M6 : Lesson 2: Trauma Healing & Proper Sequencing Of Treatment
An important consideration is whether or not are you ready to process deeper layers of trauma.
Sequencing of trauma processing means ensuring that you have enough nervous system capacity and self-resourcing to handle processing the emotions and memory triggers lodged in your nervous system.
Trauma Healing Sequencing:
1. Build Capacity In Your Nervous System (which we are doing in Regulate)
2. Inner Work: Awareness of Trauma Patterns, Parts Work, Inner Identity Repair, Adult Main Personality (AMP) Development, Deeper Somatic Presencing With Parts
3. Emergence: Returning Back To The World And Helping Others With Your Wisdom
Tool:
Self Resourcing Tool #3: Finding Boundary
Please see the Module 6 Workbook for Lesson 2 materials.
Transcript
Lesson 2, trauma healing and proper sequencing of treatment. And self resourcing tool number 3, finding self in boundary. Trauma healing sequencing. First of all, we need to establish a baseline, which is about creating a foundation for trauma healing. Are the basic needs being met is their physical safety, healthy food, shelter, and resourcing support.
Once that foundation has been met, then it’s a better time to go into the healing process. We begin by building nervous system capacity, which is what we are doing in the level 1 regulate program. From there, we do something known as inner work, which is basically our level 2 Primal Trust mentorship work. And then lastly, we work on reintegration and emergence which is about community involvement, giving back in leadership, which is the focus in our level 3 community. Let’s go over each sequence in more detail.
Again, remember the foundation of safety and basic needs must be met. Level 1, building the nervous system capacity, and I recommend do not rush this step. Many people get into nervous system work, and they use a few tools for a few weeks, and then they go on and try to heal their trauma. Well, it often backfires, and Alex explain why more in this module. Underneath all trauma patterns is nervous system dysregulation, and this must be addressed I recommend to combine top down and bottom up approaches as you’ve heard me talk about over and over again through this program.
In this step, we are developing awareness and pattern interrupting our stress response, which we started already in module 1, and we’ve been doing this whole time. We also work to discern our past from our present, and we teach our amygdala new associations which is what we’re doing in brain retraining. And we develop flexibility of our nervous system to be able to ride the polyvago wave that we’ve discussed in module 2, to be able to go into sympathetic activation, and come back into ventral vagal safety. All of this is to improve our capacity for presence, which is all about going inward. Like I mentioned in lesson 1, the way through is by going inside.
Let’s talk more about building nervous system capacity for staying present as this is key to trauma healing. How can you learn to become aware of your travel responses and stay present during those uncomfortable sensations and emotions? Well, we do this by building introception and observing the self, which we talked about in module 5. So you can see how this entire program has been setting you up for trauma healing. We do presence practices such as the somatic orienting and awareness, the somatic movement therapies in yoga.
Also, healing touch connection and co regulation activities help to build this nervous system capacity of presence and breath work, which we’ve been doing a little and will floor more today in this module. I also want to mention emotional freedom technique, which is also known as tapping or EFT I think it’s an excellent tool to help build the ability to be with the body and experience uncomfortable emotions and learn how to become present with them. It is a multifaceted journey of finding safety and gently discharging built up stress in the body. So trauma reaction patterns can soften and self healing can occur. Let’s go over a little more of trauma healing proper sequencing.
Now, we cannot just jump into the big scary feelings and memories when the nervous system is still in a high alarm setting. Why? Well, this is one of the biggest mistakes that I see in trauma processing, and it’s probably the biggest mistake that I personally made, which is going into the fire when your brain and body is on fire. Meaning, you’re going into the fire of your trauma patterns when your brain and nervous system are already so inflamed over reactive, it’s just not the right time to do that. So we must build capacity first.
I cannot emphasize this enough in our limbic system and our nervous system have been practicing calming down and resetting for a few months at least, It is so much easier to process trauma without fully reliving it. It is a lot easier to shift the perception of the memories of the painful trauma and process intense emotions once the memory center of the brain has had training with brain retraining. So I recommend brain retraining and simple vagus nerve toning for several weeks or maybe even several months, and then return to the trauma processing when you’ve acquired the ability to have some self regulation of your limbic system response. Needless to say, this is why I’ve created a multilayered healing program It’s a sequential approach that’s very powerful. Moving on to trauma healing sequencing step 2, the inner work and adult mean personality development.
In a nutshell, inner work is about going inward. There is that word again. And encompasses the following. Inner parts discovery, also known as parts work, which I talked about earlier, coined by Richard Schwartz. Parts work is about becoming aware of inner parts also known as identity structures that were created during intense emotional events.
It’s about learning their various needs and effective survival strategies and understanding and accepting them. And remember, what is a part It is a neural network. It’s a memory plus emotion plus belief and behavior all in one. And it does create a type of identity that can hijack the prefrontal conscious self when it’s activated. This might be like, gosh.
I just feel like Someone just took me over when I responded like that. It didn’t even feel like me. Well, it wasn’t. It was a neural network. That had a trauma response and it was just trying to help you feel safe.
Trauma healing sequencing step too continued. Let’s talk more about this. As we mentioned earlier, there’s often a survival protection pattern that happens when we’ve experienced trauma. So part of the inner work is to become aware of those patterns on a very deep level. This is where our unconscious inner conflicts and beliefs and emotional wounding become discovered by us.
Often, our inner resistance is finally seen and it’s understood. And these unconscious aspects of our self also known as parts become conscious and finally accepted. Adult mean personality development. This is my key focus in my level to mentorship, and this is what I think sets me apart from other programs. I don’t focus on parts work as other programs do in the same way.
I focus on developing the inner adult more than anything, and I’ll explain why. Sequencing step 2 continued, finding your inner adult. Well, what is that? So I also call this the AMP, and you’ll often see a lot of people in Primal Trust talk about their AMP. This is what they’re talking about.
It’s a brain state and it’s a crucial component of integration of trauma parts and memory repatterning. The AMP or the adult main personality is the brain state of heart, brain coherence, which means that your heart and your brain are having harmonious communication. It is the present moment conscious choice that you’re looking for. This is where we can choose beyond our protective survival patterns. The AMP is not subject to the demands of the superego, which is like our inner critic and our inner control center and it’s not subject to the demands of our unconscious survival behaviors.
It’s the voice of your conscious self. And it’s also the gateway to what is often called superconscious awareness or your higher self. Why is adult main personality development a priority? Well, Like I said, we are engaged in a whole brain state with prefrontal awareness during the stress response. This is where your limbic system is not running the show.
It’s about rediscovering that part of you that has purpose, passion, and authentic expression. That’s your true self access. The adult mean personality is a brain state that allows for something commonly called inner attachment repair. What is inner attachment repair? It’s the merging of our fragmented survival parts.
With a conscious regulated brain state. It’s integrating the past with the present, which is also known as memory reconsolidation. And just know, you cannot integrate scared parts of you. If you are scared in the process, this is such a key point in what I deal has been my biggest learning. I tried for years to do trauma repair work and parts work and all sorts of stuff.
And it did not give a positive outcome for me until I developed what I call the adult main personality brain state. You see, I was trying to help healing happen to wounded parts of me when I didn’t even have a healthy brain state to wire into or to integrate into them. It was almost like the scared child in me was out there trying to heal and do all this trauma healing with scared parts of me, and there was still no co regulation. This is so key if you can understand why maybe some of your past therapies haven’t been effective? Did you have a healthy inner adult brain state to help the healing process occur?
Compassionate selfpresencing. That is something that your adult main personality is able to do with ease This involves the capacity to be present with very charged emotional states, and it allows the nervous system to finally process the trauma and release the stuck energy. I know I’m repeating this a little bit, but it’s just really important you understand. I when I realized that I needed to cultivate this brain state that could hold the feeling of primal trust when I was in a stress response I devoted all of my efforts to this. It’s really why I created the level 2 Primal Trust mentorship.
It was my own journey. And so for me, this became my focus of why was I toning my vagus nerve or doing brain retraining It was so that I could become conscious of my inner adult presence, so I could feel primal trust. It wasn’t about my symptoms anymore. And that’s what we’re doing here. And this is the stage I’m trying to lead you to.
I know you came in to regulate probably for your symptoms. But at this point, I’m hoping that regulate helps you to come into you and that the journey in level 2 will help you to come even more deeply into you, finding your inner adult that can handle everything, all of your emotional charges, all of your symptoms, and feel safe at the same time. When you find this brain state that’s got this perspective of primal trust. You’ll likely experience a profound relaxation and sense of inner capacity to handle your situation. In summary, this is about becoming the regulated adult you needed when the trauma happened.
Anurwork helps you become the regulated adult that can handle your triggers. In a nutshell, your dopamine personality helps you move from the survival pattern to a self regulated pattern You can still feel a stress, the triggers, the fears, but you have a more prefrontal brain function online and more flexibility and capacity in your autonomic nervous system to handle it. This is an infographic on the adult main personality to just give you a nice visual overview of what I’m trying to describe. Over here on the left. This is what it was like for me.
I felt like a part of me was trapped like this bird in a cage a bird with so much potential to be free, but I couldn’t get out because what was running my brain state was traumatized parts. Or anxious parts or scared parts, critical parts, and doubtful parts. And all of these parts seemed like they were me, but deep inside locked in a cage almost was the real me waiting to come out. And so I went on a journey. I went on a journey of developing this adult main personality so that it could break out of its cage and be able to integrate those parts, and that’s what the triangle represents.
In the primal trust mentorship, I use this triangle to represent your adult main personality, which is just like this bird who is free and capable and sees all the perspectives from a greater view. And what can happen is that those scared parts feel like it’s safe to come inside and to be seen and to be loved and to be held And then they’re not taking over the brain state because the adult mean personality is now the dominant brain state. It’s running the show. This adult mean personality can speak their truth. They feel capable and safe, adventurous.
It’s who you really are. So I hope this infographic just helps. You see what I’m trying to cultivate here. I’m trying to lead you to all of this nervous system work. It’s to develop this brain state so that we can actually integrate scared parts of us that had been dominating the show.
The inner work helps us to realize that was then this is now Time processing is a big part of healing trauma. What happens is in this process, we start to become deeply, consciously aware that we cannot fix the past. Our Olympic system has been trying to get us to fix the past. It’s a kind of an insane drive of the Olympic system, it doesn’t know the past is over, and that’s what we’re trying to do with a lot of this work. And then we learn to respond from our adult main personality, rather than react from our survival strategies or parts.
We become aware that what we’re feeling and remembering has already happened and that we’re having a memory flashback and a protection pattern hijacking of our conscious mind. We can accept and even grieve that we cannot go back and act in a different way Over time, this teaches the Olympic system that we are now in a new time and a safe environment. Therefore, we realized that the so called limbic system impairment was just your brain trying to protect you. And the limbic system activation calms as you bring new thoughts, feelings, and perspectives of the world and are able to be present with and process the difficult emotions and triggers. This is an updated self concept.
That is in communication with your autonomic nervous system in a new way. It’s kind of like saying, I am all grown up now. And I can handle this and stay present. We let go of the impulse to protect and fix and avoid and distract and choose to be present with all of our feelings and allow our life to unfold as it is and we can embrace the magical mystery of what’s to come. And lastly, now that we’ve gotten through all of that, we’re at the 3rd step, reintegration and emergence, giving back and leading others.
This is a final stage that I speak of when the wisdom holding hero in you comes back into life, into community with purpose. And passion and helps others with newfound understanding and presence. Emergence is a stage where service becomes natural. You want to be the self regulated adult in your family and community so that you can be a source of stability for others. You are able to begin repair and build new relationships with others, and you know that you have valuable things to teach and to share, and you feel a sense of purpose.
You feel more safety being in your own skin and just being your unapologetic authentic self You can go inward with ease and self trust. However, even in this stage, we continue to be on a journey of transformation ourselves. We still get triggered, and we still use our tools. We just have more confidence in our ability to move through the situation with more grace and compassion for self and others. And let’s complete this lesson with another somatic tool This is about finding yourself in boundary.
With the history of trauma, there’s often a hole in your sense of boundary, meaning where your space is, where your body is versus where others are. And sometimes, especially with anxiety, we can just feel so fragmented So this was my favorite thing to do to try to find myself again. And what we’re gonna do, I’ll just play this video as an example. It’s just tapping all over your body. And as I tap, I often say, be here.
Be here. Be here. Or sometimes I squeeze my body all over. So This is what it looks Well, I hope that was kind of fun, so As you complete this lesson, just take a moment, come into your body, tapping all over, finding yourself, And whenever you notice that you’ve been maybe on the Internet too much or just out of it, just come back in here. Be here.
Be here. Sometimes even just smoothing the body. Be here. Be here. Be here.
21:14These are simple tools that you’re sending beautiful messages to your body, that your adult main personality wants to come home. So with that, I will see you in the next lesson lesson 3 breaking the trauma response.