Category: collective trauma

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The Traumas that live within us

(This is a revision of a post originally published in December 2017)

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

Let’s talk about trauma.  Because it lives within all of us.  Whether it is 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 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 consciously, and either way they occurred during our lifetime, and our body very clearly remembers them.

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 7-minute video below.

This essay is the first 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.

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.

Links to the other essays in this series:

The Traumas Living Within Us (This Essay)

The Physiological Impacts of Trauma

The Psychological & Emotional Impacts

Processing or Healing Trauma

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Learning the difference between emotional and physical safeness

Unlike other forms of psychological disorders, the core issue in trauma is reality. ~Bessel A. van der Kolk, Traumatic Stress: The Effects of Overwhelming Experience on Mind, Body, and Society

One of the things we’ve been talking about lately in a few of the groups I facilitate, is learning to differentiate between emotional safeness and physical safety.

In other words, the difference between the potential for our feelings to be hurt in some way and our bodies to be harmed, tortured or murdered.

Reading those words, I’m guessing some of you may be wondering why we would need to differentiate these things.  In so many ways we are all logically aware of the difference between these two very different types of situations. Most of us can look at different events in our own lives and be able to determine in which ones we were in actual physical danger and in which ones the risk was more about being told no, or being wrong, or not feeling heard or understood.

In our logic brain, we can completely understand the difference.

And.

Our primal brain, or reptilian brain as some call it, doesn’t know the difference.

So, when our frontal lobe (where logic and empathy live) isn’t able to communicate with our limbic brain and brain stem, our systems see any type of “threat” as life threatening.  When we are in a trauma state, when we are in that elevated state where we are almost always in fight, flight, or freeze, our logic brain can’t communicate with our primal brain, because our logic brain has pretty much gone “off line” so our primal brain can try to keep us alive.

Because that is the role of our primal brain: to literally keep us alive.  To make sure we physically survive a situation.

Our primal brain isn’t actually concerned with our “feelings” such as shame, emotional hurt, embarrassment, etc.  It only cares that our hearts keep beating, our lungs keep working, and we are physically functioning enough to potentially procreate (regardless of whether we are within the years that procreation is actually possible.)

When the trauma that lives within us has not been processed, our nervous systems stay in a state of hyper alert.  This shows up in various ways, most commonly as anxiety, and can show up as irritability, moodiness, being “overly” emotional, etc.  When our sympathetic nervous system is in a heightened and activated state, when it doesn’t have the opportunity to calm down and allow our parasympathetic system to come online, and a traumatic event occurs, it affects our systems exponentially.

When we consider that we have not only the trauma of our own lived experience within us, but also that of our ancestors and we are constantly being re-traumatized to varying degrees by our culture, it is no wonder that our systems are on over-drive.

When our systems are in this constant state of over-load, we begin to be unable to differentiate between an actual physical threat and a perceived emotional threat.

This is why we get nervous speaking up to that racist uncle or aunt at the holiday dinner table.  It is why we don’t speak up. It is why we don’t share our intimate details or inner most thoughts with those who can hold them.

It’s why we isolate.

Perceiving emotional risk – from speaking up at the holiday table, to sharing our deepest self with a lover and all things in-between –  as life threatening is what perpetuates our isolation.

Our nervous systems and fight/flight/freeze responses are so over stimulated and over activated that any situation that is remotely uncomfortable emotionally, yet completely physically safe, is perceived as a threat to our lives.

To say this is problematic is an understatement.

This is why it is so important for the first step of processing our trauma to be integrating tools, techniques, and practices to soothe and calm our nervous systems (i.e. self regulate) and bring our “baseline” back down to a non-activated state.

It is why I share nervous system soothing (self-regulation) exercises on social media and in my weekly newsletter.  Because truly, this is where we need to start.

We literally are incapable of doing any deeper trauma work until we are able to soothe our sympathetic nervous system. Without that first step we only re-traumatize ourselves and keep ourselves on a very painful and frustrating treadmill.

The good news is, there are literally dozens, if not hundreds, of ways to begin the work of calming our systems.  When we look at our Self from a holistic lens, we can then find the different combination of ways that work for us.  For many people taking supplements, vitamins and or herbs, is incredibly helpful.  For others, pharmaceuticals are necessary.  For all of us having a somatic approach of some kind, anything from a somatic trauma therapy like my TIE™ approach to massage, acupuncture or chiropractic work, is incredibly beneficial.

In the end, it doesn’t matter which approaches you use, it only matters that they work for you, are nourishing, and allow for the space in time for you continue on to the deeper work of processing the trauma that lives within you.

I don’t believe in a “one size fits all” approach to trauma processing and healing.  We are each unique, and therefore the ways our systems respond to different exercises, practices, approaches, and modalities is unique to each of us.

And.

I also believe that the very first step we all need to take is in calming our elevated and activated systems into a more stable and steady state.  So we can then dive into the deeper work.  So we can truly connect with our body and the present moment.  So we can internally and systemically understand the difference between an actual physical threat and a perceived emotional one.

I believe this work is not only part of the ways we find healing for our individual selves, but is also part of the way we find healing, growth, and change in the greater collective and in our society.

The individual is part of the collective and the collective is part of the individual.  We need each other for greater internal and external change to happen.  And our ability to connect and be in right and meaningful relationship is dependent on bringing our nervous systems down from an elevated and threatened state and being more in our frontal lobes so we can respond to situations mindfully and intentionally instead of reacting to them from a state of fear, anxiety, and stress overwhelm.

…

Originally published on January 28, 2018 as a weekly newsletter and revised for publication here.  Did you enjoy reading this?  If so, I invite you to sign up to receive my weekly love letters right here.

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Safeness vs. Safety

The pearls weren’t really white, they were a warm oyster beige, with little knots in between so if they broke, you only lost one. I wished my life could be like that, knotted up so that even if something broke, the whole thing wouldn’t come apart. ~Janet Fitch, White Oleander

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

We live in a world where mass shootings at schools is almost a weekly occurrence.  A world where children are being torn from their parents with a flimsy reason given of “immigration status.” A world where women are still raped daily.  A world where women are killed by their intimate partners daily.  A world where black boys and men are murdered by the police daily. A world with war, poverty, misogyny, racism, homophobia, transphobia, ableism, classism… you get my point, I’m sure.

For those of us living with trauma in our bodies, minds, and being, it is validation for our anxiety and other trauma symptoms.  Each of these types of events is like a nod to our own individual systems saying “See!  I’m not paranoid!  The world isn’t safe!! Being in hyper-arousal is the ONLY way I will survive!”

It is true that the world is not safe.  It is less safe depending on the color of your skin or perceived gender or sexuality or ability or class or age.  It is less safe for some than for others, and it is not 100% for anyone.

The first phase of trauma processing work, no matter what kind of work/model/approach you are using, is always developing stabilization and a sense of safeness.

But how can we feel safe when we know we are most definitely not actually safe?

First, there are degrees to safety itself.  Living in a home where there is physical, sexual, or psychological violence is not safe, and also living in such an environment does not allow for developing a sense of safeness.

And, living in the world is not safe.  However, it is a different level of not safe, it is a different level of constant threat.  It is an unknown (whereas living in an abusive home is a known).  We cannot predict when we will be mugged or be in a car crash.  Often, when living in abusive environments, we can become very good at predicting when shit is going to go down.

Second, there is a difference between being actually safe and having a sense of safeness within our body, mind, and being.

Anxiety has physical manifestations.  For some people it shows up as a vibrating feeling or like your skin is crawling.  For others it’s stomach pain or feeling like your stomach is tied up in knots.  For some it’s headaches.  For others muscle tension.  Rapid heartrate and shallow breathing are also symptoms of anxiety.  These are all also signs that our sympathetic nervous system – the part of our system responsible for fight-flight-freeze – has been activated.

When our body systems are in a state of hyper-alert, our systems are constantly telling each other we are not safe.  We are not safe in our environment.  We are not safe in relationship.  We are not safe within ourselves.

It means we constantly second guess ourselves.  It means we don’t trust ourselves.

Having a sense of safeness within ourselves means that we trust our Self – it means that we know we’ve got our own backs.  It means we can confidently tell ourselves that should something happen out in the world, we will survive it.  It means being able to detect, hear, and respond to the subtle messages our bodies give when we are actually in physical danger.

It is knowing that we live in an unsafe world and still being willing to walk out into it without constant fear and anxiety.

Developing a sense of safeness within our Self requires having a relatively safe space to explore this idea.  It requires having our home be a safe space (where abuse is not currently happening). It requires being in relationship with another that is safe enough (more on this in a few), be that person an intimate (sexual or not) partner or friend or a trusted therapist.

What do I mean by safe enough?  The reality of being human is that sometimes we unintentionally cause harm to others.  When in relationship – be this parent child or intimate friend or partner, we call this misattunement.  It means we are not attuned.  Someone said something they thought was funny and we internalized it as very hurtful.

Misattunement happens.  In all relationships.  With our children, with our parents, with our best friends, with our lovers, with our therapists.  Misattunement happens because we are all human and each of us carry our own unique set of stuff, and no one can ever know all the stuff another person carries.

This is where re-attunement comes in.  It is where we apologize for harm we have caused.  It is where we state in a non-blaming way that we feel hurt by the other persons words or actions.  It is where the opportunity to repair is present and it is vital for the relationship that both sides take full advantage of that opportunity.  This is when a relationship is safe enough: that when harm does happen (and it will), we are able to repair in honest and loving ways.

We live in an unsafe world.  This is a fact.

We can still develop a sense of safeness within ourselves, within specific environments, and in relationship.

We do this through connecting with our body, its sensations, its emotions.  We do this through trial and error.  We do this by learning ways to calm and soothe our nervous systems when we are in safe enough environments.  We do this by learning to sense our physical, emotional, and psychological boundaries and how they interconnect.  We do this by learning to find center and ground and be present in the here and now with ourselves, with our environment, with our relationships.  We do this by acknowledging our own inner and outer resources.

We do this slowly and by being brave.  We do this by not gaslighting ourselves.  We do this by becoming curious.

As we each learn to develop our own sense of safeness within ourselves, we can then begin to help others do the same.  This shifting allows us to move from the reactive states of fight-flight-freeze into the intentional, mindful active state of creativity, empathy, and compassion.  This shifting within ourselves allows us to create shifts within our world.

Perhaps the world will never be 100% safe all the time for all persons.  And we can sure make it more safe for all persons, including ourselves.  But first we need to have a sense of safeness within so we can more fully connect with our frontal lobes and create change out of love and curiosity instead of fear.

…

Originally published on February 18, 2018 as a weekly newsletter and revised for publication here.  Did you enjoy reading this?  If so, I invite you to sign up to receive my weekly love letters right here.

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The importance of processing ancestral trauma and dislodging internalized misogyny

Internalized misogyny does not refer outright to a belief in the inferiority of women. It refers to the byproducts of this societal view that cause women to shame, doubt, and undervalue themselves and others of their gender. It shows up even in the most feminist and socially conscious of us. And it’s insidious.

~Suzannah Weiss, 7 Sneaky Ways Internalized Misogyny Manifests in Our Everyday Lives (Bustle, December 18, 2015)

So just why is it important to process the ancestral trauma that lives within us and to put focus on dislodging our internalized misogyny?

Because we, as women, will never find freedom or equality if we don’t.

Sounds kinda dramatic, doesn’t it?  Yet, it is true.

All women have varying degrees of internalized misogyny.  It is impossible to not have it.  When we are raised in a culture (and in families) that constantly tell us how we are inferior, how we are mere objects, how we don’t matter, how we are stupid, worthless, and not fully human, how we should feel shame about our anatomy and body shape, the only possible outcome is for those messages to find their ways into our psyches, into our bodies, into our very being.

These messages not only impact how we think of ourselves, it also deeply influences the way we look at and treat other women.

The so called “Mommy Wars”?  That was (and is) all about internalized misogyny.

Every time we comment or judge the way another woman does something, that she isn’t doing it “right” or “good enough” or that she is taking “too much” time or space – that is all internalized misogyny.

When we judge the way a woman dresses.  How she wears her hair.  Whether or not she’s wearing make up.

When we judge a woman based on whether or not she has children (or even wants children).  When we judge a woman who has children about whether or not she works outside the home.

Internalized misogyny.

Anytime we look at other women and judge them as not enough, as too much; every time we don’t believe another woman’s personal lived experience; each time we criticize and ridicule women for the choices they have made about their own damn lives…

All internalized misogyny.

(Note: criticism and ridicule are very different from critique.  Critique is loving and encourages growth.  Criticism and ridicule is spiteful or hateful and encourages shame).

Our internalized misogyny goes further than this too.  It shows up in the ways we insist on competing with other women, the ways we feel there are not enough resources for all of us, the ways we fight over men, jobs, minutia and technicalities.

It shows up in the ways we insist upon enacting revenge upon other women when we feel we have been harmed.

It shows up in a million different big and small ways, every day.

It lives in our consciousness and our unconscious minds.

It is a by-product of not only our ancestral trauma, but also our inter-generational and cultural relational trauma.

It is a part of us, whether we like it or not.

One of the ways we see our internalized misogyny is Mean Girl™ behavior.  Think back to middle school and the “cool kids” and how the “cool girls” treated everyone else.

They were bullies.

Here’s a thing though, this behavior doesn’t stop at middle school.

I see this type of behavior happening all over social media, perpetrated by ADULT WOMEN who are leaders in the feminist movement.

Yes, I have witnessed bona fide feminists, women who fight for social justice, who insist on being treating as equals and tearing down the status quo, who have been doing this work for decades, using the exact tools of the status quo of domination, authoritarianism, shaming, and othering.

(And then witnessed their followers, who seem more like sychophants, cheering them on!)

This is why we need to focus on our internalized misogyny.  Because tearing down other women will never get us to where we need to be.  It will never bring us the world we want for ourselves, our daughters and nieces, our granddaughters and grandnieces.  Or our sons and nephews for that matter.

Our internalized misogyny is deeply rooted in our ancestral trauma.  It lives in our blood and muscles and cellular make up.  It is in our very DNA.

For women of European descent, consider how it must have been to be a woman living in the time of the “Witch Trials” and watching your own mother or daughter or best friend being raped, tortured, and burned alive in front of you and others in the town square?

For women who are descendants of slaves, imagine the pain of having your children torn from you and sold at auction.  Imagine witnessing beatings at the hands of other (white) women, or worse when the slave masters would insist the slaves beat each other.

We can find examples from across the globe and across history of this kind of brutality inflicted upon women – mostly for simply being women – that women were witness to.

Being witness to that type of horror has its impact; it is traumatizing.  What our ancestors witnessed and experienced still lives today in our DNA.  And it shows up in the ways we don’t trust other women, the ways we criticize them, the ways we try to dominate and oppress them.

It shows up in the cautionary tales we tell our daughters about what to wear or how to act or the stories about those types of women.

In many ways our internalized misogyny was originally a survival mechanism.  It helped to keep us alive, it helped to keep our daughters alive.

But the tools aren’t useful or helpful anymore.  And in order for true social change to occur, we need to start with change within.

This is why I believe as part of our own liberation we need to explore and process our ancestral, inter-generational, and cultural relational traumas and become curious and aware of our internalized misogyny so we can begin to dislodge it, do different, and stop passing it on.

This is why for the past three years, every spring, I offer this intimate online circle centered around our ancestral trauma and internalized misogyny.

Because this is one more piece to the puzzle that will help bring about our liberation.  Is is a vital piece that will help insure we do not simply use the tools of the patriarchy against other women so we ourselves can be reap the benefit.

We are all in this together.  And until all of us are free, none of us are free.

…

If you’d like to learn more about the upcoming spring circle,  Unleashing Ourselves: Processing Ancestral Trauma & Dislodging Internalized Misogyny that begins April 1, you can click here.

Did you miss the educational essay and video series I wrote introducing the ideas and concepts we’ll be exploring and examining in the spring circle?  If so, you can find them at the links below:

Defining Ancestral, Inter-generational, & Cultural Relational Traumas and Internalized Misogyny

Connecting the Dots

Connecting Individual & Collective Traumas

Ending Cycles: Processing the Past & Changing the Future

The importance of processing Ancestral Trauma & Dislodging Internalized Misogyny (this essay)

More About the Unleashing Ourselves Circle

You can find the FAQ for this circle here.

Below are three essays I wrote prior to the 2017 offering of this circle.

Unleashing Our Self :: Mothers, daughters, and generations of trauma

Unleashing Our Self :: The loss of sisterhood

Unleashing Our Self :: Disconnection, shame, & thinking it is us

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Ending Cycles: Processing the Past & Changing the Future

No one is innocent in the tide of history. Everyone has kings and slaves in his past. Everyone has saints and sinners. We are not to blame for the actions of our ancestors. We can only try to be the best we can, no matter what our heritage, to strive for a better future for all.

~Diana Peterfreund, Across a Star-Swept Sea

When we look at cycles of trauma, it is important to remember that often there may not have been a choice to not pass the pain forward.  Talking about trauma at all is a relatively new development in our human (western) history, and in the early days of recognizing and trying to find ways to process trauma, we only looked at the trauma soldiers experienced and lived with.

It has only been in the last forty to fifty years that we began to acknowledge the trauma that comes with abuse and assault.  And it has only been about twenty to thirty years that we began to recognize the impacts things like poverty, being witness to abuse, or living in a family where one or more members had addictions issue has on us.

Add to this that the somatic (body-centered) trauma therapies are also a relatively new thing. It wasn’t until 1997 that Levine’s first book Waking the Tiger introduced the wider public to the ways that trauma lives inside our bodies and how we humans prevent ourselves from processing it.  That was only twenty years ago.

The amount of research and acknowledgment around trauma just within my own lifetime (46 years) is amazing.  We have come so far since the early 1970s, and I believe we likely still have a long way to go.  And I also believe we are getting there.

I share all that to remind us that we couldn’t know what we didn’t know.  I don’t  know how many times I have heard clients say “I wish I would have started this work earlier/years ago/when I was much younger.”  But the truth is that this work, body-centered trauma processing work, is a very new phenomena and likely you actually could not have started this work earlier, because it didn’t exist.

And yet.  While it is not our fault that information was not available before it was available, it is our responsibility now to do the work to create change, within ourselves, within our families, and in our greater communities and world.

Breaking cycles of abuse is something that has only been talked about for the last fifty or so years.  And then it was only spoken of quietly.  Greater social conversations didn’t begin to happen until the 1980s, in part thanks to Alice Miller and her body of work.  We didn’t even consider that beating children would or could have long term, life-long, impacts on them. And it wasn’t until the Adverse Childhood Experiences study (ACEs) which was initiated in 1995 but then not really talked about until twenty years later, that we knew those impacts were beyond psychological and spilled into our actual physical health.

And even so, I know my maternal grandfather talked about his abusive step-mother and how he swore he would never treat his child the way she treated him (now I have no idea if he actually kept this promise to himself, but evidence says he probably did).

So, even though the greater social conversation was not there, I do believe we have within us the “moral” (for lack of a better word) compass to know abuse, domination, authoritarianism, and othering are not right, okay, or humane (or for that matter actually human).

We are in the infancy of truly understanding how the traumatic experiences of our ancestors are passed down to future generations.  We are in the infancy of learning how to examine and process these traumas – especially the ones we don’t actually know about. There is still so much that is unknown, and frankly there is so much that cannot be known for several more decades as studies continue to watch families move through more and more generations.

And.

Even with this being true, I believe we all know deep within ourselves that the past impacts us.  Historical past, ancestral past, and our own lived experience past.  We may not have all the data and research to back this up (yet), and still we know.

And this is where our own responsibility comes in.  It is not our fault what was done to us or our ancestors.  It is absolutely our responsibility to make the change within ourselves so that change out in the world can occur, so we can end the cycles of abuse, oppression, and domination.

So we can all find our ways to freedom.

So we can all be a part of creating a world where all of us are free.

I believe part of that work is for us to look at our ancestral, historical, and personal pasts and to unearth what we have internalized; to examine it; to unlearn what we know is not right or just; and to create space for change and doing different for ourselves and for the world moving into our futures.

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

This essay is the fourth and final in a four part series I have written exploring ancestral, inter-generational, historical and cultural relational trauma and internalized misogyny.  I hope you found the series helpful and informative.

This essay series is also to introduce the themes we will be exploring in the spring circle I facilitate: Unleashing Ourselves: Processing Ancestral Trauma & Dislodging Internalized Misogyny. We begin April 1.  You can learn more here.

To read the other essays in the series, go to the links below

Defining Ancestral & Intergenerational Traumas and Internalized Misogyny

Connecting the Dots

Connecting Individual and Collective Traumas 

Ending Cycles :: Processing the Past & Changing the Future (this essay)

The importance of processing Ancestral Trauma & Dislodging Internalized Misogyny

More About the Unleashing Ourselves Circle

You can find the FAQ for this circle here.