’d like to learn more and possibly join us, you can click right here.

Other essays in the series:

The Holidays, Trauma, & Our Nervous Systems (this essay)

Boundaries: Physical, Emotional, & Psychological

Stress, Grief, & Embodiment

Secular Blessing for Becoming Unleashed 2018

September 30, 2018 By gwynn

The work of a lifetime, the process of individuation, is widening of that spotlight so much that everything is illuminated and you are conscious of and can see your All.

~Sera J. Beak, The Red Book: A Deliciously Unorthodox Approach to Igniting Your Divine Spark

May we…

Unravel our stories of not enough, seeing in them the lies we have been told that have nothing to do with us.

Revolt against the idea that comfort at any and all costs is necessary for our survival

Dismantle the shame we carry in our bones and being

Embrace our beauty, our power, our voice

Realize we no longer need to compromise our integrity, our values, our love for our Self, in order to be loved by another

Release the tales of how we are too much and allow them to scatter on the wind like so much dust

Reclaim our birthrights of respect, honor, and real, honest, and mature love.

Learn to be accepting of the in-between spaces and unknowns as we move through this work, through our lives, through this world.

Find the ways of being that strong, resilient, soft, and loving that have always lived inside us.

Amen.

…

There is still time to join the Becoming Unleashed Circle 2018. Registration will close at 10pm PDT Monday October 1. To learn more and register you can go to http://gwynnraimondi.com/becomingunleashedcircle .

In case you missed the essays exploring the topics and ideas we’ll be examining in this circle, you can find them at the links below:

The Impacts of Inter-generational & Cultural Relational Traumas

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

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

Reclaiming our power, strength, & daring

Why the Becoming Unleashed circle?

The essence of Becoming Unleashed

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)

Reclaiming our power, strength, & daring

September 13, 2018 By gwynn

Without the ‘dark’ I would never understand how light the ‘light’ really is. And while I don’t care for the dark, I do appreciate what it does for the light. ~Craig D. Lounsbrough

Change is supremely inconvenient, uncomfortable and naturally scary. Yet we only move through life through the process of change, reinvention and renewal, and so bravery is our quintessential rebel for pushing us past our own limiting beliefs and behaviours. Bravery is feeling the fear, immersing yourself into it and through it so you can come out the other side. ~Christine Evangelou, Rocks Into Roses: Life Lessons and Inspiration for Personal Growth

A story only matters, I suspect, to the extent that the people in the story change. ~Neil Gaiman, The Ocean at the End of the Lane

Within each of us is strength, power, and daring. Our own. That of our ancestors. Within each of us is resilience, love, hope. Within each of us is a knowing, a trusting, a believing. It is there. We may not feel it. We may not be able to admit it is there, we may not be able to see it, but it is there all the same.

The work of reclamation is to unearth and reclaim these parts of our Self that we have buried, pushed down, ignored, or truly did not believe existed. It requires us to reclaim our bodies as ours, our strengths and skills and talents, our inner power and knowing, our courage, bravery, and daring to break patterns and cycles, to become the people we want to be.

Reclaiming those parts of our Self we thought lost, or worse that they never existed, is work that can only be done after the work of releasing and creating space, and allowing for the time of renewal to integrate the openness into our being. Once that space exists and is truly a part of us, we can begin to see those parts of us we couldn’t before. Those parts of us that we were told were vile, were ugly, or simply weren’t there in the first place.

Reclamation is the time of deeply and viscerally realizing that what we were told is “too much” about us is actually our strength, our power. Of realizing all the ways we were told we are “not enough” is actually where our courage, our bravery, our daring lives. Of realizing all the shame we carry isn’t ours, that we were never meant to have it living within our being.

Then, once we have all these realizations and can feel them in our bodies and at the core of our being, the work of reclamation becomes relatively easy.

I’ve described all these stages of this work in a linear fashion, first one then the next then the next. And while it is true that in many ways one stage does need to proceed the next it is also true that we are constantly doing all these stages of this work simultaneously.

I envision the path of this work to be like a three dimensional spiral. We travel along it, around and around, up and then down, revisiting the same narratives, the same wounds, but at different layers and from different perspectives each time. The work is perhaps never actually “complete” and yet with each layer we find our ways closer to the person we truly want to be, the person we truly are, and finding more and more freedom from the leash of our own trauma and the trauma of living in our current western culture.

I talk more about these ideas in the 6-minute video here.

This essay is the fourth and final 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 have found 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.

In case you missed the previous essays, you can find them at the links below:

The Impacts of Inter-generational & Cultural Relational Traumas

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

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

Reclaiming our power, strength, & daring (this essay)

The Goo: A time of renewal, restructuring, re-evolving

September 6, 2018 By gwynn

Metamorphosis is the most profound of all acts. ~Catherynne M. Valente, In the Night Garden

And I feel like the Queen of Water. I feel like water that transforms from a flowing river to a tranquil lake to a powerful waterfall to a freshwater spring to a meandering creek to a salty sea to raindrops gentle on your face to hard, stinging hail to frost on a mountaintop, and back to a river again. ~María Virginia Farinango, The Queen of Water

I take pleasure in my transformations. I look quiet and consistent, but few know how many women there are in me. ~Anaïs Nin

According to Merriam-Webster to renew has the following definitions:

to restore to existence : revive
to make extensive changes in : rebuild
to begin again : resume
replace, replenish
to become new or as new
to begin again : resume

If we look in the thesaurus, some synonyms for renewal are:

awaken
transform
metamorphosis
revolution
shift
radical change

When I think of renewal I think of the story of Inanna, the Sumerian Goddess of Heaven and Earth. The very condensed version of the story is that Inanna travels to the Underworld to be with her grieving sister, Ereshkigal. Inanna had to travel through seven gates on her way down into the Underworld, leaving a piece of clothing behind at each gate to enter into the Underworld completely naked. The descent into the Underworld and removal of layers of clothing represents Release. Her time in the Underworld represents Renewal.

Ereshkigal was not happy to see her sister and had her hung on a hook to die. Inanna’s handmaiden, Ninshubar came after three days and helped Inanna back up through the gates, reclaiming what is rightfully hers at each gate, and back to the land of living.

This time in the Underworld, hanging on a hook dead, was the time of Inanna’s renewal, her own transformation, her incubation that lead to her rebirth.

It was her time in The Goo.

If you are new to me and my work, The Goo is the time in the cocoon when the caterpillar has fully disintegrated and decomposed yet not yet formed into a butterfly or moth. My feeling is that this is a very uncomfortable time. The Goo is no longer what it was (a caterpillar) and also isn’t yet what it is to become (a butterfly or moth) and honestly I believe The Goo has no idea what the future holds for it, and so it is a time of unknown, a time of needing to trust in the future without being able to see it. It is the time of great change, great shifting, profound transformation.

While The Goo is uncomfortable, likely terrifying, it is a time of quiet restructuring. To the outside world when we are in our own versions of The Goo, it may look like we are doing a whole lot of nothing or that we are resting. This is because The Goo is not a time doing, it is a time of being. It is a time of outer stillness in many ways. Not stagnant, for there is much movement internally, but stillness to allow for the internal restructuring and integration to take place.

The Goo is when we learn what it is to tolerate discomfort, to accept the unknown, to be able to be in the in-between spaces of life without trying to force things in one direction or another. It is a time of acceptance. Of surrender. Of allowing what needs to happen to happen.

It is not an easy time. Like the stage of release, but to a greater degree, it is a time of unlearning, unraveling. A time of allowing old neuropathways to atrophy and new ones to sprout and take root. It may be a physically painful time, it is always an emotionally painful time, and there may even be moments of psychological pain as we let go of old coping mechanisms that no longer serve us, but in fact are now causing us harm.

The Goo may feel unbearable at times, but it does not last forever. Even the most profound of transformations do come to an end (to allow us to move into a new time of transformation). The discomfort doesn’t last forever, pain does pass. The person we become on the other side, I believe, is worth all the work, and discomfort.

I talk more about these ideas in the 8-minute video below.

This essay is the third 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.

In case you missed the other essays and videos in this series, you can find them at the links below:

The Impacts of Inter-generational & Cultural Relational Traumas

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

The Goo: A time of renewal, restructuring, re-evolving (this essay)

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)

When we self-regulate well, we are better able to control the trajectory of our emotional lives and resulting actions based on our values and sense of purpose. ~Amy Leigh Mercree

May we…

Dismantle the shame we carry in our bones and being

Reclaim our birthrights of respect, honor, and real, honest, and mature love.

Amen.

Subscribe to Our Newsletter