M6 : Lesson 1: What Is Trauma? How Does Trauma Occur?
This is not meant to be a substitute for trauma therapy or mental, or emotional health treatment. This information is for educational purposes only.
This module is another “thick” module 🙂 please take your time, take notes, and think of it as a mini-course in itself to help you understand the details of trauma and the healing process. Refer to workbook pages 23-26 as you listen to the lessons.
I present many key learnings to help you begin the process of recognizing how unconscious protection responses might be contributing to your chronic symptoms.
In this lesson we explore:
What is trauma? Are you experiencing unresolved trauma in your nervous system? Could trauma, or body-based stress responses be contributing to your chronic symptoms?
We take a deeper look at why some people end up stuck in long-term trauma patterns in this lesson
What are ‘Parts’ aka subpersonalities?
What are the most common survival/protection patterns that affect our personality, behaviors, and self-concept?
PLUS – Self-Resourcing Tools:
Tool #1: The Healing Hug & Physiological Sigh
Tool #2: Head-Heart-Belly Self Presencing
Please see the Module 6 Workbook for Lesson 1 materials.
Transcript
Regular module 6. Trauma healing, and breath work. Before we get into module 6, I just have a couple of quick notes. I’d like you to know that this module contains complex teachings about trauma, so please go slow. I want to empower you with an advanced understanding of inner wounding patterns as you complete your level 1 program.
So that you can be more informed going forward to be able to get the best support that you might need to help you repattern any trauma or protective reactions. In your workbook, there’s a handout that says summary of concepts. Please print that out and watch that as you go through the lessons as it helps to simplify some of the teaching that I’ll be explaining throughout the material. Again, please take your time, maybe even rewatch the different lessons. And print out your module summary information.
Get support if you need to help you implement and understand this material. And remember, this course is not a substitute for direct trauma informed therapy. For some of you, simply talking about trauma and looking for patterns can be triggering. Use your regulate tools daily to help you have the inner capacity to explore these deeper concepts and prepare yourself for meeting wounded aspects stuck within you awaiting your integration. There will be a handful of new tools and practices in this module, so don’t be overwhelmed by adding more in.
They’re not meant to be added into your daily routine. They’re just additional support to help you handle difficult moments as you need it. Hello. I wanna just check-in for a moment to see if you’ve been using your tools and changing your perspective of the situation. Were pretty far through the program.
And by this point, you might have gathered that I’m trying to bring an understanding to help you focus on things that are within your control. And to let go of things that are not within your control regarding your chronic illness situation. This is an important and a credible shift that you can make in your life. In this module, I’m gonna go into why learning to focus on and shift things that are within your capacity to influence are an important part of dealing with trauma patterning as well. And in primal trust, we have a philosophy of learning to embrace the magical mystery of life as there are many things outside of our control and primal trust is about learning to be okay pay with some level of uncertainty and to influence our nervous system in a positive way despite the uncertainty of life.
I also hope that by now you’re not stuck in as much of an obsessive focus on figuring out what’s wrong with you and that This program is helping you to understand that despite the countless diagnosis you might have, the overall goal is to improve your brain and nervous system function so that you can have a direct impact on your cellular health as we learned in module 1 by understanding the cell danger response. When you understand that to shift your body, we need to shift what’s happening inside our cells, it makes sense to find the ways that we can influence ourselves, and we’ll talk about this a little bit more here in the trauma module. But nervous system regulation is one of the most direct impacts we can make in improving our cellular function as well as processing the trauma that might be stuck inside our cells, which we’ll talk about in a moment. But ultimately, our body has an intelligence that we need to learn to trust in. But we might have to help our body by removing some of the barriers that’s limiting its function, and nervous system work is a big part of that.
So in this module, we’ll go into a little more detail of understanding trauma. And we’re gonna go into some additional tools to help bring balance to our nervous system, especially when we’re feeling trauma activation. And it’s important to begin to process the physiological and emotional wounding that’s influencing our nervous system because of trauma and what it might have done in the past to our body, our brain, and our nervous system. Now, this module is not a complete trauma healing program. Rather, it’s more about getting you a foundational understanding of a beginning part of this work to help you recognize trauma patterns and to prepare you for a further journey in unraveling your trauma, which we do in the level 2 program.
I think of the process like this. The level 1 program is giving you tools and basic understanding to calm down the stress response. But for some, not everyone. There is a deeper wounding that must be addressed This level 1 program is building the foundation for you to go on that inner journey, which we’ll talk about what that means in a moment. Up next, let’s go over the overview of module 6.
Module 6 overview. Another hefty module full of rich understanding to help you with your chronic illness journey. Even if you have not had trauma, Please take your time to slowly go through this module because the understanding here is very important for long term success and healing of chronic illness. By learning to understand how trauma impacts the brain and nervous system, you’ll gain an even deeper understanding of what might be contributing to your chronic stress response. We’ll start with lesson 1, understanding trauma, and how to curs, we will learn a couple of self resourcing tools in lesson 1.
In lesson 2, we’ll understand the proper sequencing of treating trauma. And you’ll learn another tool there. In lesson 3, we’ll learn about how do we break the trauma response or tective patterning loop in our brain and nervous system. And again, we’ll learn another self resourcing tool. We also have less than 3.1, which I’ll present other tools that I love for trauma processing.
In lesson 4, I’ll go over some of my favorite tips of dealing with fear and anxiety. In lesson 5, I will guide you through a practice I call somatic trauma and emotional processing practice. In lesson 5.5, we have a bonus lesson on tension and trauma release exercises where we’ll be guided through a practice with Doctor Eric Robbins. Lesson 6 is more breath work, an overview of how to take your breath work to the next level. Less than 7, I’ll go over advanced breath work, creating safe sympathetic activation to help with trauma healing and emotional processing.
And lesson 8 will have a summary of module 6. Lesson 1. What is trauma and how does trauma occur? In this lesson, we’ll learn a couple of self resourcing tools, the healing hug and physiological sigh, and head, heart, and belly processing. What is trauma?
Well, we’re gonna hear the definition from 2 of my very favorite trauma informed therapists and educators. 1st, Gabor Mate describes trauma as an inner injury a lasting rupture or a split within the self as a result of difficult or hurtful events a psychic injury in the mind and in the nervous system. Gabbr also says trauma is not what happens to you, it’s what happens inside of you as a result of what happened to you. Trauma is that scarring that makes you feel less flexible, more rigid, less, feeling, and more defended. Invessel Vanderkolk says that trauma is specifically an event that overwhelms the central nervous system, altering the way we process and recall memories.
Trauma is not the story of something that happened back then. He adds, it’s the current imprint of that pain horror and fear living inside people. With trauma, almost nothing feels safe. Finding more and more moments of safety and trust both in the body and in our lives is the incremental way that we help heal trauma over time. Do you feel that you have trauma?
Well, we’ve discussed all the ways it can occur in less than 1, but I want you to know that I believe that if you’re dealing with a chronic illness, that’s a form of trauma too. So please be kind and compassionate with yourself as this process of healing is not easy. Healing trauma is a multifaceted approach requiring careful sequencing of modalities and processes. And a foundational piece of trauma repair is improving your ability to self regulate your own nervous system in addition to co regulation therapies. This is why this program is so important for those with a trauma history because we need to carefully build capacity in our nervous system to be able to process our trauma experiences.
Our first tool, self resourcing tool, number 1, the healing, hug, and physiological sigh. And I will demonstrate this to you now. So before we go into this any further, you must realize that the love and comfort that you seek is actually a deep connection within yourself. And this is a journey of befriending your scared parts and ultimately awakening loving self compassion. Sometimes with chronic stress and trauma, we lose our sense of self and we need to find gentle ways to come back into the body.
So one of the first things I started to do is I learned how to presence trauma was to parent a part of me and parent myself as if I was holding myself. So this first tool is about helping us to find both our container of our own body helping us find where we’re at in space and coming towards ourselves like a loving parent would. So this is called the healing hug. And we’re also gonna do this by adding another tool which is called the physiological sigh. I first learned about this tool from neuroscientist Andrew Huberman, but I’m not sure who the original creator was.
So let me teach you the breadth and then I will teach you the hug. So the breath pattern is 2 inhales followed by a nice long exhale. So you’re gonna inhale, and then inhale a little more, and then exhale. The physiological sigh. So again, inhale again, and exhale.
This helps to activate our parasympathetic nervous system. So we’re gonna do that alongside of the hug, and the hug looks like this. You’re gonna take your left hand on your right arm like this and your right hand on the side of your ribs and on your chest like this. So We’re just hugging ourselves, and we’re gonna do this with the presence of the breath. So here we go.
Inhale twice, and exhale. And just hold yourself on this exhale. If you notice I’m even kind of rubbing my arm in my chest, I’m giving myself some feedback. And we’ll inhale again the physiological sigh, inhale twice. Exhale.
And really just come to find your body and yourself on that exhale. Feeling yourself, holding yourself. Coming right here in this moment. And just finding the container that is you. Let’s do this again.
2 inhales. Exhale. And just be with yourself. Welcoming yourself home right here right now in this body in this moment. This is so simple.
Right? Like, how can this hub do so much? But it does. And especially when we Need to come back to our self when we’re getting overwhelmed or emotionally flooded. Just holding yourself.
In a breath and just being here. So we’ll begin the trauma module with this self loving act. So I wanted to include in this module a lot of the understanding of trauma. And I think that how to deal with trauma is one of the most important topics in today’s world. Trauma, it’s one of the highest indicators of disease, and it’s one of the leading costs in healthcare spending.
But even more, There’s so many people walking around in trauma responses, and they have no idea. And I was one of them. The society we live in has a huge increase in chronic illness and mental health issues, and they’re mostly linked to trauma in my opinion. So through becoming trauma informed, we can begin to understand more about why we behave like we do when we feel stressed. Or threatened.
And we can also understand why our loved ones might also act out their trauma based protective patterns, which we’ll learn what that means in a moment. So why is this awareness so important? Because when we understand what’s happening, because of the trauma that’s happening in our nervous system that’s outside of our control, we can have more compassion for others and for ourselves. When we realized that we’re simply trying to feel safe. And even though we’re acting in ways we don’t like, it’s the way our nerve the system learned how to cope and survive long ago.
1st, let’s discuss a few ideas of what it looks like when we’re stuck in a trauma pattern. Trauma can look like a mixture of intrusive thoughts and images that make you relive the experience. The body is often filled with really uncomfortable sensations and emotions that can be overwhelming. The experience of never being able to relax, and sometimes severe inability to sleep is also common. Many experience a lot of self hate, including a hateful relationship to their own body and a lack of desire to feel and meet your needs.
Some will seek substances that are addictive, like drugs, sex or alcohol to find an escape from the feelings, thoughts, and images. And some people just wanna be out of their body, and they find constant distraction methods. Like I said earlier, when we are in trauma, almost nothing feels safe. I know for me personally, I couldn’t even watch a Disney movie with my kids, nothing felt safe. And for some, it’s not as over as this list, but still trauma patternings are running the show.
You might feel like you can’t say how you really feel. You might feel like you need to rush all the time. You might simply be afraid of conflict. You might be addicted to achievement and work, and these 2 are trauma patterns. Now, the only way through is going inward.
The path to trauma healing is in and through the body. And, yes, this is the very same body that we’re often terrified of being in. Healing is through coming to truly know yourself. Even though you may have negative feelings about the self that you think you are. This makes for a difficult resolution process when the path through is the very path that we want to avoid, and all of our coping strategies are keeping us from avoiding it.
It takes a lot of support, resourcing, and understanding why we are better off and safer, finally facing the things that scare us and find new perspectives. Next, let’s explain why we must go into the body and not just the brain to heal trauma. A key understanding that is finally making headway is that trauma is not just a psychic wound. It’s in the nervous system and even in our cells. Like a virus in our encoding system, unprocessed traumatic memories can become sticking points that cause our mental and physical processes to malfunction.
Early evidence of cellular memory shows that it’s not just our brain, but our body’s cells that could hold an imprint of past traumatic events. I wonder, could this be a contributor to cell danger response as we discussed in module 1? Trauma also lodges in the muscles and fascia. The body literally keeps hold of all traumatic events that you were not able to discharge in the moment by movement speech expression or processing. What I mean here is that when we have stress Our body has a natural reaction to fight or get away to respond to resolve that stress.
But if we couldn’t resolve the stress in the moment, that pattern or that reaction can get lodged in our body, in our muscles, in our fascia. And so we’re gonna have to go through the process of dislodging this stored stress pattern, which we’ll explain more about later. This happens especially in cases where you couldn’t physically remove yourself from the situation and instead went into a freeze response. So like I said, if you couldn’t fight or run and instead you just had to be still embarrassed, that stress doesn’t get dis charged, and we do not complete the stress response process. So when you think about it, Who is the least likely to be able to discharge the stress in their body in the moment of trauma by either fighting or fleeing?
Well, it’s usually children. Unprocessed and unresolved trauma from childhood is common. And this is why brain retraining alone cannot get to rewiring these deep life disruptions This is so important to understand. We must go within the body and work somatically with our felt sensations and we do this through processing and inner work. Again, I repeat the only way through trauma is by going inward.
Another quote by vessel Vandercock is trauma victims cannot recover until they become familiar with and befriend the sensations in their bodies. Being frightened means that you live in a body that’s always on guard. Angry people live in angry bodies. The bodies of child abuse victims are tense and defensive until they find a way to relax and feel safe. In order to change, people need to become aware of their sensations and the way their bodies interact with the world around them.
Physical self awareness is the first step in releasing the tyranny of the past. From the book, the body keeps the score. Let’s look at some trauma patterns. What is a trauma pattern? It’s a protective, survival coping strategy.
I often refer to this as protective patterns or survival patterns, but it all means trauma patterns. These cause you to react rather than respond. When you’re triggered. You’re simply trying to be safe the best way you know how on a nervous system level. Here are the common survival coping protection patterns as a result of trauma.
These are all common, autonomic defenses to try to keep you safe. Some of the patterns are to fight, and that’s someone that might be more angry and controlling when they’re stressed. Or maybe it’s flight and they avoid conflict or run away or they avoid relationship attachment or maybe it’s freeze and that’s just where you’re overwhelmed, dissociated, and just not present, or maybe it’s fun. And this is the submissive people pleasing type And there’s always find, which is the kind of person that ends up becoming overly enmeshed with others overly attached and codependent. If you notice these 5 descriptions are right out of the sympathetic nervous system reactions of stress.
Other common descriptions are rigid, enduring, hypersensitive, the martyr and the perfectionist. Those are all coping and survival strategies of trauma. Now, I want to discuss something. What are parts. This is a common language that you might hear when people are working with trauma.
You might have heard it called parts work. Well, let’s discuss what parts are. Parts are basically the survival patterns inactivation. Apart is a neural network of a memory, plus an emotion, plus a belief, plus of behavior. So common parts examples are the protector and inner critic personality.
Or the exile or the wounded child personality. And often, we have mixtures of all of these survival patterns and parts but there’s often a dominant protection strategy. So here as you see in the image, I’m trying to describe that a part isn’t like another person. It’s actually a neural network, but when it’s inactivation, it can seem like another person. Because it’s got its own memory and behavior and emotional and belief patterns that might be different from your main personality, which we’ll discuss what that means and a little bit later in this module.
I just want to acknowledge that parts work was coined by Richard Swartz of internal family systems therapy, and he’s got a lot of great writings if you wanna learn more about parts and parts work. Just as a personal note, I wanna say that discovering my survival based protection pattern was was pretty hard. But it was also liberating. I had to really see myself, including all of my rage, my control, my enmeshment and people pleasing. And these were all ways that I found really to protect myself when I was young.
These were the ways that my mind could feel safer and stress, and it’s been really hard to stop these coping behaviors. And in fact, I still work, I’m becoming aware, and responding differently. I’ve come a long way, and I still have ways to go. I had so much shame and guilt about myself. I had to see that I was just trying to survive and I was just doing what my nervous system knew how to do despite my conscious mind wanting to behave differently.
So as I described some of these survival strategies and parts, what are yours? Are you willing to see these unconscious ways that you try to survive and be safe? And are you willing to have compassion for yourself? This is another layer of the awareness of ABC, and we get into this more in level 2, But try to become aware of when you’re running a survival pattern and simply name it with acceptance and self compassion. Like, oh, I’m running my pattern of trying to control or I’m running my survival pattern of people pleasing.
It just helps you to start naming this and finding acceptance and knowing that it’s not who you truly are. It’s just a way of feeling safe. I also wanna say that I do parts work a little differently than internal family systems if you’re familiar that. And you learn a little bit more about my method in level 2. I don’t focus directly on part initially.
I work on something called the adult main personality, which we’ll discuss later in this module. So I just want to bring that up that I kind of go about this work a little differently based on what work for me. Okay. Let’s get back to the slides. Let’s explore how these deeply ingrained protective responses are created and why it’s so hard to change them.
As we just learned from Vessel Vanderkook in the quote he mentioned, our nervous system was put into overwhelm. And next what happens is various protection or survival patterns are created This trauma survival pattern is an attempt to solve the experience of overwhelm by buffering our experience in some way so that we can bear it. So to go over this simply, the brain is put into overwhelm. For some reason, something happens that’s really intense, and the brain cannot process the emotion or meaning of the event at the time. And so the nervous system creates a type of survival pattern trying to cope this experience because you’re conscious mind didn’t have the capacity to appropriately go through it.
And then the limbic system gets stuck trying to resolve the past, and this can be ongoing. This is why we can get stuck in an overactive limbic response. Because the brain didn’t fully process the stress in the first place. Let’s go through a detailed explanation of the trauma protection coping pattern creation. Something happens to us that puts us in overwhelm.
It can be intense, or maybe it’s subtle. But either way, it’s it causes an extreme overwhelm for us to the point where our conscious mind cannot fully process what to do. There’s too much emotion and too little prefrontal understanding, and you just can’t respond. So we all have a need for self protect and self regulation when these kind of events occur. And our brain will try to find a way to solve our problem It might be dissociating, fleeing, fighting, people pleasing, acting capable.
This coping pattern gets in printed into our nervous system, and we use this strategy whenever we feel a similar experience in the future. The memory of the event teaches the brain how to respond in the future. You might create a personality around this pattern of survival. The trauma based protection pattern is an unconscious embedded response, and it’s not your fault. And just know, like I said earlier that if there was not somebody who was regulated around you when this happened, it’s very difficult for our brain to process this.
And our limbic system doesn’t get the regulation it needs to work through it, and so it can get stuck. An overdrive trying to figure out how to resolve this past experience. It’s like a replay tape in our head of a stress response as emotional fuel to get us to survive a situation that is already over with. And it happens again and again. This is a crucial piece of understanding of why we do brain retraining as a part of this in addition to getting present in our body and helping our body to see that what we feel might be a threat in the moment but there is not actually a threat happening to us now.
And also, know that we often mistake the survival pattern for our true personality. Instead, the survival pattern is actually a part time personality, and it’s important to come to understand that. These parts or these protective strategies take over when we get scared or triggered. And unfortunately, the survival pattern becomes a lens in which we view our world. And it shapes our perception of reality and distorts our sense of our true self.
We often lose self compassion, and that lack of self compassion is the very thing that keeps us from resolving the pattern. Please understand this statement. Self compassion is what we need on a deep level to resolve these patterns. Remember, trauma is actually not about the event It’s about our response, and we all respond differently. So please do not judge yourself or others and many factors influence these different responses such as How regulated are you at the time of the event?
Well, if you were 3, it’s unlikely you were a self regulated human being. And what are your previous life views, experiences, and beliefs that often shapes how our nervous system responds to threat? And maybe most importantly, how supported are you at the time of this event? How much co regulation was available to you to teach your nervous system that you’re okay. It’s really important to understand that one person might have that ability to neurologically handle and respond and process.
They might have their hippocampus and memory structures properly categorizing that event into the past. And others, their amygdala gets this imprint of the emotional overwhelm and Their memory processing centers just don’t process it as this event has passed, and they stay in a stress response for years. That’s PTSD post traumatic stress disorder. The brain is still stuck in the stress response. So for example, like I said, a child typically doesn’t have the capacity to process these intense events, especially if there’s not a regulated safe adult around them.
And then that child grows up and they have some crazy patterns and we judge them but they didn’t have a chance. They didn’t have an upbringing or safety to be able to deal with that, and now it’s deeply embedded in their unconscious. And they’ve got a pretty destructive survival pattern. So be mindful of that as we’re frustrated with others that they might be stuck in a trauma response. As I said, at some point in the healing process, there’s gonna have to be an experience of feeling all of the feelings all of the unprocessed emotions and sensations, but in a safe way.
This needs to be done carefully and sequentially to help the brain and the nervous system complete this unprocessed stress cycle without re traumatizing yourself. I will discuss more about what I mean by careful sequencing in the next section. But first, let’s learn another basic tool to help you when you’re having the experience of trauma resurfacing. Self resourcing tool number 2. Head, heart, belly, selfpresencing hold.
Well, that was a mouthful. You probably wonder what do I mean by head, heart, belly, selfpresencing hold. Well, I’m gonna demonstrate that to you. So this is pretty simple. We’re gonna just use our hands to hold ourself in different places.
You’re gonna start with one hand on your head, one hand on your heart. I usually like to put my left hand on my heart And what you’re gonna do is you’re just gonna hold. You’re just gonna hold this here. Deeply breathing and centering and trying to come back into your body and try to feel your hand both on your forehead and on your chest, like try to really feel the felt sense and try to meet your hands. And just hold this until you feel a shift.
So we’re just gonna start with our hand on our forehead, a hand on our heart, and just come back into yourself. I often like to say, I’m here. I’m here. I’m here. Or you can simply be silent and just breathe and feel the warmth of your hand on your head and on your heart.
And after a few moments, Hopefully, you’ll feel a shift and a softening. And as soon as you feel that shift and softening, take your hand that was on your forehead and then bring it down and put it on your belly. Can’t really see in the camera, but right on your belly. So now you have your hand on your chest on your heart. And on your belly in the same thing.
Just dropping into the body, meeting your hand with presence. Until you feel a shift. Again, trauma processing is just about coming home to yourself again and again. And again, especially when you’re feeling stress. You’re just being Here now in this moment.
These tools are really simple. But they’re very powerful when you repeat them again and again because you’re loving yourself. You’re parenting yourself. And speaking of parenting, these exercises, both the healing hug and this one I just showed you are really great to do on your kids. In fact, it’s a great one for you to teach them to do where you’d have them put their hand on their heart, and you put your hand over top of theirs.
And you just hold with them. What’s gonna happen over time is they’re gonna start to associate, oh, when I put my hand here and here, mom or dad is with me and this is safe. And then as they grow up and even when you can’t put your hand on them, they still have this imprinting in their nervous system of selfpresencing. Same thing, getting them to hold themselves, and then you hold them as well. This is a way where you can undo the cycle of trauma that may have gotten past your kids by teaching them these selfpresencing tools and using your own co regulation to help them in the experience.
37:21Alright. So this completes lesson 1 of module 6. Up next is lesson 2, trauma healing, and proper sequencing. I’ll see you there.